The year 1985 wasn’t so much a turning point in pop culture, but ground zero. Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s monumental “Global Jukebox,” was presented in July of that year, and the music community, now aware of its power to mobilize at speed and facilitate change for good, was never the same.
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In 1985, the era of post punk, new wave and synthpop was in the rearview. The future was U2, Bon Jovi, and even bigger hair than what came before.
And in April of that historic year in music, WHAM’s George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley embarked on a trip where no pop act had gone before, to China. The story of that visit is captured in the forthcoming documentary WHAM! 10 Days In China, due out July 28 in theaters and teased with a new trailer, which can be seen in full below.
The feature-length film is a time capsule, collecting previously-unseen footage of WHAM interacting with fans, authorities and the media, plus performances in Beijing and Guangzhou, and fresh interviews.
It’s both a fish-out-of-water film and a glimpse through the Bamboo Curtain, a study of two British lads finding connecting with the local youth through music and sport. Among the highlights, Michael can be seen encouraging young ladies to dance, the lads play soccer with locals, and visit the Great Wall. Forty years later, Ridgeley returns to the scene.
The pair, we learn, were carrying a lot of cultural and economic importance, and serving as Western ambassadors. Dignitaries of pop.
Speaking with Billboard in 2017, WHAM’s former manager Simon Napier-Bell explained that the authorities were, at the time, “terrified of youth culture. Any repressive society knows when it takes ahold, it takes over and you can never go back. They’re frightened to death of it.”
To promote the shows, audience members were given commemorative cassette tapes. One side featured original recordings, and on the other, Mandarin-language covers of WHAM! songs sung by Chinese singer Cheng Fangyuan, featuring modified, socialist-friendly lyrics.
“We gave two cassettes away to each person who bought a ticket — keep one and sell the other which would pay for the ticket,” Napier-Bell told this reporter. “That would spread the word around. The Chinese didn’t quite manage to keep it quite as under wraps as they thought.”
Some years later, the travel writer Colin Thubron visited China. “He said everywhere he went in China he heard Wham songs playing,” Napier-Bell recounted. “I did my subversive job very well, I think.”
WHAM! officially split in 1986, but the pop act’s music hasn’t diminished. The group’s holiday classic “Last Christmas” finally reached No. 1 in the United Kingdom in January 2021, some 36 years after its release. Almost two years later, the single secured the coveted U.K. Christmas No. 1 for the first time, completing the longest journey (39 years) to the top spot. A year on, WHAM! made history again as “Last Christmas” became the first song to snag the U.K. Christmas chart leader in consecutive years.
Michael, who died on Christmas Day 2016, at the age of 53, was posthumously inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. In the same year, Netflix released the original documentary WHAM!. The story of those groundbreaking concerts in China was retold in the 1986 film Wham! in China: Foreign Skies.
The new documentary features meticulously restored, newly digitized and never-before-seen archive footage, reps say.
Sony Music Vision is the distributor of WHAM! 10 Days In China in partnership with Trafalgar Releasing handling theatrical distribution, and the film is in association with Sony Music Entertainment UK and the BBC.
Tickets can be found at wham10daysinchina.com. Later this summer, the doc will be broadcast on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer, in association with the BBC.
WHAM! 10 Days in China is produced by Supercollider (a Zinc Media Company), directed by Mike Christie, and executive produced by Krista Wegener, Ian Sharpe (for Sony Music Vision) and Tanya Shaw (for Supercollider).
