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Wham helped change China, pop guru claims

Former promoter Simon Napier-Bell reckons he helped open up China. PHOTO: AFP

Simon Napier-Bell looks lost as he trudges around Hong Kong looking for a coffee shop.

"It's changed so much I don't recognize the place," the former pop-music guru says standing on a traffic island in the middle of the downtown Central district.

Indeed Hong Kong has changed, mostly as a result of the huge changes in China, the city's parent nation just a few miles to the north. And Napier-Bell is all too aware of change there.

"We helped start that," he says with no hint of sarcasm in his tone.

He's stretching the point, of course, but he's not far off the mark. Twenty years ago Napier-Bell took singers George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, then known as pop duo Wham, to play the first-ever gig by a Western pop band in communist China.

In artistic and financial terms a flop, the show did however impress on the world that China meant business when it said it wanted to open up to market reform.

"There's no doubt about it, foreign investment came flooding in as a result of that concert," says Napier-Bell, now 67 and a long way from the heady days when he was British pop's Mr Big.

The concert at Beijing's People's Stadium on April 7, 1985, became a milestone not only in pop but also in Chinese history, even if few Chinese actually knew about it.

"We were not interested in promoting it in China. We wanted to promote it to the rest of the world," Napier-Bell says.

"In the end everybody got what they wanted from it -- Wham became the biggest, most famous band in the world and the Chinese got a concert that proved they meant what they said about opening up."

The concert was a nightmare to arrange, says Napier-Bell, who now spends his time writing his memoirs and developing the career of a young singer in Thailand, his adopted home.

After two years of badgering communist leaders and sweet-talking them into believing a pop concert was just what China needed, he finally got the gig Michael and Ridgeley wanted -- only to be told months after that they wanted to split the band.

"All that effort and they called it a day soon after," Napier-Bell laments over a bottle of spring water. "But it was worth it for the fun."

Fun seems to have been the driving force behind Napier-Bell's 40-odd year career in the pop business.

Stumbling into management almost by accident in the early 1960s, he took the then unknown Dusty Springfield under his wing, penning her biggest hit single, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me.

Goaded on by the hedonistic life the royalties allowed, he soon took on managerial duties for some of the biggest acts of the era including The Yardbirds, who went on to become Led Zeppelin, and Marc Bolan who became a hit with T-Rex.

In the 1970s he came to the fore with the art-rock band Japan, whose apt success in Japan allowed Napier-Bell to develop his love affair with Asia. It was this as much as any desire by Wham to play China that gave him the idea to organize the Beijing concert.

"It was over an Indian dinner and George said he wanted Wham to be the biggest band in the world within two years -- I said it would take at least five to break America," Napier-Bell says.

"So the China gig was mentioned as a way of short-circuiting the usual promotional routine. And it worked. After the gig, Wham was in every newspaper for weeks."

Napier-Bell has been back to China only once since the concert. Last year he tried to track down Zhou Renkai, the party official who, as head of the All-China Youth Federation, had greased the way for the gig.

Apart from being horrified to learn that all records of Zhou had been "lost" he also found the city transformed from the drab uniformity of its communist past to a thriving capitalist metropolis.

"I have never seen such a transformation, anywhere," he said.

Openly gay, Napier-Bell's books -- including an examination of drugs in rock called Black Vinyl, White Powder -- pull no punches when it comes to outing the music industry's foibles.

His latest, an account of the events leading up to Wham's China concert, I'm Coming to Take You to Lunch, is just as candid, but this time about the rigid authoritarianism of the Chinese officials.

With politburo members still wearing Mao suits and riding cycles in the 1980s, the inner circle of the Chinese ministries were like Masonic lodges, he says.

"Everything had to be done sensitively so as not to upset anyone," he says. "A lot of attention had to be paid to etiquette and manner. It took me a long time to work it out."

He believes all that has changed since then is the suits.
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