How Wham! broke China

Forty years on from George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley bringing pop to the communist bloc, Mark Beaumont uncovers a tale of spies, silent stadiums and airborne terror

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The Beatles at JFK, this was not. “Where’s all the screaming kids, then?” George Michael asked, scanning the arrivals hall at Beijing international airport in April 1985 to find the wind whistling through the east Asian branch of Club Tropicana. Wham! arrived in China at the peak of their fame, yet rather than scrum their way through hordes of howling girls – as was the custom everywhere else – the doe-eyed pop phenomenon were met by a clutch of photographers, a hall full of nonplussed onlookers and a gathering of besuited government officials.

At least one of their welcoming party had brought his child, toddling up to Michael’s bandmate Andrew Ridgeley in the uniform of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, getting a snapshot and then swiftly running away again. “I think I scared the living daylights out of him,” Ridgeley chuckled, little knowing he’d just lived out a miniature metaphor for the first major Western pop tour of China, staged 40 years ago this week. At the rear, backing singer Janet Mooney was one of the 11strong band accompanying George and Andrew into this uncharted, awkwardly officious territory. “We’d never experienced anything like that,” she tells The Independent today. “Everywhere we went they were mobbed, except in China. They had no experience of Western pop culture. I don’t think they had that culture of fans waiting at the stage door and stuff.”

By 1985, these two Hertfordshire heartthrobs had conquered around 80 per cent of the globe. Instant smashes such as “Young Guns (Go for It)” and “Bad Boys” had made them overnight UK chart sensations, and their 1984 second album