How does a British pop group go about breaking America? The traditional answer has always been: tour, tour and then tour some more. Yet in 1985, Wham! – or more accurately, their savvy manager Simon Napier-Bell – had an altogether different idea, to do what no Western band had ever done before: perform in communist China. That way, Napier-Bell figured, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley could ride the wave of global publicity all the way to America, making them household names before the need to even step foot on US soil. Genius? Cynical? Grubby? A mixture of all three?
“I thought it was nuts,” says Ridgeley now, on video call from his home in London. “I couldn’t see how the goal would be achieved. It was incredibly expensive. It was incredibly risky. But I was convinced of the power of publicity to project Wham! in the way that it was being presented [to me].”
It’s no exaggeration to say Wham!’s trip to China was one of pop history’s more substantial events: a clash of politics, cultures and ideologies – the oppressive communist wall meeting the capitalist pop machine via two flamboyantly handsome young men from Hertfordshire – that had previously seemed unthinkable. It was also one of pop’s strangest happenings.
