WHAM! and Lindsay Anderson

“The artist must always bite the hand that feeds him,” Lindsay Anderson once observed. His spirit of uncompromising independence as a film-maker was so well known that, when the management of WHAM! sacked him during the editing phase of the 1985 documentary about the super-duo’s tour of China, the only surprise was why they had bothered to hire him in the first place. Their way of biting back was to bury Lindsay’s original cut of the film, If You Were There...

Forty years on, Sony Music, with the approval of Andrew Ridgeley and the George Michael Estate, have returned to the footage that Lindsay shot to bring out WHAM! 10 Days in China, which will be released worldwide in cinemas from 28 July. But when the trailer for the new documentary claims “the legacy of WHAM! in China remained untold until now”, that’s not really true. It had been told, but just not the way that they wanted it.

Lindsay’s crime had been to make an honest, intelligent film, when the nature of super-fandom makes it as difficult to be intelligent about George Michael – or even Andrew Ridgeley – as it is for a Chinese person to be disrespectful of Chairman Mao.

Even as he arrived in China in the spring of 1985, Lindsay had a keen sense of the absurdity of the assignment that he was taking on. He confided his thoughts in a postcard that he sent to his friend Lois Smith from Beijing. He had flown there from Washington, where he had just directed what the Washington Post called an “admirable production” of Hamlet at the Folger Theater, “refreshingly free of stagy histrionics”.

“It’s impossible to get the American media to pay attention to anything without flash, gimmick or stardom,” he lamented. If directing a film about WHAM! in China was of course to jump straight into the epicentre of “flash, gimmick and stardom”, he hoped that he might at least “make a bit of cash”.

What is fascinating about Lindsay’s documentary – before WHAM! buried it – was how it deliberately defied the expectations to glamourize a product. Metaphorical fingers were being bitten. In his published memoir, Andrew Ridgeley commented: “The film was exactly what I’d feared: a well-shot but drearily worthy look at life in a communist state, rather than the exciting adventures of a Western pop band in China.”

It’s no surprise that the advance publicity for the new documentary makes no mention of Lindsay whatsoever. In telling their story of “the exciting adventures of a Western pop band in China”, the WHAM! interests must have been as keen to bury him as they had buried the original film he had made.

I’ll be interested to see if the credits of WHAM! 10 Days in China mentions his name at all. I assume probably not. I’m expecting it to be a reassertion of that depressing truth that he who pays the piper calls the tune. But the fact that Lindsay consistently challenged that rule was one of the reasons why – beyond trying to make some cash out of some admittedly very “potent cheap music” – he was so important as a film-maker and a commentator on society.

Sadly, the credits of Lindsay’s original film are just about the only thing that could be shared from it without invoking a lawyer’s letter. But if you can find a bootleg copy of If You Were There..., it is well worth a watch.