![]() “Pad it out with loads of words,” says Ridgeley. There are touching moments too, such as when the pair – who genuinely try to cope with the maelstrom around them – write a speech in the back of a car en route to an official banquet. In another scene, the band watches in horror as a snake is skinned alive in a restaurant, and there’s a stilted garden party at Beijing’s British embassy. The song is intercut with shots of Western appliances in Chinese shops to demonstrate creeping modernisation (fans at the concerts were all given free Wham! cassettes). It’s big on East meets West juxtapositions: footage of a quiet temple segues into Wham! singing Everything She Wants dressed in brash faux-military white uniforms with vast epaulettes. Rather than simple pop promo, the film reflects an interesting culture clash: the mutual bemusement when a colourful Western pop juggernaut lands in a closed society for the first time.Īs well as footage of Wham!, it features arms-length shots of Chinese street scenes, sunsets and traditional pastimes. A large travelling press pack made the band’s life miserable.Īnderson’s 80-minute film, called If You Were There (after the Wham! song), is a ruminative and respectful take on the band’s time in China. Early on, Anderson injured his leg at the Great Wall of China and was confined to a wheelchair. Anderson, meanwhile, was a Palme d’Or-winning feature film director who in the 1950s had co-founded the Free Cinema documentary movement, which specialised in the unrushed realism of everyday life. Michael and Ridgeley, then 21 and 22, were pop’s good-time boys image-conscious, adored and wildly successful, their last five singles had topped the charts in either the UK or America or both. To mark the 40th anniversary of Wham!’s debut single Wham Rap! on June 16 – and as an extended version of the 2017 documentary George Michael Freedom Uncut comes to cinemas later this month – I went to Stirling to watch the film and delve into Anderson’s personal letters. His cut has never been seen in public and can only be viewed by appointment at the University of Stirling, where the director’s archive is kept. But, as Anderson’s letters make clear, it descended into chaos and sparked one of the most intriguing and catty artistic fallings-out of modern times.Īnderson’s film was rejected by the band and he was fired. ![]() George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley were the first Western pop stars to play in the country, and they’d hired 61-year-old Anderson to make a film about it. The “operation” in question was a proposed documentary about pop group Wham!’s concert tour of China in April 1985. “I was not prepared for the incredible waste, silliness, lack of conscience, ignorance, lack of grace, lack of scruple, egoism, weakness, duplicity and hypocrisy which have characterised the whole operation,” Anderson wrote. ![]() The fêted director of If… and This Sporting Life was even more forthright in another letter to workmates. “The whole Wham! in China episode went from farce to disaster,” Lindsay Anderson wrote to a former colleague in March 1986. ![]()
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