STAY IN YOUR SEATS

On May 29th, my book "I'm Coming toTake You to Lunch", about managing Wham! and taking them to China will be re-published in America by Unbound Books. It ends with Wham's concert in Beijing.

In the VIP box, I sat sandwiched between the British ambassador and General Xiao Hua, a senior member of the Central Committee. Below us the auditorium was packed with cameramen. In a roped-off area in front of the stage were more than seventy TV crews; behind them, two hundred stills photographers and hordes of international reporters.

This was normally a sports stadium. Now, the downstairs arena contained the stage, an area in front of it for TV crews and photographers, and then seats for four thousand. The next tier was seating for six thousand and above that were two more tiers of two thousand each. Behind the stage there was cheap seating for a thousand. Our VIP box was high up between the first and second tiers.

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 lights went down, the audience cheered, the band came onstage, the first chord was struck and George and Andrew bounced out smiling and waving.

So this was it. The moment I’d spent eighteen months travelling backwards and forwards to China to witness. With seventy TV crews and two hundred photographers in front of them, Wham! were just twenty-four hours from being front- page news in every paper in America. But instead of bursting into song as he was meant to, George hesitated. With all those cameramen and TV crews training their sights on him, he opened his mouth and not a sound came out.

Just a couple of days ago, he’d asked me, ‘There won’t be too many photographers will there?’

‘Of course not,’ I told him sarcastically. ‘It’ll just be you and fifteen thousand Chinese teenagers. Who’d be interested in taking a picture of that?’

He really hated photographers, and the sight of two hundred of them plus seventy video crews had caused something to happen he’d never experienced before. George – always overconfident, always cocky, never nervous – was experiencing his first attack of stage-fright. With cameras flashing madly and TV crews following his every move he ran to the far side of the stage, clapping with the beat, trying to loosen himself up.

By now I was as nervous as George – when things went wrong he could be unpredictable – but he recovered quickly and somehow pushed out the first line, croaky but audible. Then the second line, stronger and more confident, and suddenly the stage-fright was gone. The show was on the road.

The next song was ‘Club Tropicana’. George bounced round to the back of the stage, clapping his hands on the beat, encouraging the spectators seated behind the band to do the same. They hadn’t a clue; they thought he wanted applause and politely gave it. 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, especially downstairs, intimidated by the sight of so many police and soldiers. But they were enthusiastic nonetheless and cheered hugely, letting out strange bursts of clapping which had no relevance to either the beat or the start and finish of songs. In the context of a normal pop concert, this show was never going to work, but as a bizarre event it was red hot.

By the end of four songs, I realised 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 watching Wham! play in Beijing.

‘And now,’ George announced, “‘Bad Boys”!’

‘Ba-ba-ba doo-wah,’ chanted the backing girls, Pepsi and Shirley.

From our seat in the circle we could see the upper terraces. Away from the police and the prying cameras of journalists the upstairs audience was more boisterous. One big block, perhaps a thousand people, were foreigners with tickets from their embassies. By the end of ‘Bad Boys’ they were standing up and dancing. The Chinese near them took confidence in their numbers and copied them. Then scattered groups around the other upper tiers started to do the same. Some of them even got the hang of clapping on the beat, even learnt to scream when George or Andrew waved their butts.

Downstairs, though, the audience remained more careful of what they did. The film crew had turned hugely bright lights onto them. These Chinese kids probably didn’t realise this was a documentary for CBS Records, they thought it was the secret police taking a filmed record of anyone who misbehaved.

‘This song has been Number One in our country,’ Andrew shouted. ‘Let’s hope one day it will be Number One in China too. “F-R-E-E-D-O-M”!’

Upstairs the groove was growing. With no in-built sense of self-control some of the Chinese kids were getting dangerously over-excited. People danced around the terraces, not with style and rhythm, but with manic swinging arms, pouring out energy like punk rockers on speed. It wasn’t just the music that was driving them, it was a new-found sense of self-expression. Of freedom.

Below, the world’s journalists were unable to see what was going on above them, but from the VIP box we had a perfect view. Thirty minutes had passed. Next to me the general from the Central Committee sat stony-faced and silent. The audience downstairs still behaved meekly, but upstairs, fueled by the contingent from abroad, the audience was becoming more and more excited. On the other side of me our ambassador appeared equally unresponsive to what was going on. He knew all too well, if there were any complaints from the Chinese government it would be him on the receiving end.

‘Careless Whisper’ calmed the crowd for a moment but then Wham! crashed into ‘Young Guns’ with its sexy dance routine and catchy vocal riff.

Some of the TV crews had escaped from their special area downstairs and were starting to climb up the terraces, roaming up and down steeply raked balconies, their handheld lights sucking up small groups of demented dancers like garden lights attracting whizzing night insects.

Downstairs, the impassive guards of the People’s Police still prevented people from moving around or attempting to dance but upstairs there was no one stopping what was going on. The few guards that were there watched bemused, enthused even, sometimes smiling as people jammed themselves into the pools of light that came from the handheld cameras.

“‘Wake Me Up Before You – GO! GO!”’ The upper tiers took George’s yell on the last two words of his announcement as further encouragement to throw off their inhibitions. They began to throb magnificently – almost as well as the crowd at the Glasgow Apollo had done fifteen months earlier.

We were now forty-five minutes into the show. Downstairs the audience were still subdued, sitting politely, nervous of the filming and the lights. The stills cameramen, still held captive by security guards, were pivoting from side to side, looking up into the terraces, trying to see the bizarre goings- on, shielding their eyes from the lights of the downstairs film crew, searching for stories. And all the time Wham! poured out the music.

As they reached the end of ‘Wham Rap!’, with just two numbers to go, a teenager downstairs started dancing in a distant corner, smoking a cigarette, drinking from a bottle of rice wine. He was grabbed by half a dozen of the People’s Police and it caused a miniscule rumpus. Just what the world’s media had been looking for!

They rushed to film it, leaping from their restricted area, the guards unable to contain them, competing with each other to shine lights on what was happening. Some of the stills photographers, finding themselves pushed back by the police, struggled with them so that the single drunken fan became the cause of a skirmish between photographers, TV crews and police, which of course was filmed by others.

‘“I’m Your Man.”’ The band pounded into its last number, the last three minutes of the show. Downstairs, filmed by the TV crews, the police took away the lone dancer. Upstairs the kids jived on. Then the band hit the last chord and the houselights came up. From all round the hall there was cheering but next to me General Xiao Hua looked shaken. The passionate reaction of the young Chinese in the upstairs terraces was new to him, as was the rumpus downstairs, and he didn’t like it.

I wanted to have the entire audience on its feet for the encore, so being in the emperor’s seat I stood up and applauded furiously. The general was forced to follow suit and so was our ambassador. Then everyone in the auditorium. I’d decided to stand and clap till the band came back, then stay standing throughout the encore to keep the audience on its feet with me. But it didn’t work. George and Andrew had had enough. Playing a one-hour concert in such a bizarre atmosphere had taken its toll. They were back in the dressing-room recovering.

The next day we received international newspaper reports by telex. It was intriguing. On the front page of all the British tabloids was the story of the police beating up a boy for dancing. The American papers had chosen not to write about that. Instead they concentrated on the audience’s desire to learn what rock ’n’ roll was about – ‘Rock and roll history made in a riot of enthusiasm’ – and particularly noted the subdued audience in the downstairs seats.

I thought about the quiet man from the Central Committee who’d sat next to me – General Xiao Hua. He was pleasant enough, in an impeccably cut Western suit. Before the show he’d told me his daughter had just come back from university in America and had brought a Michael Jackson record with her. She’d been teaching him how to dance and he’d enjoyed it.  But after the show his face was filled with concern and he didn’t talk to me again. He’d been closely watching what had gone on upstairs and he hadn’t liked it, especially the way the foreign contingent had influenced the normally well-behaved Chinese youth around them.

He’d just had a lesson in how subversive Western pop culture could be. The dangers of introducing it to China’s young people must have been all too clear to him.

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