If you were there…

Sarah Bromage, Head of University Collections, University of Stirling

Wham!’s music was the soundtrack of my childhood, and I was aware, possibly through avid reading of Smash Hits magazine, that Wham! were the first western band to tour China after the Cultural Revolution.  Discovering that Lindsay Anderson had filmed a now banned documentary about this tour and that he was fired during the editing process, I was keen to know more. 

On watching Anderson’s film, If You Were There, and the subsequent Wham! approved film Foreign Skies it becomes clear that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the documentary.  It is not clear why Anderson was chosen as the commissioned filmmaker, as anyone who had seen his previous work would know that he was unlikely to produce the MTV type of film required.   

Wham!’s management were dismayed by Anderson’s first edit which featured scant actual concert footage of the group as they felt that the film’s potential audience ‘want to see Wham! not China’.    In correspondence Anderson was keen to emphasise he was not making a concert film, even though this was obviously what he had been asked to do, and confessed that during the edit process ‘I find myself quite unable to resist the temptation to behave like an artist’.   

His resulting film shows little interest in Wham! with only four songs worth of concert footage interspersed with topics he obviously found infinitely more interesting.   If You Were There documents China at a period when it was just opening up the western world.  Anderson’s film shows the beginning of the influence of western youth culture and capitalism in Chinese Society.  In particular his footage, lost in the released version of the film, exposes the vast cultural divide between this dynamic pop group, British civil servants and the Chinese authorities. 

(Images: Production material for Wham! film, ref. LA 1/10/2; photographs of Wham! in China, ref. LA 1/10/4; notes written by Anderson providing his account of his removal from the project, ref. LA 1/10/3.)