EXCLUSIVE: Andrew Ridgeley has said that concerns about George Michael's voice were the reason Wham! never embarked on a full US tour, speaking ahead of the release of a new BBC documentary07:39, 25 Aug 2026Updated 07:39, 25 Aug 2026In 1985, Wham! duo George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley flew to China to perform two concerts in Beijing and Guangzhou – becoming the first western pop act ever to play in the country.‌While a pop promo-style video of their visit, Foreign Skies, was released at the time, a new feature-length documentary called Wham! 10 Days In China gathers concert footage from the China gigs, new interviews, and previously unseen behind-the-scenes clips to paint the fullest picture of what the trip was like.‌For Andrew, 63, the film is another chance to celebrate his old friend’s talent, with it being released just a few months before the 10th anniversary of George’s death (he died on Christmas Day in 2016).‌“Watching George perform and hearing him sing live is always a fantastic sensation, and I don’t think anyone can fail to be moved by his singing voice,” Andrew says.“The shows in China are actually the only recorded shows with visuals that we ever had – even The Final [the band’s farewell gig in 1986] wasn’t filmed. So it was really nice to see the band perform and to hear George sing.‌“A big part of this film for me is for people to see and hear George sing something like Careless Whisper – the live version with the sax intro is just exceptional. It’s a privilege to be part of those special moments.”George and Andrew were just 21 and 22 years old respectively when they arrived in China with acclaimed movie director Lindsay Anderson, who had been hired to make a film of the event, and a gaggle of journalists in tow.The documentary captures just how mad the undertaking was – a mixture of official, almost ambassadorial events they had to attend, staged moments such as a visit to a Beijing electronics store where Chinese teenagers asked to use the display cassette players to listen to Wham! tapes for the first time (which Andrew now describes as “contrived”), and painful press conferences that neither George or Andrew looked like they were enjoying.‌Even at the time, Andrew knew the whole thing was crazy. “I was deeply sceptical about the trip, but we had no other choice,” he explains. “George was not going to tour the United States extensively as there were concerns about his voice, so the idea was we could consolidate our success in the US by having photographs and press interviews from China beamed into people’s homes.I didn’t think it would work, but it did put us in the homes of Americans, and we played a stadium tour there later that year and it was big news.”‌He was also bemused by the hiring of Anderson, who was best known for his satirical movies such as public school drama If….. As it turned out, Andrew was right to be dubious. When the band returned to the UK, Anderson was fired from the project and his version, which only featured four songs from the tour, was never released.“I was utterly bemused by the appointment of Lindsay Anderson,” Andrew laughs. “I thought it was a terrible idea – a director of his artistic pedigree and political provenance was a simply bonkers fit for Wham!. I thought it was ill-fated from the start.”“He didn’t like us at all, and I found nothing in him likeable. He was embittered, he didn’t want to be there and in his letters he writes that he only did it for the money.”‌The new film delves deeper into the trip than Anderson’s version or the Foreign Skies video, even including a shocking mid-air event involving a band member that made headlines at the time. It captures Andrew and George just 14 months before they called it a day in front of 72,000 fans at Wembley Stadium.While the lifelong friends agreed it was time to break up the band (“nothing could have induced George to sing Bad Boys in middle age,” says Andrew), he admits at one point there were plans for the duo to release a third and final album that sadly never materialised.‌“We’d achieved pretty much everything we wanted to do with Wham! by the end of 1985, but we had talked about doing a third album,” Andrew says. “But at that point I think George’s songwriting was taking him away from Wham! – the band represented our youth, it was that embodiment of us as youths, it couldn’t come with us.”“So it was briefer than perhaps it might have been, but we went out in a blaze of glory.”Wham! 10 Days In China, Saturday 29 August, 9pm, BBC Two and BBC iPlayerArticle continues belowLike this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .