Andrew Ridgeley in ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’. Photo credit: © Craig Hastings.
Opening in theaters worldwide on July 28th is the new documentary ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’, which was directed by Mike Christie (‘Nick Cave’s Veiled World’) and chronicles the pop duo’s historical 1985 visit to China becoming the first Western pop group to visit the country.
Release Date: Jul 28, 2026
Run Time: 1 hr 30 min
The film utilizes footage shot by director Lindsay Anderson (‘If….’) that was original repurposed for the 1986 documentary ‘Wham! in China: Foreign Skies’ and mixes in new interviews with Andrew Ridgeley, and never-before-seen archival footage of George Michael.
Moviefone recently had the pleasure os speaking with legendary musician Andrew Ridgeley about ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’, why this story needed to be retold, working with director Mick Christie, his friendship with George Michael, looking back on their historic visit to China, and the band’s lasting impact on that country.
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Andrew Ridgeley in ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’. Photo credit: © Craig Hastings.
Moviefone: To begin with, following ‘Foreign Skies’ and the Netflix documentary ‘WHAM!’, which included elements of this story, what did you feel still needed to be said about your tour in China and why did you want to make this movie?
Andrew Ridgeley: Well, it was a pretty momentous event. It was one of the big career events of Wham!. To be able to revisit, to make a retrospective, to reveal and explain the concept, the whys and how it shaped Wham!’s career, and to discover the legacy that exists in China, because that was something that was a complete unknown. That was very important for me personally. The story wasn’t fully told. This does it. I think that was important to do that. ‘Foreign Skies’ was great in what it was. It was essentially a promo video for Wham!. The Lindsay Anderson documentary, which never was seen publicly, it didn’t achieve anything for anyone. So yeah, this was kind of unfinished business. I’m really pleased with it, because it is authentic, and it’s genuine. It does as far as it could reveal how it came to be. But it certainly discovers the legacy as it is in China.
(Left) Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael in ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’. Photo Credit: © Neal Preston.
MF: Can you talk about repurposing filmmaker Lindsay Anderson’s original footage and why Mike Christie was the right person to direct this movie and definitively tell this story?
AR: Well, in 2025 we had several proposals. It was in my mind to use the China visit for our centerpiece 40th anniversary. But Mike’s proposal was the one that resonated. That was the one that was closest to our perspective of what a retrospective should be, and he’s made films in China before. He has experience of doing so. The challenge that was in front of him was to assess and curate 10 days worth (of footage). I think it was 90 hours he said and there was a lot that was unusable. The stuff that had been used in the Lindsay Anderson cut had actually been cut out of the roles. So, it was no small job to be able to match up the audio with the film. By all accounts it was a really difficult job. But Mike, because of the nature of what this was, he was able to use the footage in a way that neither Andy Morahan who edited together ‘Foreign Skies’, nor Lindsay Anderson did. So, the footage that has been used obviously has been modernized in the ways that’s not my pay grade. Mike’s been able to use the footage that was unused in order to tell the story in the way that we all wanted it told. As a retrospective and with the benefit of hindsight, it was a wonderful thing to be able to set out as authentically as we could, warts and all, the whys and the wherefores.
(Center) Andrew Ridgley on Great Wall of China in 1985. Photo Credit: Andrew Ridgeley, Big Geoff Overseas Limited, Robobuild Limited t/a George Michael Entertainment. Photograph(s) by Martyn Goddard.
MF: What was it like for you personally to go down memory lane and look at this footage and remember what it was like for you to be a young man visiting China at this particular time in history?
AR: It was fascinating. I spoke with Mike for the best part of probably three days worth of interviews, a fraction of which is used of course, but we may get the opportunity to explore that more fully. But I had wanted to make this retrospective because there was so much to tell. There was so much untold as well. There was so much a person needed to discover. We made three Wham!films recently. This had the most interest for me because there were elements that were unknown to me. I know the Wham! story, I know the “Last Christmas” story back to front. The Wham! in China story, I only knew part of. I didn’t know the Chinese aspect.
(Center) Andrew Ridgeley in ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’. Photo credit: Craig Hastings.
MF: The film reveals the lasting impact that your visit had on the people of China and how it inspired many to pursue music. How did that make you feel to lean the affect you and George had on audiences?
AR: It was incredibly gratifying, and it was very moving to meet people whose futures were revealed to them and whose lives ultimately were shaped by that one event. That’s an extraordinary thing to be personally confronted with. To meet someone who tells one that if it weren’t for that moment in time that one was responsible for, that their lives would not have taken the course they did is extraordinary. Not many people get to know that and to do that, let’s say. It’s a real shame that George would never know. He may have, who knows? Someone may have told him, I don’t know. But I think we can safely say that he never knew the full legacy. The legacy that exists on a personal level and within those people, a very personal level indeed. So, that was a moving and touching moment for me to hear those testimonies of what Wham! meant to those people, how it shaped their futures and changed the course of their lives. The enduring and most profound legacy that really I think you could probably ask for.
(L to R) Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael in ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’. Photo Credit: © Neal Preston.
MF: Finally, what do you think George would think about the impact you had on Chinese audiences and can you talk a little about your friendship with him at that time and while you were in China?
AR: As I’ve expressed, he would’ve been extremely gratified and moved by learning that his music and his performances were so powerful that they did for others what those performances that we would’ve witnessed, those ‘Top of the Pops’ performances that we saw, Freddie Mercury and Queen, or David Bowie. There were seminal performances that for us as youngsters would perhaps have had the same effect, maybe not to the same degree because we were immersed in it anyway. But to the second part of your question, what I find touching is to see the bickering in the back of the car about the speeches. That is a genuine reflection of what our relationship was. You can see that’s the intimacy and bond that you have with your brother or your sister. It’s that touchiness that you can have and yet still you’re bonded by something that’s unbreakable. Our relationship at that point in time was one where we had moved through our youth together, and we were on the cusp of realizing Wham!’s ultimate ambition. Those ambitions had developed and evolved throughout our career. They weren’t static. As school boys, our ambition wasn’t to play stadiums in the United States at that point in time. It was to get a demo to the bloke who was at the record company who lived down the road. So they grew and they evolved as Wham!’s success grew and developed. Even the photographs tell a story from 1982 when we were fresh-faced kids who just signed a record deal to stepping out on stage at Wembley in 1986 where George especially, he’s become George Michael. That’s an amazing transformation in really three and a half, four years. So, we were young men at that point in time with adulthood already in view. The next phase in our lives was becoming clearer to us both. I mean things happened pretty bloody quick as they do I think for everyone. Although, I think probably sped up for us by the nature of what we did in those four and a half years between the age of 18 and 23. Anyway, things were constantly changing, but we were bound together, not only by our friendship and the fraternal bond that existed between us, but by the mutually held ambition to fulfill Wham! and our ambitions to make Wham! the biggest pop act in the world. And we pretty much did it.
(L to R) George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley in ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’. Photo Credit: Andrew Ridgeley, Big Geoff Overseas Limited, Robobuild Limited t/a George Michael Entertainment. Photograph(s) by Martyn Goddard.
What is the story of ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’?
In 1985, Wham! were the first Western pop group to perform in communist China. George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s two concerts in Beijing and Guangzhou introduced live Western pop to Chinese audiences and marked a turning point for the band. For Wham!, the tour was more than music; it was a bold move to capture American attention and launch them into global superstardom, and it worked.
Who Appears in ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’?
- Andrew Ridgeley as Self
- George Michael as Self (Archival Footage)
Andrew Ridgeley in ‘Wham! 10 Days in China’. Photo credit: © Craig Hastings.
