Witnessing China's opening-up through music

LONDON, Oct. 21 (Chinese media) -- On April 10, 1984, Britain's pop band WHAM! staged an eye-opening concert in Beijing, just a few years after China adopted the policy of reform and opening up. With no media report within the country, the concert nonetheless was greeted with a full-house audience, mainly youth, and became an exciting topic in the streets of Beijing.

Few people then realized the significance of the concert in the history of China, but the fact is, Wham! was actually the first western pop band that performed in China since 1978, when the country inaugurated the reform and opening up policy.

It was owing to the clever PR of Simon Napier-Bell, the then manager of Wham!, that the band's China visit had made huge waves not only in the United States, his target market, but also across the world.

Napier-Bell, now living in Thailand, has somehow unexpectedly become a witness of China's opening up, as his interest in China began at an early age.

"My father went to China when he was 22, fresh out of Oxford University, to sell oil for Shell. He told endless stories of the country and his photo album is full of faded sepia photos of his life there," he said in an e-mail interview.

Napier-Bell had been obsessed with the Far East since the 1970s.

For him, China was always there at the center -- after all, culturally it spreads itself right across the Far East. "So it was like China had always been there waiting -- and then with Wham! I got the opportunity to go and do it."

Now, almost 24 years since the Beijing concert, Napier-Bell's memory of it is still vivid.

"As the concert neared I became interested in publicizing it locally. There's no doubt, despite the lack of internet at that time and the difficulty of getting news from overseas, students and the like in China read about the concert in overseas papers and heard about it on overseas radio. After all, it was the most hugely publicized event overseas although it was kept totally under wraps in China."

To popularize Wham! and get kids familiar with Western music and youth culture, Napier-Bell decided to give two cassettes of Wham! songs away with every ticket. One was for the purchasers to listen to and get to know the songs, and the other could be given to friends or sold in the market, just to spread the words around.

"It obviously worked because in Colin Thubron's wonderful book on China when he visited shortly after the concert, he mentions endlessly hearing Wham! being played all over the place, the only Western group he heard being played in China."

Also, with the vast publicity it had around the world, the concert did convince the world that China was opening up culturally and that helped the government pull in some of the huge amounts of overseas investment they needed to build Beijing into the city now it is.

"What's interesting is, now, looking back, we can see that everything that has happened to make China/Beijing what it is today had already been put in place by the early 1980s."

Napier-Bell made some 13 trips to China in the 1980s before the concert was finalized in 1985. Although he did go back to China many times from 1986 to 2002, it was mainly to Shanghai and Guangzhou. It was not until 2004 did he return to Beijing.

In his book "I'm coming to take you to lunch" published in 2004,Napier-Bell detailed this "extraordinary" trip.

"The grim, never-ending drabness I knew so well had completely disappeared. Beijing looked like Tokyo or Singapore. Everything that was old and grubby and depressing had been torn down and replaced with things that were tall, shiny and gleaming."

"As the Wham! went to China, Beijing had just one modern hotel -- the Great Wall Hotel. Colin Thubron, in his book Behind the Wall, described it as a space capsule, lying on the outskirts of the city as if it had been 'discharged from another planet,' with a lobby in which 'neon-lit elevators glided like glass beetles.' It was, he said, as if 'Beijing and the hotel were severed from each other.'"

"In 1984, Beijing and the Great Wall Hotel were indeed like two different worlds -- but today it's the world of the hotel that has triumphed. The Great Wall Hotel is now simply one of thousands of glittering steel and glass buildings."

"Even more surprising are the countless districts dedicated to night life. The change in just 20 years is as great as the change that has taken place in most Western cities in 60 or 70 years. Once empty avenues are now jammed to a standstill across all five lanes with Audis, Volkswagens, Mercedes, BMWs and Nissans."

He stayed in the downtown Peninsula during his 2004 trip. It was brashly modern and extravagant -- a marbled mezzanine, a French restaurant, plasma TVs all over the place, fashion shops by Gucci, Armani, Louis Vuitton, Ralph Laurent -- just like five-star hotels anywhere else in the world.

On the eve of the Beijing Olympics this year, Napier-Bell went to Beijing for a charity concert sponsored by a Europe China Foundation.

"When Wham! played, we hired a 747 freight plane to fly in equipment -- we even had to bring our own fuse wire. Now, there is the finest technical equipment, everywhere. And not surprising, for throughout the world the music business these days is using equipment made in China."

It was also amazing this time that the concert was held in the Great Hall of the People, the parliament building which every five years the world gets to see on TV news when China votes for its new president. But this time, instead of all those dignitaries on stage, it was "our musicians and artists."