The told story of Wham! in China

This is book No. 25 on Paul French’s Ultimate China Bookshelf.

Blurbs:

“A veteran manager of groups like the Yardbirds, Napier-Bell was just about ready to retire when Wham! fell into his lap…those interested in what goes on backstage and behind the scenes will find Napier-Bell’s stories worthwhile and entertaining.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A riot of boys, booze and 80s excess…a great raconteur and his snide asides are a joy…Bitchier than an Elton John putdown.”
—Elle

“Reading this is like sitting across a table groaning with foie gras, listening to a raconteur extraordinaire ramble through an alcoholic mist…tremendous fun.”
—Gay Times

“Richly funny and entertaining..some of it reads like a big, gay Bond thriller; other bits are pure, pungent travelogue.”
—Mojo

“Given Napier-Bell’s hedonistic life in Eighties London, his diverse circle of acquaintances and his pithy, lively writing style, this book could hardly fail to entertain.”
—Observer

“Tells the story with a raconteur’s relish and a cast of shady characters straight out of a Graham Greene novel.”
—Q Magazine

About the author:

Simon Napier-Bell has been a film composer, songwriter (most famously for Dusty Springfield), record producer, and author, but he is best known for having managed such artists as The Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, Japan, and Wham! Under his management, Wham! became the first Western pop group ever to play in Communist China. He is the author of three other books about the music industry: You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (his most famous song for Springfield, which was also recorded by Elvis), Black Vinyl White Powder (which should need no explanation!), and The Business, as well as a forthcoming memoir, Sour Mouth, Sweet Bottom. He is the CEO of the Pierbel Entertainment Group and now lives down in Thailand enjoying a life of good food, good company, sunshine, writing, and an occasional foray back into producing.

The book in 150 words:

Simon Napier-Bell liked a challenge and China intrigued him. I’m Coming to Take You to Lunch is his instant classic gossipy memoir about bringing Wham! to China in the ’80s. Bored in London in 1983, Napier-Bell was offered the chance to arrange for Wham! to be the first-ever Western pop group to play in the People’s Republic of China — a masterstroke of publicity that, in one swift move, would make it one of the biggest groups on the planet. But what was worse about 1985 China? Its petulant pop stars, shady businessmen, or a confusion of spies, students, and communist officials? But the boys — George and Andrew — did get to play. They stormed China, and along the way, Napier-Bell learned a lot about doing business in ’80s China.

Your free takeaways:

A phone call to the Chinese consulate provided me with my first obstacle: a recorded message. “There are no visas for private tourists. You must travel in an official tour group. If it’s business, we need a formal letter of invitation from the Chinese company you are visiting. It will take a minimum of three months to come through.”

I’d heard that the Beijing Hotel held a weekly disco on Wednesdays from eight till eleven…it was packed with young people, many of them university students. The sound system was suitable only for a room a fifth of its size but had been connected to another one which filled the room with a muffled throb of bass, giving people the tempo but none of the melody. Closer to the DJ you could make out what the records were — twenty-year-old Beatles, ten-year-old Boney M, some Michael Jackson!

Every one of the fifteen thousand seats was filled with chattering young Chinese. In case their excitement should boil over, a thousand members of the People’s Police stood round the walls downstairs, ready to stop trouble before it could start.

The next song was “Club Tropicana.” If the audience seemed interested rather than ecstatic, it was probably because of an announcement during the interval. An authoritarian Chinese voice had blared through the speakers, “Stay in your seats. Don’t dance!,” and for the moment that’s what they were doing…by the end of four songs, I realIZed something strange wAs happening. The TV lights and camera flashes, which at a normal concert would be directed at the stage, were being directed at the audience. The world’s media hadn’t come to see Wham! play in Beijing, they’d come to see the Chinese media watching Wham! play in Beijing!

Why this book should be on your China bookshelf:

Basically, because Simon Napier-Bell did it! He got Wham! (not the easiest couple of lads to wrangle — who were only 21 and 22 at the time, amazingly), and their entourage, to China, on some stages, up to the Great Wall, and around the Forbidden City, before managing to get them back home again in one piece…and he got paid in Chinese bicycles (which Napier-Bell then legendarily traded to the Cubans). The Americans may have Intel, Boeing, the NBA, Hollywood, and all that jazz, but British business will always have April 1985, when two bouffant-ed lads (and not forgetting their backing singers, Pepsi and Shirley) played to a crowd of 12,000 at the Beijing Workers’ Gymnasium, with tickets selling for about $1.75 each. That’s a masterclass in soft power for you right there! They also played the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou, where the tickets were a whopping $5.50 each.

Napier-Bell is also a little different from our usual “China hands,” schooled in universities and think tanks to speak Chinese, “understand” China, dispense their wisdom to us via books, journal articles, TED Talks, and lord only knows what else these days. Simon Napier-Bell eschewed all that — he was simply bored, sitting around in London, had done it all (at least as far as the music business was concerned), and so decided to set himself the challenge of getting Wham! to China. And he has no great insights, no “learnings” to impart about business in the Middle Kingdom. This is the anti-China MBA, the anti-CEIBS approach to doing business in China. It’s an argument for knowing full well that your proposed business partners are very different, live in a very different world, have very different constraints to deal with, but (as was told to us by Carl Crow, Joe Studwell, and others), if you’ve got what they want, and they can facilitate what you want, then a deal can be done — over lunch… This is not something you will ever be told in a high-priced business school, but spend eight bucks on I’m Coming to Take You to Lunch and you’ll feel ready for any China challenge.

One day, we may get another take on the Wham! Tour of China. The British film director Lindsay Anderson — best known for his 1960s avant-garde work — accompanied the tour to China and did actually make a documentary, Wham! in China: Foreign Skies. The doc, which features footage of George and Andrew onstage in China, was screened at the famous Wham! farewell gig at Wembley in 1986 in front of 72,000 people. However, we’ve now had nearly 40 years of legal and personal wrangling and the documentary is yet to be released on DVD or streamed anywhere. It apparently remains locked in an archive vault at Stirling University in Scotland. Napier-Bell maintains there is 70 miles of film of the tour!

We have some other things to thank Napier-Bell for, too. He did manage to sink Queen’s attempt to play China first, and the thought of having to endure Freddie Mercury and Brian May claiming to be the first Western band to play China rather than North London’s finest ’80s pop duo would have been unbearable (I know some may not subscribe to this opinion). And, yes, I’m aware that Jean-Michel Jarre was the first Western musician to perform in 1981, but who knows what he’s all about! Ten years later, some Swede obviously came to China to take a few people to lunch, because it was only then that the second Western act was to play China — Roxette in 1995 — It Must Have Been Love!

Oh, and did I mention, I’m Coming to Take You to Lunch is a very funny book…

Next time:

Talking of business in China and funny, we move along to perhaps the wittiest, most self-deprecating catalogue of China biz disasters since Carl Crow’s 1937 Four Hundred Million Customers (our book No. 1) — the hilarious adventures of a tough-as-nails and somewhat overconfident Wall Street banker and an English guy with Mandarin skills but less experience in business. Together they raised $400 million on the back of the China Dream and basically pissed it all away, spectacularly. But the English guy got a great book out of it, so that’s okay…

Check out the other titles on Paul French’s Ultimate China Bookshelf.