photo: Reuben Cox

Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and three-time Grammy nominee Andrew Bird wasn’t even familiar with HBO Max’s gritty medical drama The Pitt when the show’s composter, Gavin Brivik, cold-called him with an invitation to collaborate on a song for one of the series’ most heartbreaking and gut-punching moments. But once Bird watched the show — particularly an early version of that scene, in which fan-favorite character Louie Cloverfield, the lovable alcoholic with a heart of gold, dies with only the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center staff by his side — his lyrics for “Need Someone” came quickly.

“I’ve done this before where I’m asked to write a song for a show, and more than half the times I’ll take the song back. I won’t give it to them, because I write the songs as if they’re my own songs, and so I feel a certain ownership over them,” Bird confesses. “I’ve got to really think about it before I hand it over. But with this one, I knew for sure that this was it. It takes everything you’ve learned over a whole lifetime to sit down and write a song in an hour. … I absolutely wrote [“Need Someone”] for that scene. Every word.”

Bird was partially inspired by the 2020 pandemic — not just society’s shared post-COVID trauma, but the lack of appreciation of healthcare workers, whose harrowing experiences are depicted in The Pitt with an unflinching accuracy never quite captured in past hit hospital dramas like ER (which featured The Pitt’s star and co-executive producer, Noah Wyle) or Grey’s Anatomy. And while Bird has a long list of screen-composing credits, including The Muppets and Baskets, it was writing for The Pitt — which leads this year’s Emmy Awards with 25 nominations, including Original Music and Lyrics for “Need Someone,” which is Bird’s first Emmy nod — that gave him a true appreciation for television as an art form and a force for good.

“I really didn’t realize, until I started watching [The Pitt] and got involved, what an important show it is. Honestly, growing up watching TV as a kid, just it being ubiquitous in childhood as a sort of mind-numbing thing, I never thought TV was important,” Bird admits. “I don’t even have a TV in my house now, and once I became an artist, it wasn’t interesting to me. So, it was like, ‘Oh wow, this can really do a lot, almost more than any other medium, to help us figure out what the hell just happened [during the COVID-19 pandemic].’ To think of TV as being healing and important to a culture wasn’t something I’d really thought about until this came along. I quickly realized what an important show it was, and I really put everything I had into this.”

Bird is currently focused on an orchestral tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of his landmark album The Mysterious Production of Eggs, and is working on a new studio album due in 2027. But he also has nine songs on the soundtrack for I Play Rocky (Peter Farrelly’s upcoming biopic about Sylvester Stallone’s making of Rocky), so there may be more Grammy nominations, or even an Oscar nomination, in his future. He also doesn’t rule out acting again (after making his acting debut in Fargo Season 4), if the right role comes along. In the meantime, he chats here with Gold Derby about his once-in-a-lifetime experience with The Pitt.

LYNDSANITY: First of all, congratulations on your very first Emmy nomination! I imagine you’re very excited.

ANDREW BIRD: Thanks! I was told that we had a pretty good chance, given The Pitt‘s profile… but I’m not one who’s usually on the Grammy or Emmy circuit, probably because of genre being kind of elusive in what I do. So, [award nominations have] never really been on my mind much. I was really happy.

Well, you mentioned that the show has a high profile, with a rabid and invested fanbase. Were you a fan of The Pitt before you were enlisted for “Need Someone”?

No, I wasn’t at all. I was aware of it, but I just thought it was another medical drama in the style of ER or Grey’s Anatomy, which never really piqued my interest. This was kind of a cold call from Gavin. But I’ve always said that I enjoy doing song for picture, like lyrics for picture. I like the challenge of it; it uses everything I’ve got to offer, I think even more so than instrumental score. And so, I quickly binged Season 1, and it all happened. When these things come to me, I jump on them right away. If I want to do it, I get excited about it. I have to do it right away. Everything has to go to the side. It’s first idea, best idea, kind of knee-jerk and really fast. I think what helps is I embrace ambiguity in my lyrics sometimes, so that’s good for picture.

I wanted to reflect what was happening with the characters in the show, but you have two verses and a chorus to do that, so you get to decide how explicit you want to be. But I had little references to things, like Dana getting assaulted and “absorbing all the blows.” All these little things are kind of dropped in there, but it’s not explaining what’s happening in the scene exactly. It was written very fast. The binging, the writing, it was all very new to me. And plus, I’m getting the scene out of context — it’s episode 6 and they’re all standing around Louie, and that’s the first thing I see. When Noah drops that line about Louie losing his family and everyone kind of looks at the floor like, “Oh, shit,” I had to get more context to write a song for that, because I wasn’t exactly sure what everyone was feeling.

There’s a small but especially tearjerking detail when Emma grabs Louie’s hand, right as Dr. Robby is telling them about how Louie had lost his eight-months-pregnant wife and their unborn child in a car accident years ago. Apparently hospitals leave a deceased patient’s hand out from under the blanket so that a loved one at the bedside can hold it, but Louie only has the hospital staff, who’ve sort of become his honorary family, with him when dies. This goes perfectly with your lyric about how “you need someone who is gonna cry for you.”

Yes, I absolutely wrote it for that scene. Every word. The scene made me think about is how a lot of times, the last people that someone sees before they die are healthcare workers. And often at end-of-life care, that’s who’s really there for them. We don’t like to think about it very often, but what’s more fundamental than the fear of dying alone? That’s where the chorus came to me. Also, this show does not stop until this moment. There are not very many reflective moments; it’s so frenetic and there’s so much multitasking going on. And that’s the point: that everyone stops for a second to reflect on what they’re all doing. I didn’t realize at first, until this job came up, that the show was actually a reaction to ER and trying to set the record straight or correct things that were traumatized for entertainment value. Noah [Wyle] built his career with those type of shows, but he felt he wanted to capture a more reality-based experience with this show. I guess maybe it was weighing on his conscience a little bit.

I understand the COVID-19 pandemic was weighing on your mind when you wrote “Need Someone.”

Yes, the backstory has hints at the pandemic and the mental health and struggles of healthcare workers. I mean, that’s all still not dealt with; we as people have swept it under the rug, and there’s collective amnesia about it. … I’d have conversations fairly often with people that say COVID wasn’t that big a deal. And I’m like, “You do realize there were refrigerator trucks full of bodies, because the ERs were overflowing? And that emergency room doctors were committing suicide?” And they think I’m being hysterical or something. It’s like, wow, man, it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe they weren’t paying attention, but geez. And yeah, the show deals with a lot of things we don’t want to look at. A lot of people actually avoid the show simply because they’re too squeamish. But on a bigger-picture level with this stuff, end of life, people don’t want to talk about that and the pandemic. It’s kind of remarkable.

photo: Heather Gildroy

I understand you and Gavin collaborated on “Need Someone” by exchanging voice memos.

Yes, he had a template for the end credits, which is where most of the music you hear in the show is, and there were five or six things he sent me and I chose. It was just guitar, bass, and drums. I learned the chords and just started with that. He brought me the opportunity, so I felt an obligation to use his template. I came up with the lyrics and the melody and the chorus within about an hour of choosing that template, and then recorded that and sent it back to him. And then he had to pitch it up the chain. This was Gavin’s idea; it wasn’t the showrunners’. Apparently they were wary of songwriting — understandably, because they’re going for a reality thing. They don’t want to push people’s buttons any more than they already are with music; it might feel somewhat intrusive. But he had no problem getting the showrunners to like it. They watched [the song paired] with the scene and cried. But then we had to go up the whole executive ladder. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that it would go [in the scene]. But there was no, “Hey, maybe it could be a little more like this….” There were no notes, really; it was just as-is. And I’ve done enough score work to know that that is extremely rare.

This is interesting, because you mentioned ER and Grey’s Anatomy, and Grey’s Anatomy was one of the first big network TV shows to have syncs that really boosted bands’ careers and turned songs into hits, like with the Fray, Brandi Carlile, and Snow Patrol. After that, the floodgates opened. All the record labels and publishers were pitching the studios, and every artist wanted to get a placement in a hit show. But since The Pitt was always intended to be more documentary-style, there’s hardly any music in it all. So, to have your song in The Pitt, especially in such a key scene, must have been a real honor for you.

For sure, especially when I realized how important the show is. I’ve done this before where I’m asked to write a song for a show, and more than half the times I’ll take the song back. I won’t give it to them, because I write the songs as if they’re my own songs, and so I feel a certain ownership over them. … “Cracking Codes” was written for a kids’ show, and the show wasn’t very good. It was fine. I don’t think anyone remembers the show. I don’t even remember what it was called; it was kind of a Malcolm in the Middle-type of show. I feel like I’ve got to really think about it before I hand [a song] over. But with this one, I knew for sure that this was it. It takes everything you’ve learned over a whole lifetime to sit down and write a song in an hour.

You says that when the showrunners saw the scene with “Need Someone,” they cried. How did you react when you saw the finished scene?

I didn’t cry. … I guess sometimes I’ll do score work and I’ll get the script first, read the script, and even if I don’t end up doing the score, if I’ve read the script and I go to the theater and I see it, I can’t be moved at all by it. Anything where I know the structure of it or the outline of it, it’s really hard to be affected by it. Something about being privy to the writing mindset of it really turns you off to the emotions of it. … But there have been other parts of the show that have caused me to well up, like the young mother with terminal cancer. That’s a really painful one. The show has moved me in a lot of moments.

I mentioned that The Pitt has this very intense fandom. What feedback have you gotten from Pitt fans about “Need Someone”?

It was all very positive and effusive, except the only negative thing was that they wished it was longer! So, I wrote a bridge, because we were going to release the song and it was pretty damn short, a minute and change. I felt as a standalone piece, it didn’t really go anywhere to justify coming back to the chorus; you’ve got to have another bridge to take you away from something, in order to come back to it. So, I wrote this bridge about “sometimes you feel like someone is testing us, and you wonder how much you can take.” And then we rerecorded the song with my band, and that’s what’s out there now.

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Have you performed “Need Someone” at a public gig yet?

I’ve been doing it at [Los Angeles nightclub and theater] Largo, and we’ve been talking about tacking it onto these orchestra shows I’m doing. … Ernest Harden Jr. [the actor who portrayed Louie Cloverfield on The Pitt, and is nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series at this year’s Emmys] actually came to a show at Largo, where I did a benefit for healthcare workers’ mental health. It was amazing.

How did he react to seeing you play the song live?

I mean, I did a song for his death; it was kind of intense! But he just said, “You’re so talented,” and he was so sweet and just so delightful. He’s loving every minute of this whole ride. He’s been a character actor, like smaller roles, for most of his career, and here he is on this run right now. It’s awesome to see how much he’s enjoying it.

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I hope you are enjoying this run as well! Before I let you go, I know you’ve been on the other side of the television camera: You played funeral director Thurman Smutny on Fargo a few years ago. How did that come about? Wasn’t that character written specifically for you?

Yeah, [show creator Noah Hawley] cast me on the spot after seeing me play in Austin. Backstage, he said, “Do you want to play this character in Fargo?” And I said, “How do you know I can do it?” And he said, “You can do it.” But it was nerve-wracking, because I’d never really given any thought to acting. I’m friends with John C. Reilly, so I thought, “I’ll ask him, ‘How do you act?’” John said, “Don’t underestimate the power of editing.” And that was it. I don’t know what I expected him to say. How can you replace years of coming up through Chicago theater, working on your craft, to me just coming in cold? It got me really thinking about actors who want to be musicians and musicians that who to be actors, and the human-nature impulse to be binary about these things.

Like, when I was on set, one of the first people I met was [Fargo actress] Jessie Buckley. I didn’t know of her at all at the time, and the first thing we talked about is music and how she’s a musician. So, then I see her act and I’m like, “Oh, she must just have this savant ability, to [also] be an amazing actor!” Just because my first impression was “she’s a musician,” so I’d categorized her as that. I still to this day think, “How does Jessie do that, when she’s a musician?” It was a whole exercise in how we have a bias about these things. Why shouldn’t you be able to do both extremely well?

It’s been my observation that there are more musicians who can act well than the other way around.

It depends. Like, in certain songs the ’50s and ’60s, the singer would start reciting something, like an Elvis kind of thing or an old country tune where they start talking instead of singing. Those are moments where you can tell if that performer can act or inhabit a character. Something gets triggered when you do that, a switch gets flipped. I’ve got certain songs that have a theatrical element, where I have to inhabit something and recite something to the audience in an off-the-cuff sort of way. But I tried really hard to learn my [Fargo] lines as if they were lyrics, trying anything to stay within my comfort zone. It wasn’t a tough role to play; it was a pretty narrow range of emotions that Thurman had, by design. That’s why [Hawley] knew I could do it. There was no “why hath you forsaken me,” crying-in-the-rain kind of moment. Thurman was a pretty buttoned-up, nervous man, which was what I was! … I definitely had imposter syndrome and I was a nervous wreck, but by the last episode I was like, “OK, I get it. Put me in, coach.”

So, did Fargo give you the acting bug? Is there more acting in your future?

I’d like to do it again, but the only offers I’ve gotten have been horror movies. And I don’t think that’s really going to be me.

This interview, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, originally ran on Gold Derby.

On Aug. 15, I had the honor of hosting a Q&A following a sold-out, star-studded screening of Tyler Measom and Craig A. Williams’s If These Walls Could Rock, a new documentary about infamous Hollywood hideaway the Sunset Marquis hotel. The directors and I were joined by surprise guest Mark Rosenthal (the hotel’s president and son of Marquis founder George Rosenthal) and special guest Sharon Osbourne. The Osbournes were frequent guests at the Sunset Marquis (the only Los Angeles hotel that wouldn’t kick out Ozzy Osbourne), and the rock ‘n’ roll family used to set up camp at this home-away-from-home for months at a time. Sharon and her daughter Kelly (who confesses in the film that she had her first drink, first kiss, and first line of cocaine at the Marquis) were two of the first celebrities who agreed to appear in If These Walls Could Rock, before Morrissey, Dave Grohl, Bruce Springsteen, Heart’s Nancy Wilson, Michael Des Barres, and many other rock A-listers eventually signed on.

Surprisingly, Sharon had not yet seen the film, experiencing it for the first time along with everyone else in Hollywood’s Landmark Sunset Theater, and she was visibly moved after the screening as she gushed about the importance of preserving old Hollywood and its struggling entertainment industry. And she, along with Mark Rosenthal, shared some sweet family memories of the hotel. But of course, Sharon Osbourne being Sharon Osbourne, she also blurted some wild remarks, one of which expectedly went viral before at least one of the attending iPhone-wielding fans had even exited the theater.

Watch the full, fan-shot Q&A in the video player above, and the offical movie trailer below. If These Walls Could Rock is now available to stream on Apple and Amazon.

Martin Lewis with Andrew Ridgeley & George Michael
in China, 1985 (photo courtesy of Martin Lewis)

Last week, Wham! 10 Days in China — a new documentary about the British duo’s historic 1985 journey to the East, as the first Western pop act to play Communist China — premiered in theaters. The film is actually a third cinematic chronicle of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s concerts in Beijing and Canton (Guangzhou), following Foreign Skies, which played before Wham!’s farewell concert at Wembley Stadium in 1986, and the shelved If You Were There…, which didn’t get an official public screening until 2024.

If You Were There… was directed by renowned British New Wave filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (If…, O Lucky Man!, This Sporting Life), but was scrapped —  and later drastically reedited by music video director Andy Morahan, as Foreign Skies —  reportedly because both Wham! and their management thought Anderson’s $1.5 million film wasn’t commercial enough and featured too little actual concert footage. A Guardian feature that ran decades later detailed the clash between the two camps, including Michael blocking the film’s release all the way up until his death in 2016, Ridgeley saying the decision to hire Anderson was “bonkers,” and Anderson disparaging the band and the film in his journal entries.

With Wham!’s Chinese tour back in the news and back in cinemas, Martin Lewis — the producer who came up with the ambitious If You Were There… concept, and hired his “hero,” Anderson, to direct — feels the need to speak out. Lewis (a showbiz lifer who got his start interning for Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, and whose dizzyingly diverse CV includes work with Monty Python, cast members of The Young Ones and Absolutely Fabulous, and far too many A-list rock stars to list here) is quick to praise 10 Days in China director Mike Christie. But he stresses that 10 Days in China “would not have been possible if [Christie] didn’t have 21 hours of stunningly brilliant [Anderson] footage by cameramen who were directed by one of the great British filmmakers.”

Lewis explains to Lyndsanity, “I love Lindsay Anderson, and I feel it’s my duty to stand up for him. I’m proud to do that. And I will do it also because I love Wham!, and I am exceptionally proud of the work I did with them. … [If You Were There… ] is a beautiful, beautiful film. It’s just not a pop documentary. It was never meant to be.”

In the exclusive Q&A below, Lewis gives his account of the making of If You Were There…, including why Ridgeley needed to be fitted for an emergency wig; why a related hair emergency prompted Michael to cancel a pickup shoot at the last minute; how Michael was convinced to be interviewed on camera during a naked massage; how under different circumstances, Michael and Anderson could have become friends and collaborators; what Lindsay’s original vision was; and why Lewis hopes that the famously “litigious” George Michael estate will one day greenlight an If You Were There… home video release.

And along the way, Lewis (a colorful character whose favorite catchphrase is “but I digress…”) shares anecdotes about third-wheeling on a steakhouse date with Michael and a certain ‘80s it-girl; why he went on TV to defend Michael after Michael’s Beverly Hills park restroom scandal; and much, much more.

LYNDSANITY: Please explain what exactly your role was during Wham!’s trip to China.

MARTIN LEWIS: For all my sins, I was the person who instigated the filming of Wham! when they went there. I hired the director, Lindsay Anderson. I pitched the project, and I produced the original film, If You Were There… I also was the listed producer of Foreign Skies, which is the adaptation from that.

It’s interesting that If You Were There… never officially came out, and that most of Lindsay’s footage was unseen and gathering dust in a warehouse until it was given to Mike Christie to make 10 Days in China.

I will say straight off, I’m a big fan of the film that Mike Christie has made. I think he’s done an extremely good job. It’s such a vast story, and I think given how broad the story is, Mike made very good choices about what to focus on. But the notion that it was a mistake to hire [Anderson] is absolutely, factually wrong. And the proof of that is how brilliant Mike’s film is, because Mike’s film is 75 percent, approximately, all footage that was shot by Lindsay. The film Mike made would not have been possible if he didn’t have 21 hours of stunningly brilliant footage by cameramen who were directed by one of the great British filmmakers.

Good point. But the argument has been made by some people — including Andrew Ridgeley — that Lindsay was not the right director for the job, because his film was very slow. Mike Christie described it to me as “ambient.” Basically, Lindsay did not make a pop movie.

It’s not a cutting-edge, fast-paced film. But it wasn’t ever designed to be. “Stately” is what I would call it. My original title for it was 10 Days That Shook the World: A Cultural Revelation. It was always supposed to be all about the cultural revolution — and this was a cultural revelation both ways. I know what the alternative was: The alternative was a music video director, like Andy Morahan. Andy is an extremely good video director and has even made some feature films, but do they match If…, O Lucky Man!, or This Sporting Life? You tell me. The height of Andy Morahan’s filmmaking career is Highlander 3. And Highlander 3 was definitely the third-best of the three Highlander films.

So, sure, you could shoot a bog-standard MTV travelogue and do all the beauty shots — Tiananmen Square, so instead of Club Tropicana, you got Club Tiananmen — but what would it achieve at the end of the day? You’d be preaching to the choir, preaching to the converted. You’d just be making something that would please Wham!’s existing fanbase. But if instead of doing a puff piece or vanity piece, you did a serious documentary about this bizarre cultural juxtaposition, that gets you something different. You’d have a film that could be in film festivals. You’d have a film that would elevate the conversation about Wham!, because at that time they were being considered as just the contemporaries of Culture Club and Duran Duran. This would elevate Wham! into a different dialogue. They would be seen as cultural ambassadors. I wasn’t necessarily thinking that we would win an Oscar, but this would be a classy, elegant film, not a pop confection for MTV — which is why it’s regrettable that this nonsense is being spouted. The band’s management loved this concept.

How did you pitch this high-brow concept to Wham!’s management?

I’d known [Wham! co-manager] Jazz Summers for 14 years. [Summers’s business partner] Simon Napier-Bell was already well-known; he’d been a character in the ’60s, an impresario who’d worked with Marc Bolan and the Yardbirds. Jazz Summers was a nobody, but he was really hard-working. So, the analogy is very simple: Simon was the show horse, Jazz was the workhorse. Fast-forward to February 1985. I’m living in New York and I get a phone call out of the blue from Jazz. I hadn’t heard from him from since the late ’70s when he was managing punk acts, and he’d tracked me down. He and Simon were managing a pop group called Wham!, and he invited me to see them. It was at the Beacon Theater, and they were pretty impressive. We went to dinner afterwards with George and Andrew, who couldn’t have been less interested in two old hippies talking about the good old days. Why would they want to listen to these two boring old guys going on about the ‘60s? So, George and Andrew sat at the table disinterested in us, but Jazz and I started chatting. He said, “Simon and I want to make Wham! the first Western group to go to China.” And a light bulb went off in my head, instantly. I immediately thought of Elton John going to Russia in 1979. I said, “That’s a film!” And Jazz said, “Great. Do you want to make it?” And I said, “Yeah.” That was the development process.

Were George and Andrew sold on this idea?

Well, George and Andrew were just a bubblegum act when Simon and Jazz came around, so that’s how Simon and Jazz treated them. Simon especially was from that era of the Idol Maker type of managers, the Colonel Tom Parker type, where the managers are the puppetmasters; it’s Pygmalion, and the artists simply do what they’re told. The best [Wham!] deal that Jazz and Simon had done up until China was the “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” video, which was genius: Wham! were wearing Fila sportswear, a branding opportunity and sponsorship deal that Jazz and Simon pulled together. And guess who told them to put shuttlecocks in their shorts?

Anyway, at that time, George had not expressed that he wanted to be a “serious” artist. He was a bubblegum act, and a consequence of that meant Jazz and Simon didn’t share every detail of their plan. They said, “We’re going to China. It’s a big PR scam to break in America.” That was it. They didn’t say, “We’re going to make a film of it, and we’ve got a good film director.” They didn’t go into granular detail. They didn’t explain any of that. And that’s where the breakdown happened. George and Andrew had a passion for music, for clubbing, for dancing, for fashion, stuff like that, but they didn’t have time to be interested in an auteur film director like Lindsay Anderson. They were just like, “Oh, all right, whatever you say.” And that was the seed of the problem, because there was a different agenda going on. George and Andrew were never in on the plan. When I had the conversations with George years later, he said, “They never told me that. They never told me anything about film festivals.”

It’s my understanding that George and Andrew didn’t want to go to China at all, let alone have camera crews trail them everywhere.

Yes, it was enough that they were having to deal with this tour, but actually the thing that irritated them most — but was an essential ingredient for which Jazz and Simon should be congratulated, not pilloried — was they took the press with them. Jazz and Simon understood that being the first Western pop act in China would be like catnip to the media, but George and Andrew resented having the press with them all the time, particularly because Andrew had become a “bad boy” in both the song title and reality. Andrew was being portrayed as “Randy Andy,” always chasing after girls. Wham! were in the front pages, and at that time, the British media had two things that sold newspapers: Princess Diana and pop stars. The British tabloid media are like piranhas, disgusting creatures; it’s very hard for Americans to understand just how virulent the British tabloid media really are. And they treated George and Andrew with such disrespect, especially for how young they were. Now George and Andrew had to be on a plane, and then for 10 days in China, with the very people they hated. So, there was a tension already set up.

photo: Martyn Goddard

But some of the most fascinating footage that ended up in Mike Christie’s 10 Days in China documentary are the tense moments — like Andrew being surly during the awkward Beijing press conference, or that massage scene where George is lying on the spa table, trying to relax, but he’s disgruntled and venting about how he’s not enjoying this trip.

The massage scene, I’ll take full credit for! Lindsay didn’t approve that, and he told me off! What happened was George and I had developed a bantering relationship. I was 10 years older, so it was like an older brother/younger brother thing. I became the “George whisperer,” is how I regard it. He said, “No, no, I don’t want to do an interview. I’m off to have a massage.” And I said, “Well, you’ve got to let me film that, then!” And because we had a jokey relationship, he said, “You’re not going to show anything, are you?” But George gave me the green light and I grabbed [cameraman] Paul Cameron. I’m just loving it, thinking, “This is what the fans want! George being massaged!” I joke that I was a pioneer of reality TV. I whisper in Paul’s ear, “Ask George some questions! Ask him about China.” And George is so relaxed that he gives real answers, and it’s perfect. I mean, on one level, it’s bizarre, George offering his opinion on Communism, and that’s why Lindsay told me off. But it’s real. It’s natural. It’s authentic.

Didn’t some naysayers actually accuse Lindsay of having a Communist agenda?

Yes, he was pretty much a punching bag for people to say, “He was fired because he was a Communist,” because he was left-of-center, I mean, I literally read that! Simon said, “Oh, it’s his Communist point of view.” Listen, I love Simon. If you want to have a dinner guest to make you laugh, Simon’s your man. But his book [I’m Coming to Take You to Lunch: A Fantastic Tale of Boys, Booze and How Wham! Were Sold to China] should have won the Pulitzer for fiction. But I don’t condemn Simon. He was an incredible character.

Did Wham! butt heads with Lindsay from the beginning?

Lindsay hadn’t pissed them off. Lindsay had barely spoken to them. Lindsay and George and Andrew barely had any conversations. However, there was a cordiality that Lindsay expected. And there was a moment when it really turned. During the press conference, Wham! were asked, “Tell us about this film that’s being made,” and George, without a trace of irony and not trying to make a joke, said, “Oh, we’re making a film, and we’ve got a competent director called Lindsay Anderson.” Now, Lindsay at that time was 62. He’d won the Oscar in 1954 for Best Documentary Short. He was regarded in Britain as like a Martin Scorsese. He was a very respected filmmaker. Can you imagine if, when Martin Scorsese did No Direction Home, there’d been a press conference and Bob Dylan had said, “Oh, we’ve got Martin Scorsese, a ‘competent’ director”? Now, I don’t think George meant to be insulting; he just had no knowledge of how important and special Lindsay was. But Lindsay was really hurt by that. Lindsay understood it had come out of ignorance rather than meanness, but he was thinking that either George should have done some homework, or somebody should’ve informed him of how important Lindsay was. To be described as “competent” really hurt Lindsay’s feelings.

photo: Neal Preston

It seemed like George was already starting to bristle against the whole teenybopper thing.

Yes, and what I spotted was Jazz and Simon were in fear of George. I remember when I needed to get George to go to the Great Wall, no one would go to his hotel room, because they didn’t want to be the ones who George said “piss off” to. Nobody would do it! I saw that as a warning sign, that there was something amiss in this relationship. I later found out they were all frightened of George because he’d started to find his real self, even though he was only 21. Nobody wanted to ask him to do something he didn’t want to do, because he’d bite their head off and it would be a black mark against them. So, good ol’ foolish Martin, the designated George whisperer, is delegated to go up and knock on George’s door. He’s lying on his bed listening to Madonna on his Sony Walkman, and I say, “Come on, George, we’re going to the Great Wall of China.” He says, “I don’t feel like it. I’m not in the mood. Not interested.” I say, “Forget the fucking film, George! It’s one of the Seven Wonders of the World! It’s visible from outer space! Aren’t you just remotely curious to see this thing?” And he shrugged and said, “Seen one wall, seen ‘em all.” That actually had me in hysterics.

Even though If You Were There… was never conceptualized as a concert film, Lindsay did shoot the shows in Beijing and Canton. One of the criticisms If You Were There… received was its lack of live footage, which surprised people and apparently upset the band.

There was an implication back in the day that Lindsay had been so inefficient that they had to shoot more [live footage], that there wasn’t enough concert coverage in China because of Lindsay Anderson. And that got my blood boiling, because I know the truth. It was a fairly traumatic experience. As I said, there was no way that this was a concert film. No way at all. Not economically viable. A concert film would’ve been shot on video. We would have needed eight to 10 camera crews, multiple cameras, a big truck. It’s not functionally possible to take a video truck into China, not even remotely possible. So, we were going to do it old-school, with film. And since we had five cameras, that was the most the budget would allow. We would only be able to film a little bit of each concert. In Beijing, we only had that night to shoot, and of course, we did not want to obstruct the audience. We did reasonably well, but there wasn’t an opportunity to do any closeups, because you cannot put cameras in the way of paying audience members.

photo: Martyn Goddard

I sat down with Michael Owen, my associate producer, and he told me, “I’m worried about the coverage we’re getting. I think we need to do a second shoot in Canton. We need to shoot closeups.” Jazz agreed. So, the morning after [the actual Canton concert], the music crew assembled to play a whole [staged, audience-free] show. And suddenly George comes up and says, “I don’t feel like doing it today.” I thought he was teasing, but he said, “No, I’m serious. I’m not doing it. It’s too humid in here. My hair’s going to frizz.” He was petrified that his hair would go frizzy — there’s famous stories about how the “Careless Whisper” music video was re-shot because he didn’t like his hair.

I immediately did what any producer would do in that role, and said, “I’ve got it sorted. I’ll get some dehumidifiers in here.” Classic producer bullshit. How did I know how to get dehumidifiers on a Friday morning in Canton?” But George said, “No, I just don’t feel like doing it.” I said, “We need closeups,” and then he said, “Well, we could just do it all in [Surrey production facility] Shepperton.” I said, “Shepperton? We’ve got a vintage Chinese theater here. You want me to recreate the stage of a vintage Chinese theater and get all your musicians, dancers, everybody onstage looking identical, back in England? It’s not possible!” And he said, “Martin, anything is possible.” I was literally losing the battle with this 21-year-old. So, I thought, “I’ll play the trump card that cannot fail. I’m going to beat George on this.” I told him it’d cost about a half a million dollars. And George said, “All right, that’s what we’ll do, then. We’ll shoot it in England.” I said, “But it’s a half a million dollars!” And he said, “Yes. And it’s my money.”

So, you literally staged a whole reenactment of a Wham! Chinese concert at Shepperton Studios in England?

Yes. It wasn’t discussed with Lindsay, who was pissed off with me — and understandably, because he’s saying, “This is insanity!” Lindsay was not used to a youngster of 21 dictating the way things were done. This was a young pop singer wanting to spend half a million dollars of his own money because he was worried about his hair frizzing. But that was the world of pop music in 1985. What the star wants, the star gets. So, we tried our best to make sure that everything would be fine. We didn’t have an official continuity person, but we went around photographing everybody that was onstage [in Canton], taking a million Polaroids, so that when we regrouped in London, we could make sure everyone was dressed the same and the hair and everything looked the same.

And then, at Shepperton, Andrew saunters in, calm as anything — with a crew cut! A buzzed crew cut. He looked like an American astronaut circa 1965. His days of being a floppy-haired Hugh Grant were over. And Andrew’s wondering why all our jaws are on the floor. We say, “Don’t you remember that thing about showing up looking identical to the way you looked in China?” He’d completely forgotten. He’d just gone out and got a haircut because he felt like it. We had to cancel that day’s shoot and get a wig made. And fortunately, because my background was in comedy as well as music, I knew where to go. I went to Wig Creations on Portman Street, near Baker Street where Sherlock Holmes fictionally resided, and commissioned a wig for Andrew Ridgeley. They made a wig in 24 hours, and we reconvened the next day at Shepperton and shot a whole concert, like we would have done in Canton. And Lindsay is sitting there with a quizzical, wry look on his face. I think he was rather bemused.

You say you had no official crew member in charge of continuity, so was it at all obvious which shots were with Andrew’s real hair, and which ones had the wig?

When I’ve looked at both If You Were There… and Foreign Skies, I see the slippage, or the discrepancy. But the reality is, the average Wham! fan would be thrilled to see George and Andrew on the big screen and wouldn’t be paying that much attention. I don’t know if it pops up on IMDB where they have a “goofs” page or something like that, but I’m a detail freak, so I notice that sort of stuff anyway. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, look at that! That’s a wig!” That was not fun in the editing room, as you may imagine. I remember saying, “Look at Andrew’s hair. Will anyone notice? Can we get away with it?”

So, Lindsay finally began shaping these 21 or so hours of footage into his full-length film. What happened next?

When Lindsay got into the editing room, he was fascinated with the footage and started to get excited. When you’re directing a documentary in the verité or direct cinema style, you tell your cinematographers what to film, and really, you make the film in the editing room. That was his sweet spot. That’s a creative artist at his best, starting to really realize what he can do with the material. Lindsay kept reaching out [to Wham!], saying, “Come into the editing room and have a look at it. Let’s work on it.” But that was like salt in the wound for George. In George’s mind, he did this [China tour] so that he would break in America, and that’s the only reason he did it. Now Lindsay wanted him to go look at pictures?

But I also think that George was cut off anyway, because Lindsay was told, as was I, that we couldn’t have direct contact. We had to go through Jazz or Simon — which really meant Jazz, because Simon was off swanning around the world. Lindsay would send these beautiful letters encouraging George to come to the editing room and perhaps compose; Lindsay did appreciate George’s gifts as a writer, so he thought maybe George would like to compose some incidental music. Lindsay was not hearing back, I believe, because George was never getting the letters. But Lindsay didn’t know that, so when he was fired, he started saying these terrible things about George being conceited and stuck-up in an ivory tower. But I think that was just George being protected from anything to do with the China experience. And that was really painful for Lindsay. I think that broke Lindsay Anderson’s heart, so a lot of the mean-spirited things he wrote and said [later] came out of that. And I understand that.

Did you ever get a chance to discuss the film privately with George?

Yes, when I ended up being the third wheel on his date with Brooke Shields. I don’t know if it was to protect him from Brooke Shields. That was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. He called me when we were both in New York and said, “Do you want to get together to talk about the film, if there’s anything you need to talk about?” I loved it when he was on the road, because when he was on the road, he would call himself; it wouldn’t go through the managers. I said, “Well, there’s a bundle of stuff to talk about!” Because they hadn’t seen the film yet. We pick a day and a time, I walk over there… and he’s sitting there with Brooke Shields.

I say, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were having dinner with somebody. I don’t mean to intrude. Maybe we should just regroup tomorrow.” He says, “Oh no, Brooke won’t mind. Join us!” I thought, “Really?” Because I didn’t know if the supermarket tabloid stuff was true — that Brooke had a big crush on George — but if this was a date, you don’t need some boring old English guy talking about work. I’m feeling slightly uncomfortable, and Brooke, bless her, is very sweet, but she’s not understanding why George has invited me. We’re talking about the film, and Brooke is a little bit disappointed, and then she orders the equivalent of some dandelion fluff with some chard and some nectar and some daffodil seeds or something. It was like these vegan flowers on her plate. Meanwhile, George orders half a roast duck with roast potatoes. I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t know about the other aspects, but they’re not going to get along gastronomically!” I remember that because I pinched one of the roast potatoes from his plate, I’m afraid to admit.

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It’s a shame that there was such a communication breakdown during this project, because if circumstances had been different, I feel there would have been a great deal of mutual respect between Lindsay and George. They were both true artists who took their craft seriously.

I think that had there been input, Lindsay would have included more music if they’d wanted that. Because we had it. But he was trying to keep a balance. The whole thing is, when he showed [a rough cut of If You Were There…] to them, it wasn’t for approval. We were anticipating another six months of editing. This was just to get input, to make it a collaborative process — if George and Andrew hadn’t had their minds misled by Jazz and Simon to expect something completely different. They were expecting a home movie of their Chinese vacation.

Had George got to spend time with Lindsay, they would have connected. If George had not been set against him by Jazz and Simon, I think George would have found Lindsay to be a fascinating person. Maybe at 21, it just wasn’t the right time for him to sit down with a guy from another generation who’s 40 years older than him. But he would have found an artistic camaraderie with Lindsay. Like I said, Lindsay reckoned that George would be interested in making incidental music, some sort of score, and that might have given George a creative avenue, a way to feel positive about what had been a bad experience. George wrote, sang, arranged, and produced everything was coming out of his head, and I don’t think that Jazz or Simon probably encouraged that enough, because they were thinking of collecting those golden eggs. But anyway, I was forbidden to contact George directly, as was Lindsay. I had to put it through Jazz as the gatekeeper. And I am virtually certain that what happened was Jazz shut it down. Jazz was clearly not wanting to give George another task, another chore.

I also don’t know if there was any tension also between Lindsay and George about the gay thing. Lindsay was from a generation of gay people when you could not even show it or discuss it — or, in his case, act upon it. Lindsay was gay, but he was never out and it was never discussed; it was assumed by people, but he never had a gay relationship. He was raised in an era where there was such negativity [towards homosexuality] that a lot of people never came out, or didn’t feel they could. George had come out to Andrew and [Wham! singer] Shirlie and others, but he was not definitively only gay at that point. I don’t know whether Lindsay had a gaydar, if he’d have suspected or felt that George was likely gay. And I don’t know that George would have necessarily sensed that about Lindsay.

Why was Lindsay’s footage ultimately re-edited to be more of a typical MTV pop doc, Foreign Skies?

Well, George was burnt by China. The experience of China, Wham! being turned into performing fleas and being thrust into that kind of artificial world, was not a comfortable thing. He was burnt by the British media. It’s important to note that a little bit after China, George was starting to make noise [about wanting to go solo]. They did a stadium tour, and then George said, “That’s it. I’m done. Wham! is over. Next year is the end.” Jazz and Simon were absolutely gobsmacked and really pissed off, because they’d thought they had another five years of Wham! So, Lindsay had done exactly what he’d been hired to do, which was to make a beautiful, real visual documentary about this fascinating juxtaposition, but Jazz took one look at it and said, “Oh my God, we can’t make this into a pop video. The word-of-mouth on it will be terrible. It won’t sell. We’ve got to change the film.” I said, “But this is what you agreed to!” They said, “I know that, Martin. But our plans have changed.” They weren’t exactly spelling out the financial reasons, but it was very clear that it was financial.

Meaning, now that Simon and Jazz realized Wham!’s days were numbered, they wanted to milk it as much as they could? So, they decided they now wanted a more mainstream, MTV-friendly film?

Yes, basically that. I said, “The film is not going to change. This is what you hired Lindsay for. If you’d wanted a pop film, you would have hired Andy Morahan.” I was appalled by all this. It just rubbed me the wrong way. I just ethically could not do it. Lindsay Anderson had been a hero of mine. I couldn’t fire him. I knew they had the right to do it, but it was wrong, morally and ethically. So, I just said, “I’m out of here.” And I resigned.

Eventually, Foreign Skies premiered at Wembley Stadium, right before Wham!’s big farewell concert, just a little more than a year after Wham! had played in China. Did you and Lindsay attend?

Lindsay didn’t go. He was feeling pretty burned. Later he said to me, “What happened with the film?” I said, “Well, they showed you on [Wembley’s] giant screens.” He said, “Where was it positioned?” I said, “We were between Elton John dressed as Ronald McDonald, and Gary Glitter.” [Editor’s note: Glitter and a clown-costumed Elton performed at Wham!’s final concert.] And Lindsay, who was always a sardonic guy, just said a very English word. He said, “Quite.” And that was his only word on the subject. Quite.

Do you think George regretted not giving Lindsay a chance in 1985?

No, because he wasn’t a look-back person in that regard. I don’t think in general that he was a look-back type of guy.

But even if George and Andrew didn’t understand or appreciate Lindsay’s vision at the time, I feel like George at least would have eventually warmed to the idea of a “serious” film that showed Wham!’s cultural impact — especially because he struggled so much in his early career to be taken seriously. Did you ever try to convince George to release If You Were There…?

George found it very easy to say no to things. He said no to a million projects. And if he said no, that was it; you couldn’t go back and revisit it. I approached him several times about this, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world for George to say, “No more talk about the China film! I’m never going back. I don’t want to look at that again. It’s done. Forget it!” But he never said no to me on this. He always said, “Maybe. But not this year.” And his manager, Michael Lippman, told me to keep coming back.

Simon and Jazz were no longer managing solo George at this point?

No. I think Jazz would have been a good manager for him, but there was a very good reason why George didn’t stay with Simon. Simon was very good at putting shuttlecocks in shorts, but perhaps not so good at managing a respected artist. And I say that with affection.

What does Andrew think of If You Were There…, after all these years?

Andrew has been very respectful. I think he’s led a very dignified life. He’s known that he’s been the butt of jokes, and he’s held himself in a very gracious and graceful manner. I give Andrew huge credit for how he’s handled his post-Wham! life. But he was not in the room when George and I discussed the film years later. He wasn’t in the room with Michael Lippman. I can’t expect Andrew to do the right thing, because Andrew can’t know the purpose of the film, so it’s not for him to offer an opinion on it. Andrew actually said, “I don’t think George ever wants it to be seen,” and respectfully, he’s wrong about that. But Andrew also said, “I think at one point there should be a triple-disc release, that maybe all three films should come out [packaged together].” And Andrew is spot-on about that.

In 2024, If You Were There… was finally screened at the British Film Institute. What was the critical reaction?

Some serious papers like The Guardian and The Times and The Telegraph reviewed it. A couple of them didn’t like it, but The Guardian liked it. It’s also available to see if you go to Lindsay’s archive at the University of Stirling in Scotland, if you’re a serious researcher. It was well-reviewed by people because it is a beautiful, beautiful film. It’s just not a pop documentary. It was never meant to be.

How much were you in touch with George after the whole China debacle?

We stayed in contact until the end of his life. I’m not going to claim we were close buddies or anything like that, but we stayed in occasional contact. But here’s the thing: He knew that it was my idea to hire Lindsay. I’m the guy he remembers from the film; he remembers me much more than he remembers Lindsay. If he was so angry about that film, or so pissed off about the choice of Lindsay, he would not have stayed friends with me. He wasn’t like that. But he did, because he was a mensch.

So, I stayed friends with George, and I had wonderful conversations with him. When he was outed in Beverly Hills, when he was busted, I was so outraged that I went on a tabloid TV show — Inside Edition, A Current Affair, Entertainment Tonight, one of those — and I defended George. I said it was ludicrous and that this was clearly entrapment. I made some joke about how they’d said it was a “plainclothes cop,” but [the arresting officer] was wearing a $2,000 Gucci jacket, so that’s not “plain” clothes! Then I ran into George at a party about six months later; he’d actually seen the interview, and he was very appreciative. He was very touched that I’d stood up for him. But the thing that amused him was the news show didn’t know how to caption me, so they’d captioned me as “producer and longtime companion.” And George joked, “I outed you!” [Editor’s note: Lewis is straight.]

And George never forgot my dancing. In Canton, they had a nightclub where we would all let off steam each day, and I was dancing, drunk, happy that it was all over, letting my hair down. George came up to me and said, “Martin, I’ve been in a lot of clubs and discos all over the world, and in all that time, I’ve never seen anybody who’s a worse dancer than you. You are literally the worst dancer I’ve ever seen in my life.” And I said, “Can I quote you on that?” He said, “You have to quote me on that!” That was our banter. And he’s right. I have some quotes on my website from major stars who’ve been kind enough to say nice things about me, but the only one that’s a diss is George’s comment about my dancing.

That is a quite an endorsement! So, now that you’ve had a chance to speak out about Lindsay Anderson and Wham!, what are you hoping will come from this? Are you hoping the three-disc DVD or Blu-Ray package that Andrew Ridgeley suggested — that is, compiling If You Were There…, Foreign Skies, and Wham! 10 Days in China — will one day come out?

Let me just give some gentle marketing advice here to the [George Michael] estate, which isn’t interested in my marketing advice, because what do I know, I’ve only been doing this for about 55 years: Make this a triple-disc thing. Keep Lindsay’s cut as it was, but restore it. And I will personally — for no money, guys, because I know money is very important to you at the George Michael estate — wrangle some people who will help sell that triple-package. I will wrangle Malcolm McDowell, who I’ve worked with before, and I will wrangle Brian Cox, who, like me and Malcolm, has an appreciation for Lindsay Anderson. I’ll make a short featurette about Lindsay with some big names, and I’ll do it all for free, because I love Lindsay Anderson, and I feel it’s my duty to stand up for him. I’m proud to do that. And I will do it also because I love Wham!, and I am exceptionally proud of the work I did with them. I hope the George Michael estate is enlightened enough to follow Andrew Ridgeley’s good suggestion. Do a three-disc set. You’ll make a gazillion dollars.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

If These Walls Could Rock, a documentary directed by Tyler Measom and Craig A. Williams about legendary Hollywood hideaway the Sunset Marquis hotel, is packed with many wild rock ‘n’ roll tales. For instance…

This “rock ‘n’ roll friars club,” founded in 1963 in partnership with the Sunset Strip’s Playboy Club, was where a frustrated Bruce Springsteen hurled the initial acetate of Born to Run into the hotel pool, and where he later met Born on the Fourth of July author, activist, and Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, who inspired him to write the “Born in the USA” B-side “Shut Out the Light.” It’s where Duran Duran blacked out their windows with foil and opened their own secret, afterhours nightclub called Privacy. It’s where the Red Hot Chili Peppers dove from the roof into the pool, and where Green Day dyed their suite’s carpet green. It’s where Dave Grohl met his wife Jordan Blum and took a bath with Ringo Starr (presumably on two separate occasions). It’s where Billy Bob Thornton, the unofficial/self-appointed “mayor” of the Sunset Marquis who lived at the hotel between his many divorces, had sex in a stairwell with one of the estimated 100 dates he entertained there, and where Thornton woke up with his head in Jeff Beck’s lap (again, presumably on two different occasions). It’s where the Black Crowes’ Chris Robisnon spotted Keith Richards strolling by the pool with a knife tucked into one hip of his Speedos and a pack of cigarettes in the other, sipping on a piña colada.

It’s where the reclusive Morrissey was photographed for six album covers. It’s where the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson spotted Keith Richards strolling by the pool with a knife tucked into one hip of his Speedos and a pack of cigarettes in the other, sipping on a piña colada. It’s where Depeche Mode held poolside court in the infamous hot tub, which many of If These Walls Could Rock’s talking heads believe not all the chlorine in Los Angeles could effectively sanitize. And it was the only L.A. hotel guaranteed not to kick out Ozzy Osbourne, so the Osbournes were frequent guests. Kelly Osbourne — who, much to her mother Sharon’s dismay, took many dips in that probably-tainted jacuzzi — even had her first drink, first kiss, and first line of cocaine at the hotel, the latter supplied by one of her unnamed dad’s famous friends in a “very big band.”

Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson’s anecdotes in the film aren’t quite as debauched, but much like the Osbournes, she fondly thinks of the Sunset Marquis as a family place, a “home away from home.” It was where she processed her grief and sought comfort during her own divorce from her first husband, filmmaker Cameron Crowe, and where the kind-hearted, discreet, and always reliable hotel staff took swift action when her older sister, Heart frontwoman Ann Wilson, experienced a medical emergency. And it was an especially safe haven for the Wilsons in the 1980s, when Heart exploded into the MTV mainstream — the band’s most successful decade in terms of record sales and chart numbers, but a “pressurized” era when the music industry’s extreme emphasis on big hair, small bodies, and style over substance strained Nancy and Ann’s relationship.

Years later, the sisters had a major falling-out that put the future of Heart in doubt. “It was between 2016 and 2019 that things got kind of fubar: f***ed up beyond recognition,” Nancy says. And although the Wilsons resumed touring in 2019, even embarking on a triumphant comeback tour after Ann’s 2024 cancer diagnosis and treatment, Heart have not released a studio album in over a decade.

However, as Nancy reminisces about If These Walls Could Rock, the “extremely happy” musician can’t help but giddily tease Heart’s own forthcoming, long-delayed new biopic and documentary, as well as a nearly finished “really, really strong” new Heart album. “It really feels like a Heart record. … It’s all about these songs. It’s what we were born to do, and do together,” Nancy says proudly. “Hopefully ‘27 and ‘28 will be the year for Heart world domination, basically.”

Here, Nancy opens up about her good times and bad times at the Sunset Marquis (including being haunted by a spliff-toking phantom that may or may not be the ghost of Jim Morrison); how Heart survived the big ‘80s; how Ann’s battle with “the big C” helped the once-estranged Wilson sisters become “super-reconnected”; why Heart’s reunion is “really sweeter than ever” now that “a lot of the drama that was kind of swirling has come to a halt”; and what to expect from the forthcoming Heart album and their own films.

LYNDSANITY: I love your dip-dyed pink hair. You were rocking that color at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony last year.

NANCY WILSON: Yeah, I got my pink on again! It was starting to fade out; there’s this one color that lasts forever, but it finally faded. The Heart album is almost finished up now, and the photo shoot was happening, so I was like, “I gotta get my pink on for the Heart thing,” because the recording’s all done.

That’s exciting news!

Yeah, it’s really, really strong. I think it’s going to be great. We wrote a bunch of new songs and recorded down in Nashville with the players that we just played the last tour with. It was like a secondhand thing with each other because we’ve played so many live shows, so the album was pretty much recorded live.

Wow. How long has it been since Heart released an album of new, original material?

The last album 10 years ago was called Beautiful Broken. … Before that, Fanatic and Red Velvet Car were the last two studio albums. So, yeah, it’s crazy! I’m really happy. It really feels like a Heart record.

When is this album coming out?

Well, we’re delivering it at the end of August. And so, with the world tour to set up and a documentary film to work on and a live-action feature film and an album and a tour and a new management company, we’re getting all of those ducks in a row, so that we can strategize the rollout.

A few years ago I interviewed Ann, and she told me at that time that the Heart biopic was very early stages. I think the pandemic might’ve changed things, but a Heart biopic was in the works, and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein was writing and directing. Lynda Obst was producing, and it was going to be on Amazon.

Well, since then, yeah, the pandemic happened. And Lynda Obst unfortunately passed away. She was one of the Mount Rushmore producers in the movie industry for a long time. The original lunch I had with her before the pandemic was about, “There needs to be a Heart film. My granddaughter who’s 12 is a huge Heart fan and she wants to learn guitar and wants to be in a band, and this would be a film for them” — for the next generation of not just girls, but musicians coming in. And then the pandemic and a lot of different back-and-forth with management and different stuff just kind of blockaded the process for a long time. But I just now got off the phone with Julie Oh, who was the replacement for Lynda Obst, and we’re back on track with Carrie Brownstein for the next draft, the final draft, to hopefully get this thing rolling again. Sometimes good things take time, but we’re back on the tracks with it.

Have you cast it yet?

No, but there have been a lot of actresses that were excited to be asked to play the parts of me and my sister. But we haven’t got that far yet. We need the final draft.

I recall Ann liked the idea of Anne Hathaway portraying her. Who would you want to play you?

I think maybe Elle Fanning would be a really good. I think Florence Pugh would be real good for Ann. But there are a lot of cool young actors coming up right now that could do it. I don’t know who would play the older version, because there’s a big lifespan! I think, though, the story mainly just goes from the beginning to probably [Heart's 2012 Led Zeppelin tribute at] the Kennedy Center. There’s enough of an arc right there to kind of cover it all.

It’s interesting that you mentioned Florence Pugh, because when I interviewed Belinda Carlisle recently, there’s been talks of a Go-Go’s biopic, and she said Florence would be good to play her. And at one time when a Madonna biopic was still in talks, Florence was in the running to play Madonna.

Yeah, she’s a rockin’ actress, for sure!

Do you have a title for your biopic yet?

The working title has been Blood Harmony for a while, but that’s also another band name, a really cool band of sisters in country music.

I recall it was joked in my Ann interview that your biopic’s tagline should be “Sexism, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

That’s good. I like that! We’ll keep that one floating.

What details can you share about the upcoming documentary?

It’s about the band Heart, because Ann already put out a little Ann Wilson documentary by herself [In My Voice]. We were waiting for that to get done before we proceeded with the larger one — put the Heart train back on track for next year, mainly. Hopefully ‘27 and ’28 will be the year for Heart world domination, basically.

Well, right now you’re in the documentary If These Walls Could Rock, which focuses a lot on the 1980s, one of the decades that Heart dominated. You spent a lot of time at the Sunset Marquis in the ‘80s and beyond. You mentioned two albums, Fanatic and Red Velvet Car — didn’t Heart record those at the Sunset Marquis?

Yeah, we set up a little studio in one of the villas. We made our own studio there. … We worked there and also in the Nightbird studio [in the Sunset Marquis basement], and stayed there many, many, many, many, many times with our tour bus. At 4 or 5 in the morning, we’d park the tour bus under the hotel in the basement and just kind of roll off the bus and into our hotel rooms. It was really a home away from home. I loved how the [If These Walls Could Rock] documentary turned out, because it’s hysterical. When you see the stuff Billy Bob Thornton talks about, oh my God! I thought it was really cool to show just how much debauchery really was OK in those days. It was pretty standard operating procedure, how wild things could really get and how the [Sunset Marquis] really lived up to the standard of being a wild rock hotel.

I’m sure many people who watch If These Walls Could Rock will say, “Oh, it was a different time.” You and Ann were these nice Northwestern military daughters who got thrown into this crazy party scene. Was that daunting for you?

Well, in the arc of your life, you kind of go through your party stages, and that was our twenties and early thirties, so we were right down the center of Party Central. We were actually kind of lightweights compared to a lot of the people around us, because our work ethic was so ingrained from a military-type ethic that we had to show up on time. We were not going to be wasted before the show. … The party didn’t start before the show, like it did for a lot of people. We almost never missed one show ever, and we were always on time. We were a dream rock band to work with, promoter-wise, because we were professionals. But at the Sunset Marquis, we were not professional! We were doing all kinds of debauchery and getting away with it — and being protected inside of it. It was sort of a “no-tell motel” vibe, where you felt safe to push the envelope with the party thing.

One of the anecdotes you share in the film is that Rudolf Schenker from Scorpions called you up and asked you to party with him. Did you accept his invitation?

We would get a call back in the analog telephone days, with the cord-to-the wall kind of telephones where you could call from the lobby to a hotel room, so we’d always pick it up. And it’s like [German accent]: “Hullo, Nahncy! It’s Rudy from Scorpions! Vee are here now. Vee are in the lobby and vee are ready to pahrrty!” But we were like, “No, no, we can’t party right now,. We have to sleep because there’s a show tomorrow. It’s a school night for us.”

Nancy Wilson at the Sunset Marquis (photo courtesy of Bungalow Media + Entertainment)

Any other stories about crossing paths with interesting celebrities at the Marquis?

I got to make some beautiful eye contact, walking through the lobby once, with Jimmy Page. I’d met him a couple of times and made some other eye contact before, but usually in passing along the way. He’s one of my muses, one of my heroes, so it was so cool to just touch base, even if it was just eye contact. You saw a lot of Hollywood stars, a lot of actors. Billy Bob Thornton was always cruising around in there. Like he says in the documentary, “Between my divorces, I would just go live there. I wasn’t sure when to go home.” He kind of liked it there better, because it was a safe place away from the divorce situation for him. When I was in a sad space about getting separated and divorced, I came into my room and it was kind of the under-construction area of the hotel. I was upset, and Francois, the really kind bellman/concierge guy, saw the mood I was in. And he said, “No, no, no, no, no. This will not do for Nancy! Ms. Wilson will stay in a much nicer room! There will be no price difference. You will stay in this nicer, quieter part of the hotel.” Stuff like that that they did out of the goodness of their heart.

They knew me well enough to see what state I was in, even though I was trying not to be noticeable about it. They knew me well enough to go, “Wait one second. Hold on. Don’t take any bags off yet. We’ll get you a better room.” And it just meant the world to me, because I had to go on tour. I had to leave. It was separation anxiety, 100 percent, on every level — not just leaving town, but leaving a relationship, with kids involved and stuff like that. So, it was very meaningful that they treated me so kindly. The kindness thing is more important in the world than you might ever imagine, especially today in the climate we’re all trying to get through, live through, survive. The political climate in particular is so unkind. Kindness is the ethical way that the universe will need to bend towards, in the next cycle coming in. And I am such an optimist that I believe it will. I want to believe it will.

Didn’t Ann have some kind of medical emergency when she was staying at the Sunset Marquis, and the kind staff also took good care of her?

Yeah, she did. She had a little scare early in the morning. They just whisked her away to the emergency [room] and made sure everybody was not aware, so that it wouldn’t be a plague to her trying to get well from the situation she found herself surprised to be in.

When did this occur?

It was around early 2020s, 2016 or ‘15 or something like that, or 2010 maybe. It’s hard to recall, because she’s perfectly fine now. But it was just kind of a little surprise medical slip-up.

I’m glad they took good care of her then, and also glad to hear you say she’s doing well now, because obviously she had some serious health issues recently.

She’s doing well now. We just recorded the album, and she sounds amazing. We did 118 shows together, which were great. So, she’s fine. All of her medical stuff is completely sorted out nowadays, which is really a big victory, because she wasn’t sure for a while there, a couple of years back, if she wasn’t going to be taken by the big C. But her scans are fewer and farther between, because everything keeps on coming up clear. I think she actually beat it. You keep checking, but it keeps on getting more and more positive all the time.

And it’s really added a lot to her expressive way of singing these days. I think it’s my favorite Ann Wilson sound on this new album that I’ve maybe ever heard, because she’s always been so pyrotechnical-capable, she had no limits to what range and what kind of whizzing-around fireworks she could accomplish, but in her current state of play as a singer, it’s way more translatable. There’s a humanity and an expression to it now that’s much more fulfilling to listen to, I think, than all of the vocal pyrotechnics of the past. When you think of Ann, you think of almost like a banshee singer. She’s not a crooner now either, she still punches beautifully and she’s still got a range, but I think she just interprets stuff better, now that she’s been through such a lot of living. You really hear the pearls of wisdom in there now, more than they ever were. As a singer, she’s just more soulful these days.

Did Ann’s cancer bring you two closer together?

I do feel super-reconnected now. We kind of had a separation thing that took a little bit longer to get through than I ever wanted, but she needed to have her own independent stuff away from Heart. And it was good for me to have my own independent stuff away from Heart as well. So, now the reunion is really sweeter than ever. A lot of the drama that was kind of swirling has come to a halt.

You say Heart’s estrangement, or hiatus, or whatever you want to call it, was longer than you expected. I’m curious why that was, or why you thought that.

Well, after she got cancer, I wasn’t sure that I was needed, because she was so kind of closed-off about going through that. She had moved from Florida into a new place in Nashville, where she still lives now, and I’d never visited her in Florida because I really didn’t feel welcome there at all. And so, there was just a whole thing that had to kind of melt away. When she moved to the Nashville area, I could tell that she was happier where she was living. … She’s more of a city girl by nature.

Was it a gradual coming-together, organically, or was there a specific breakthrough moment when you sat down and hashed things out?

Well, we got back on the road together in 2019. Really, it was between 2016 and 2019 that things got kind of fubar: f***ed up beyond recognition. But then we got back out on the road, and it was like, “OK, this is like riding a bicycle.” There was still a lot of tension, but we kept on planning to keep going. It’s taken a while, but right now it couldn’t be better, because I just feel like Ann has kind of settled into who she’s becoming, where she gets to live now, and getting past all of the scary stuff with the cancer. She’s really exhaling enough to give energy and pay attention to our relationship again more. And I’m really happy about it, because when I got to Nashville to finish up some songwriting together that we’d been doing remotely with our collaborator, Sue Ennis, when we got in a room together it was like, “Oh, this is second nature. There’s no drama here.” It’s usually just the people around you that create the drama. There’s a lot of jealous little vendetta things that we couldn’t be bothered with anymore.

Did Ann’s health issues make you newly appreciate this rock ‘n’ roll dynasty that you two have built?

It completely did bring that to the surface of our relationship, because it was like, “Wow, we’ve done this for 50 years!” And pretty successfully, off and on — enough so that we’ve made an imprint where every rock show we play is like a singalong these days, which is really cool. It’s all about these songs. It’s what we were born to do, and do together. It’s what we’ve always done together, and it’s second nature. So, getting back into that with Ann one-on-one was extremely meaningful and really fulfilling for me. … It made me extremely happy to make this album.

And I’m extremely happy to hear that you and Ann have, for lack of a better term, made peace with your past. But changing the subject a bit, since so much If These Walls Could Rock focuses on the ‘80s, have you made peace with that period of your career? That was Heart’s most lucrative era, but you’ve had mixed feelings about it because you were pushed into this sort of hair-metal scene.

Yeah. I think there’s a lot of people that came into knowing about Heart at that time, and then they later discovered the ’70s version of Heart. The [‘80s] songs that still sound pretty timeless and little less dated are the ones we play live, like “Alone,” “These Dreams,” and “What About Love.” It was making the videos, mainly, that was the most challenging part of that decade for us — because it took the importance right off of the music itself and it slapped you in the center of a visual aspect. All these stylists would show up at the big soundstage with the camera crews and the smoke machines and the lighting and the dancers and all that other kind of stuff. It was so not exactly about the music anymore.

I mean, they made a molten-metal mold of your body in the “These Dreams” video…

Well, that’s definitely memorable! We’re still talking about it today. The gold mold, like the “golden goddess.” It was a big piece of Styrofoam, and in the Styrofoam they drew [my] shape and then carved [my] shape out. You go lay down in there after they spray-painted it. The culture itself had switched over from the late ’60s and the ’70s, where it was more mind-expanded with pot. … The drugs changed in the ’80s over to the cocaine era, so it was much more of an egocentric type of “me, me, me, me, me, me, me,” and all about how you looked. It was an egocentric drug time, instead of a mind-expanded drug time where everybody’s cool — even if you’re Mama Cass, even if you’re fat, that’s great. But not in the ’80s! Ann was “too fat” for the ’80s. That was really hard. It was pressurized. The glamorization in the ’80s was so high-pressure that they would stretch the [television] frame.

Yes, I think it was the “Never” music video where the image ratio was compressed, like squished narrower, presumably to make Ann look thinner.

And it was not lost on Ann, obviously. Emotionally, that was pretty tough for her, having just always been a big baby and a big-boned girl, always larger; some kids are born a little bit larger. Living through that made her more self-conscious and made it harder to stay on that diet. It was kind of a vicious cycle of attention on how she looked, instead of how the music sounded and what her talent really was all about. And they would stick me out the front because I was the “blonde bimbo.”

And they’d turn you into a golden-goddess statue.

Yeah, it was just a little shallow for our taste, because we were hippie chicks from the ’60s, basically.

Did the fact that record executives were pushing you more to the front create any friction or jealousy or rivalry between you and Ann? If I was in Ann’s shoes, it’d be hard not to resent that.

Yeah, it definitely hurt her feelings because she started the band; I was always going to be in the band, but I joined after I went to college a little bit first. And then I got kind of stuck up front, and they put her more behind me, like in photo shoots: “Bring the blonde forward. Hide the brunette behind the blonde!” That really hurt her feelings, and it hurt my feelings for her. It also hurt my feelings to be typecast in sort of a bimbo role that I’ve never felt described me at all. I’m not a space cadet. I studied a lot of things in university, poetic stuff. I don’t define myself by my looks at all. I’m a really competent musician, producer, and writer, and an OK singer. It hurt both of our feelings in very complex ways, to get through that image-making machinery of the ’80s that was kind of unfair to music.

Heart were never a hair-metal band, but you were on MTV when those bands were prominent, and during that time most of the women on MTV were the “video girls,” the girls in cages or whatever. I was laughing hysterically during this If These Walls Could Rock scene with Russell Mulcahy, who directed Rod Stewart’s decadent “Tonight I’m Yours” video by the Sunset Marquis pool. He has a laptop and he’s re-watching that video with all these fleshy party girls in bikinis, and he’s wincing, almost like, “I can’t watch this. Close the laptop! This is not my best work!” But that’s what was happening in the ‘80s, so it makes sense that MTV would treat you like you were video girls — even though you were actually the musicians.

That’s a really good way to frame it. We just felt like we were objectified and not appreciated for our talents at all. It had to be about the look. It was more of a Hollywood system: Churn out the hot chicks and make the dudes look like a lady. Everybody had the same blonde hair, the same hairdresser.

On the subject of hair, since we were talking about your pink tips at the start of this interview, and to take it back to If These Walls Could Rock, I understand you ruined many Sunset Marquis towels with your hair dye.

There’s so many anecdotes about the Sunset Marquis, but we really did go through a lot of towels! We ruined a lot of their towels and washcloths because of our hair color, all of the different hair colors, the purple, the fuchsia. There was every shade of red or orange. There was bright yellow. There was canary yellow for a while. Us and Cyndi Lauper [who also appears in If These Wals Could Rock] probably ruined a lot of towels.

And probably made the showers look like a scene from Psycho.

Yeah. “Something happened in that shower! What happened in there? Who bleeds purple blood anyway?”

Well, with all the other rock ‘n’ roll shenanigans going on at the Marquis, having to clean up bit of hair dye was probably the least of the staff’s worries! You mentioned the ‘60s/’70s marijuana era making way for the ‘80s cocaine era, but didn’t you once claim the hotel was haunted by a “pot ghost”?

Yes, in the main part of the hotel off the lobby where the elevator is… by the cheaper rooms, there was always a smell of pot. But there would be nobody there! There would be no sound. Most of the doors would be open and the maid would be cleaning, or there would be no people at all in there. And then once at the villa when we were recording with Ben Mink, recording Fanatic or Red Velvet Car, we were like, “Wait, is somebody smoking pot outside?” Our villa was all by itself, but there was still a pot ghost. Whoever that was, that ghost is still smoking pot to this day, I’m sure.

I wonder who it was? Which marijuana-smoking rock star that’s no longer with us would be mostly likely to haunt the Sunset Marquis?

Probably somebody like Jim Morrison.

That’s a good guess. Do you have any other memories of the hotel?

Well, I was thinking about it after I saw the documentary, that I never went in that pool! Not one time! Everyone else in the documentary went in the pool at least once, and some jumped from the balcony. But I never even went in the pool. I guess it was too public for me, and I’m too shy.

Did you go in the jacuzzi, though?

No! And I think it was a really good idea to not go in that particular hot tub.

This Q&A, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, originally appeared on Gold Derby. Watch Nancy Wilson’s full interview in the video at the top of this page. If These Walls Could Rock premieres Aug. 14 on Apple and Amazon.

photo: Martyn Goddard

In 1985, Wham! became the first Western pop act to play Communist China, and British New Wave filmmaker Lindsay Anderson came along to capture George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s historic expedition. However, Anderson’s resulting $1.5 million documentary, If You Were There…, was scrapped, because both Michael and Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell were displeased that Anderson had focused more on China than on the actual band and had utilized far too little concert footage.

“I’m not surprised that Lindsay’s cut was scrapped,” muses Mike Christie, director of a new and very different documentary, Wham! 10 Days in China. “It didn’t really have a vision. It’s a nice, interesting kind of film, but it didn’t have a drive. It’s quite ambient. It’s certainly not a pop documentary.”

Christie’s film is actually a third cinematic attempt to document Wham’s Chinese trip. In 1986, just 14 months after their concerts in Beijing and Canton (now Guangzhou), the U.K. pop duo played their farewell show much closer to home, at London’s Wembley Stadium, where a drastic recut of Anderson’s film, edited by music video director Andy Morahan and retitled Foreign Skies, was screened for a Guinness World Record-setting 72,000 fans — including Christie’s own sister. (Anderson’s If You Were There… didn’t get a public screening until 2024, due to it being blocked by Michael and his estate.) Four decades later, Christie gained access to “nearly 21 hours of film rushes; that’s like a hundred cans of film” — none of which, remarkably, was actually utilized by either Anderson or Morahan — to create Wham! 10 Days in China, which finally tells the full and fascinating story of the band’s journey to the East.

“We didn’t know this was even going to be possible, to be honest,” marvels Christie, known for his work with Suede, Nick Cave, Pet Shop Boys, New Order, and Bono. “When we first started talking about this project with the Wham! collective including Andrew, weirdly, the [Anderson] footage was kind of in cans in a warehouse. I don’t even know where the warehouse was! But no one was in a hurry to dig this footage up. … It took something like seven or eight months for all the footage to arrive; we were getting in dribs and drabs.”

Once Christie was able to go through all of 21 hours of footage, however, he was “left slack-jawed” by many unseen, unscreened moments — including a scene of near-naked heartthrob Michael getting a massage while venting to the cameras about, ironically, the pressures of being constantly followed by cameras. (“He’s not wearing any clothes! He’s wearing a towel!” laughs Christie.) But the filmmaker also was fascinated by the more serious moments, like a tense Bein ng press conference and a harrowing airplane emergency involving a touring band member (more on those incidents later). “What began to emerge, especially through body language, was a lot of the narrative stuff became really, really apparent,” Christie explains. “You were seeing discomfort, unhappiness, [along with] moments of joy, moments of fun.”

photo: Neal Preston

But to fully understand and appreciate the context of 10 Days in China, one must look at the whopping 18 months that led up to those 10 days — when Napier-Bell, author of the memoir I’m Coming to Take You to Lunch: A Fantastic Tale of Boys, Booze and How Wham! Were Sold to China, wined and dined more than 140 Chinese government officials to make Michael’s dreams of superstardom and world domination come true.

“The very first meeting [with Michael and Ridgeley], we went to dinner with them and said, ‘Right, let’s discuss what we’re going to do.’ And George said, ‘We want to be the No. 1 group in a year. And that’s all you’ve got,’” recalls Napier-Bell, who took on Wham! as a client after witnessing their “sensational” breakout performance on Britain’s Top of the Pops. “I just laughed and said, ‘That’s impossible. The No. 1 group has to be the No. 1 group in America, because it’s 60 percent of the world market. And you haven’t even had a record released there yet! Let’s sit down and talk about reality.’ And he said, ‘Nope. No. You’ve got a year.’”

“We both had the desire to succeed. It was what drove us,” says Ridgeley. “It was essential for us that Wham! was a success — and a success for George, personally. He was discovering himself. He hadn’t found the person, or at least he hadn’t been able to reveal to himself or bring out the person that he was. But he was very strongly opinioned, and he had great belief in his talent.”

Napier-Bell’s business partner, Jazz Summers, responded to Michael’s bold challenge by equally audaciously suggesting, as Napier-Bell remembers: “‘Maybe we could make you the first Western pop group ever to play in China, and that would get on the news all over the world. And that would rush things a bit.’ And George said, ‘Yeah, I like that! Go and do that.’”

One week later, Napier-Bell found himself in China. “I was sitting in a hotel room alone, in this big, bleak country… thinking, ‘What have I got myself into? Who could actually say yes?’ And of course, the answer was [premier of the People's Republic of China] Zhao Ziyang, probably the second- or third-most powerful person in the entire world. How was I going get from this hotel room to him and persuade him? That’s what I spent the next 18 months doing — and did.”

Brokering the deal for Wham!’s two China performances took Napier-Bell, who appears in Christie’s documentary, a bit longer than his demanding new client’s one-year deadline — because at first the veteran music manager, who’d worked with the Yardbirds, T. Rex, and Japan, didn’t really have a strategy. Many of Napier-Bell’s early days in that lonely hotel room were spent cold-calling random politicians, telemarketing-style.

“I got a book from my embassy, which gave me the list of all the ministries and the names of the ministers. And I sat there in that hotel room and started calling at top of the list,” Napier-Bell explains. “Every time I got through to a ministry, I tried to find somebody who spoke English. Sometimes it was just a cleaning lady, or sometimes it was someone high up who knew. And I said, ‘Could you tell them Simon Napier-Bell has come from London and would like to take the minister to lunch?’ I figured that would sound quite important to them: a foreigner, a posh name, and a good lunch. After I’d gotten a 10th of the way through the book, I gave up; it had been two days and I couldn’t do it anymore. I was too miserable. So, I flew home and told everybody it was going ‘very well.’”

But a month later, Napier-Bell returned to China and “amazingly, when I checked in the hotel — the same hotel — they said, ‘You’ve got a message.’ And the message was from the Minister of Home Resources or something like that: ‘Yes, I’m about to come to lunch with you.’ So, I called back and [arranged] the lunch with him, and he turned up in a Chairman Mao suit — you know, those sort of blue boiler suits. He’d come on his bicycle; a minister in most countries would arrive in a Mercedes, but he was on his bicycle.”

As it turned out, the minister had mixed up his Rolodex contacts and mistaken Napier-Bell for a coal buyer he’d done business with. But that didn’t matter to Napier-Bell, who seized the opportunity. “I had my first minister!” he laughs. “And from then on I went back every month and bought lunch for him, and each month he invited more ministers, because I did good lunches. I paid for good lunches, and they didn’t get good lunches because they didn’t have nice big expense accounts. And bit by bit by bit, I got more and more people to come and have lunch with him. And each time, I went a little further in talking about the benefits of youth culture.”

photo: Martyn Goddard

Once Napier-Bell had successfully wooed enough government officials, the dates were set for April 7, 1985, at the 12,000-capacity Workers’ Gymnasium (the biggest stadium in Beijing at that time) and April 10 at Canton’s 5,000-capacity Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Napier-Bell then returned home to London to work on lining up the international film crews that would give Wham! all the publicity that Michael craved. But the China announcement befuddled the European media.

“All the press said, ‘Why Wham! — why not a nice left-wing [artist] like [British protest singer] Billy Bragg, someone who’s very sort of anti-capitalist? That’s what the Communists would like.’ And I said, ‘No, no, you don’t understand. What the government wants is a group who are not political, who don’t upset the status quo, who just are happy to get on the stage and play. They don’t want someone coming there and getting into politics,’” Napier-Bell explains. “So, to [Chinese officials], Wham! were the sort of the nice kids who did as they were meant to do by their government.”

“We were a pop band. We weren’t encumbered by any kind of weight of youthful social consciousness. We were just really the essence of what we were, which was two young men having the time of their life,” shrugs Ridgeley.

Amusingly, another U.K. band wanted to be the first Western music act to play China, but Napier-Bell was determined to stop them. “Famously, Simon Napier-Bell sabotaged Queen’s attempt,” Christie chuckles. “Queen’s management were vying to take Queen there, so what he did was he made up — we call it a ‘deck’ now — a deck of Queen and a deck of Wham! Basically, he had pictures of Freddie Mercury in leather, Freddie Mercury shooting the [“I Want to Break Free”] video in drag with the Hoover [vacuum] And then he had a deck of Wham! looking like perfect teenagers. He effectively went to China and said, ‘So, would you really like Queen?’ — with all these rampantly clichéd sorts of homosexual presentation.”

Ironically, Wham!’s early look, for their 1983 debut album Fantastic, had been somewhat leather-daddy-coded, and by 1987, Michael — who, like Mercury, was secretly gay himself — would launch his solo career with a racy single called “I Want Your Sex.” (Christie notes with a laugh, “And what about [Michael’s controversial solo single] ‘Outside’? Can you imagine what they would’ve said about the ‘Outside’ video, the disco toilet?”) But in 1985, the Wham! boys’ wholesome and unthreatening image suitably impressed Chinese authorities. However, even after the success of their prophetically titled sophomore album Make It Big, Wham! weren’t nearly as big as Queen, so Napier-Bell came up with another marketing scheme to impress doubting reporters.

“The problem we had is when the foreign press and the British press asked why [Wham! were playing these shows] was I said, ‘Because Wham! are huge in China and everybody loves them and knows their records!’ And of course, that was a complete lie. No one there had ever heard of Wham!,” Napier-Bell laughs. “And so we had the problem that dozens of foreign journalists were going to come to the gig and realize straight away that nobody knew the songs at all. … So, I flew back to China and I found a Chinese Mandarin-language singer [Cheng Fangyuan, of Oriental Dance and Song Troupe], and we recorded Wham! songs in Mandarin and made a cassette, which was the Chinese singer singing on one side and Wham! singing on the other side.” On the tape’s Chinese-translated version of Wham!’s biggest pop hit at the time, “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go,” Fangyuan added some “Communist flair,” singing: “Wake me up before you go go/Men fight to be first to reach the peak/Wake me up before you go go/Women are on the same journey and will not fall behind.”

“We gave the cassette away with every ticket which was sold, so that everyone who came to the concert would’ve heard the songs, and heard them in Chinese, and hopefully would sing along with one or two songs. Actually, we gave away two cassettes with each ticket,” says Napier-Bell. “I figured [fans could] keep one, and they could sell the other one and make back the money back from the ticket. And so a week before Wham! turned up, I saw in the local market that these cassettes were changing hands. It was good marketing, as it did set things off.”

In 1985,Wham! was the first western band to play in China,A cassette tape featuring Wham!’s songs on one side, and Cheng Fangyuan’s Chinese covers on the other, was handed to each concertgoer.https://t.co/FPTO0XQoxR pic.twitter.com/rwYhWmfbYJ

— Alex Perry (@Alex__Perry) October 7, 2021

This reminded me of how when Wham went to China in the 1980s (first western band allowed to perform in the post-Mao era), they released a tape where one side was Cheng Fangyuan singing the songs in Chinese. pic.twitter.com/nyN8ilkBAb — pan blurray (@panblurray) June 17, 2021

Despite the sense of familiarity fostered by those traded tapes, Wham!’s gigs, which featured Michael and Ridgeley accompanied by an 11-piece band and several backup dancers, were a culture shock to many curious young attendees. A breakdancer hired to warm up the audience before the Beijing event only confused concertgoers. (Napier-Bell acknowledges that this was a mistake, saying it “killed the atmosphere” when the breaker ventured into the crowd and “horrified” venue personnel; the breakdancing footage in 10 Days in China is in fact quite surreal.) Then audience members were warned by security guards not to dance themselves, or even clap along to the music, despite Michael enthusiastically urging them to do so. A grumpy Michael and even grumpier Ridgeley were later confronted by reporters about this during their above-mentioned awkward Beijing press conference, footage of which now provides one of 10 Days in China’s pivotal scenes.

“It was quite a complex argument [for the press] to try and make. There’s a feedback loop in there somewhere: ‘How dare you do the thing you came here to do?’” says Christie, who could not believe the press conference footage even existed. “It kind of blew my mind. I had this really weird thing when we’d done the rough cut of the whole film — I was really nervous about how Andrew was coming across. I found myself slightly apologizing for how he came across [in the press conference scene]. I thought he’d be uncomfortable, because it’s quite uncomfortable to watch. But he was like, ‘No, it’s fine.’ Because we were trying to make a film that was authentic.”

The other uncomfortable but definitely authentic 10 Days scene, which Christie had to work in thoughtfully and carefully, centered on an incident involving touring Wham! musician Raul D’Oliveira. The trumpet player suffered a severe psychotic episode while flying from Beijing to Canton — stabbing himself with a pen-knife and then attempting to invade the cockpit, causing the plane to nosedive before D’Oliveira could be subdued and the pilot could reroute back to Beijing, where D’Oliveira was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment. The incident was not caught on camera, and Michael and Ridgeley were not actually aboard the plane because they were still in Beijing doing a television interview, but the existing reaction footage that Christie had to work with was almost more powerful.

“I’m a very instinctive filmmaker, even if sometimes it’s not obvious at first. We always were going, ‘What are we going to see when the plane incident is happening? What are we going to show?’” says Christie. “And then narratively, we discovered that George and Andrew weren’t there, that they’d stayed behind, so I said, ‘Well, that’s what we’ll cut the plane with. We’ll cut the plane [scene] with them doing this. Because that’s what’s happening at the same time.’ And we made that call before we saw the bit of footage of them being told [about D'Oliveira’s breakdown]. Suddenly we see this moment where Simon Napier-Bell comes in and goes, ‘The plane’s on its way back!’ And they’re really shocked — I mean, they’re really, really, really shocked. And I think that odd juxtaposition, and the fact that that’s happening real time, is sort of startling. It’s amazing that the cameras were just running.”

Despite any setbacks that occurred in China, Michael and Napier-Bell ultimately accomplished what they’d set out to do: Wham! did become, if only for a very brief time, the No. 1 group in the world. “The musical performances just blew me away,” Christie raves, and those vivacious concerts (footage of which Anderson bizarrely mostly left out of If You Were There…, but Christie uses to great effect in 10 Days in China) won over Eastern audiences — including a young Cui Jian, the legendary musician now known as “the godfather of Chinese rock,” who appears in 10 Days telling Christie that attending Wham!’s Beijing show changed his life.

“I would hope that essentially people understand and get that Wham! was all about life and vivacity and joy. … That happiness and sense of optimism and life was what Wham! was about, and if people get that, then it will enhance their experience of life a wee bit,” says Ridgeley.

However, success came at a price. A little more than a year after the China concerts, with the groundwork now fully laid for Michael’s even more world-dominating solo career, Wham! played their final concert at Wembley, and Michael and Ridgeley went their separate ways. “I knew, and he knew, that his future lay outside of Wham!,” says Ridgeley. “We were growing into men and adults, and it was very evident to both of us that that George’s songwriting was going to shape where he was going to go. … We necessarily couldn’t go on in life as Wham!, because we were changing and Wham! was that snapshot of our youthful years. It became evident that we’d have to bring it to a close.” But Michael, who tragically died in 2016 at age 53, struggled with solo fame.

“Nobody really likes not being able to just walk down the street or go for a walk with a dog or jogging or walking into a supermarket. You don’t have a private life ever again, and that goes with the territory [of being a pop star],” says Napier-Bell. “But you know, right at the beginning when you manage an artist, you explain where they’re going. And they’re not going somewhere nice. It’s not going to be fun. Andrew understood that, which is why he was quite happy to withdraw. He’d had his fun. He left before he suffered any of that. George couldn’t. It was in his soul, in his being. He had to go on being what he was. And yes, once Wham! were over and he was a solo artist, he did begin to hate it. But that was also very much linked to knowing he was gay and not knowing what he should come out, or how to come out — and being afraid of the press, as much as he disliked them.”

“I don’t think he ever regretted [going solo] but I think he probably missed the support that the context of Wham! lent,” Ridgeley reflects. “He was out on his own. And he was quite capable of fending for himself, but at times it was really tough. … I think he probably at times felt that it was much harder than he’d bargained for.”

Christie picked up on Michael’s internal conflict, as the cameras trailed the photogenic singer and the media hounded him, while editing a “very quietly important” 10 Days scene. “George and Andrew are in the Forbidden City, in Beijing, and the interviews at that point are really careful. And they are very much about George’s struggle with privacy versus success. I think he wanted success, but he wanted privacy — and that’s irreconcilable, really. I thought long and hard about his sexuality at that point. He was out to Andrew, he was out to [Wham! background singer] Shirlie, so he’d begun to come out, and he was still trying to rationalize the difficulty of that. Remember how well evil the press were about all aspects of queerness, whatever it was. Also, it was the height of AIDS and the moral panic of AIDS, so that was a pressure itself.”

photo: Martyn Goddard

Christie says the first person he screened his documentary for was his longtime friend and collaborator, Suede frontman Brett Anderson, and he ponders, “Brett uses this fantastic expression, which I really love and we’ve talked about a lot, which is ‘person and persona.’ And I don’t think there’s any stronger example of that that I’ve come across than George Michael. You begin to get hints of the kind of person behind the persona, and there’s a kind of chasm. The mask is extraordinary. So, I think that played more of a role.”

There are many layers to 10 Days in China — Michael and Ridgeley’s core friendship, Michael’s inner turmoil, the political significance and ramifications of a Western pop band playing a Communist country, the behind-the-scenes negotiations that made such a tour possible, even the whole meta movie-within-a-movie angle (some 10 Days footage actually shows the growing conflict between Wham! and Lindsay Anderson’s film crew). And Christie has managed to explore all of these angles, all these years later.

“There was no guarantee anything like this would ever be made of this film. I think the stars aligned, so I’m really glad it’s getting attention,” Christie grins. “I did find the solitary moments really telling — George’s expressions, the little moments. There’s a moment in the garden party at the ambassador’s residence where the camera is pointing and George is on the edge of frame, and he stops. He starts playing with the camera. George’s body language, that kind of cuteness in a way, those kind of slight Princess Diana eyes — I found all of that really quite moving. The intimacy being backstage with them and all that stuff. It was quite a privilege having that access to that footage and being able to share that.”

photo: Martyn Goddard

This article originally ran on Gold Derby. Additional interviews with Napier-Bell and Ridgeley were originally conducted for Totally ’80s and Yahoo Entertainment, respectively.

Adam’s sixth solo album is his most personal yet, so it is simply titled ADAM — because this man has paid his dues, time after time, so he needs no further introduction. The singer, actor, style-setter, and greatest American Idol alumnus of all time opened up about the album, including the major life changes and the ’90s electronica of his angst-ridden youth that inspired it; obsolete industry gatekeepers; double-standards about sexiness for male (especially queer male) and female pop stars; how he finally learned to “un-neuter” himself and “give less of a fuck” about what people think; performing solo vs. performing with Queen; and what to expect from his upcoming solo tour.

Click here to read the Q&A, and watch video of the full conversation below!

This year’s Emmy contenders for Outstanding Arts and Culture Documentary include John Candy: I Like Me, AKA Charlie Sheen, Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Martin Short’s Marty, Life Is Short… and then there’s Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery – The Untold Story. Once again, singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan is fighting a battle in a male-dominated field.

But McLachlan is used to that. She’s been doing just that since 1997, when she co-founded the all-women Lilith Fair music festival and proved all doubters and haters — who’d ludicrously claimed that so-called “pussy package” concerts could never sell tickets – very, very wrong. The inaugural Lilith Fair earned $16 million, making it the top-grossing of any touring festival that year.

Named after Adam’s mythical first wife – who, according to Mesopotamian and Jewish folklore, fled from the Garden of Eden because she refused to submit to her biblical husband — Lilith Fair was its own real-life utopia, built for and by women. A-list acts like Sheryl Crow, Paula Cole, Bonnie Raitt, Liz Phair, Shawn Colvin, Jewel, the Indigo Girls, and Natalie Merchant, all of whom appear in Building a Mystery, joined fierce forces with McLachlan to create what was one of the live music industry’s first truly safe spaces. McLachlan then responded to criticism that the first “Lily-White Fair” lineup wasn’t diverse enough by bringing on legends like Erykah Badu, Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill, Neneh Cherry, and even rising hip-hop superstar Missy Elliott (who’d never performed live publicly before appearing at Lilith Fair ’98), and the feminine phenomenon became even more massive — taking in $25 million in its second year, and $21 million in 1999. The festival also raised $10 million for various local charities during its historic, or herstoric, three-year run.

However, all was not well in McLachlan’s garden. As Lilith Fair became bigger, so did the backlash. Grumpy, rockist music critics (surprisingly even some female ones, like Gina Arnold and Ann Powers, although Powers eventually came around and actually appears in the Lilith documentary) blasted the festival for being overly earnest and unhip. Shock-jocks, SNL sketches, and late-night TV hosts made nasty jokes about Cole’s armpit hair or the stereotypical lesbian cat ladies who supposedly comprised Lilith’s audience. Pro-life protesters picketed Lilith Fair due to its support for Planned Parenthood and other feminist organizations. McLachlan and other Lilith acts fielded shockingly sexist, homophobic, or just plain ignorant questions at the tour’s daily press conferences. (McLachlan says she still gets “PTSD” when watching that excruciating footage in Building a Mystery.) And even at the 1998 Grammys, when three prominent Lilith Fair artists received multiple nominations — Best New Artist winner Cole; Best Female Pop Vocal Performance winner McLachlan; and Colvin, who received one the night’s top awards, for Record of the Year — they were lumped together for a tokenistic, Lilith-themed group number, rather than given their own performance slots during the ceremony. (McLachlan reveals in the Lilith documentary that she, Cole, and Colvin very seriously considered boycotting the Grammys that year.)

“Honestly, I think I always said to the people who shit on us or said we were all the negative things: ‘Show up. We will change your mind,’” McLachlan says with a sly smile. And despite all the above-mentioned backlash — and the fact that McLachlan decided to end the festival “on a high note” in 1999, just as the industry was shifting to shiny TRL pop and hypermasculine nu-metal, although she does “wonder what would’ve happened if we had done a fourth year of Lilith” — the festival’s impact was massive for Generation X and Xennials.

For instance, 45-year-old Brandi Carlile, who for the past eight years has hosted her own all-female Girls Just Wanna Weekend fest, gushes in Building a Mystery about how attending Lilith Fair as a teenager changed her life. And even if some female Gen Z musicians and their fans are unaware of the Lilith lore, they do walk the trail that McLachlan and her peers blazed for them: In Building a Mystery, an incredulous Olivia Rodrigo, age 23, confesses that she never even knew about Lilith Fair until recently, but she obviously has no problem selling tickets when she tours with female/female-fronted openers like the Last Dinner Party, Wolf Alice, Die Spitz, Remi Wolf, and the Breeders.

“Sarah started that and opened people’s eyes to that thinking, specifically in music,” declares Building a Mystery director Ally Pankiw. “I think that’s a huge thing that she needs to be applauded for.” In the Q&A below, Pankiw and McLachlan open up about Lilith’s legacy and their documentary — an Emmy-worthy story that, much like Lilith Fair itself, is female-driven in front of and behind the scenes.

LYNDSANITY: The first thing that surprised me at the beginning of this film was younger people saying they did not know about Lillith Fair. So, I think it’s interesting to see this film through the lens of today. Maybe young music fans, who see Taylor Swift touring with Boygenius and Hayley Williams, would be shocked to know that the idea of a multi-female-artist tour was once unheard-of in the music business. What stuck out to you when making this film about how the industry has changed, or sadly maybe not changed, since ‘97?

SARAH MCLACHLAN: I think the industry has changed a lot. I think that there are way more women in successful positions, who are using their platforms amazingly. That being said, the greater world is shifting in a very different direction. And as women gain more power, the old guys in the positions of power are trying to claw back, hold onto their power. So, there’s going to be this push and pull. But I love seeing what’s happening in music right now, and women and artists using their platforms to talk about this stuff and continue to push forward. That being said, there’s a long way to go.

ALLY PANKIW: Looking at it from a 2026 perspective, I can speak more to the entertainment industry at large. We’re kind of in a contraction point, where there has been a bit of a little punitive backswing of progress in terms of diversity, in basically who’s invested in the arts and in entertainment. I kind of put that together as I was making the doc. It was an interesting parallel of what I was experiencing in the industry today, and what was going on then and immediately after Lilith. I think that it all kind of lands under the same theme that no matter what era you look at, there’s going to be periods of time where there’s sort of a lie or a myth put in place to keep other people where they’re at, and not giving them the tools to lift themselves up or gain more privilege or power.

And so, I think what’s really remarkable about this doc. And to your point, young people might not know that that was the culture at the time, and they also might not know more widely how just incredibly misogynistic and homophobic and racist that time period was in pop culture and what the sort of prominent voice was in that time. But I think what’s so remarkable about Sarah’s story, and why I wanted to tell the story: She did the very brave but simple thing of just going, “I think that’s a lie. I just don’t believe it about myself, about my peers.” And so, she did this really remarkable thing, but from this very simple place of like, “I’m seeing the opposite be true with my own eyes, so I’m going to stand up against that existing sort of monolithic thinking,” at that time. I feel like we’re there again.

Speaking of lies or fallacies, in the mid ’90s, for the first time in history, more women were consuming more music than men were. Women were buying more CDs than men. And I’ve always thought that women and girls are predictors at the forefront of pop trends, driving the music market. So, where did this idea come from, that women can’t sell records, can’t sell tickets, or can’t sell radio ads if they’re played back-to-back on the radio? The statistics prove that’s not true.

MCLACHLAN: Those old-school attitudes prevailed in every industry. I mean, one of the crazy moments in the documentary is where [talent agent and Lilith Fair co-founder] Marty Diamond says, “We were trying to find corporate sponsors, and we went to a water company. and they said, ‘We’re marketing to guys.’” And like, it’s water!

Well, maybe women would like water if it was in a pink bottle…

PANKIW: Remember “Pens for Girls”? Bic did that and made pink pens. And everyone was like, “What?”

MCLACHLAN: We were dismissed on so many levels, consistently, and not taken seriously and put down. And if we had strong opinions, it was just like, “Oh, sweetie.” It just became really insulting, to a point where I would go to radio stations and they’d say, “We can’t add you this week because we added these other female artists.” And I thought, “We’re all different. Why are you allocating this tiny sliver of the pie to us and thinking that we’re going to be placated by this?” And same with promoters saying, “You can’t do this. You can’t put two women on the same bill.” Well, I’d already been doing that, to Ally’s point. I had been living in this world where it’s like, “This does work. It’s great. People like it. I know music. My tastes are not particular to a gender. It’s music.” I just thought that idea was ridiculous. And then of course, when men said, “You can’t do that, people won’t come,” all that did was put a fire under me to prove them wrong.

PANKIW: I think people have always underestimated young women’s taste and thought it wasn’t “cool.” But I really do think young women have great taste and are predictive in their taste, to your point. And I really do think one of my main goals with the doc was it made me the most upset that [Lilith Fair] was sort of misremembered as not being the coolest place to be those summers. And it was so cool and radical there! I wanted to show that side of it too. Sometimes it was trivialized or people said it was “too earnest,” but again, these are feminine qualities, so they’re put down in general pop culture. It’s like anything that women enjoy is kind of like a second-class thing.

Yes, people are always trying to yuck women’s yum. Like, what’s wrong with it if some women like pumpkin spice lattes? They’re delicious! Why is a beverage uncool because supposedly more women drink it?

PANKIW: Because it’s the myth that things we enjoy aren’t enjoyed also by men. And that also sucks for men. In the doc, Jewel was like, “Metalheads have to tell me secretly that they love my music. They don’t feel like they can announce it, but they’re like, ‘We’re big fans.’” That’s so sad too for all genders, for taste to be gatekept in this weird way.

What was interesting to me was a sort of internalized misogyny, because a lot of women also bashed Lilith Fair at the time. Female music critics like Gina Arnold put it down, and there were some female musicians who at least initially didn’t want to do Lilith Fair because they thought it was a bad look. I’ll even admit that maybe back in the day I thought that if you’re a “rock chick” you have to be one of the guys and not go see women play acoustic guitars. A powerful moment in your film is when Thao Nguyen, from Tao & the Get Down Stay Down, talks about this and actually starts to cry, like she feels really bad about bashing the festival when she was young.

MCLACHLAN: Well, that was survival at the time too. That was the myth that was normalized. Ann Powers as well — she kind of tore us apart.

Wait, she did? Ann is in your documentary, and it looks like she had a great time at Lilith Fair.

MCLACHLAN: No, she tore us apart [in the ‘90s], and I was heartbroken because I thought, “This is a woman!” But then a little while later I was thinking, “This is a woman who is existing in a system built by men, for men, and she’s one woman.” And if you want to get along and be part of that world, you kind of have to go along with the prevailing attitudes or you’re out. You’re out really quickly, because it’s very unforgiving to have those kind of attitudes. So, it took me a while to forgive her, because I sort of think women should know better.

So, Ann being in the doc, talking about how important and fun Lilith was, is a full-circle moment.

MCLACHLAN: She alluded gently to maybe not having … she didn’t own it in the same way [as Nguyen did].

PANKIW: She just felt “weird” there, but I think it just goes back to the unlearning that unfortunately a lot of women and other people spend decades, well into their adulthood — the unlearning of what you thought you liked, who you thought you were. And to Sarah’s point about survival, this project has been such a gift, because it’s really highlighted that unlearning that I’m already doing in my life, as a woman approaching 40 who was a young girl and a teenager in the ’90s and early 2000s. I did the exact same thing. All these things that I knew in this sort of ancient place of what I actually liked and what I thought was cool and what I thought was great art, I gave those things away. You have to hide those parts of yourself because earnestness and things that were sort of more traditionally feminine were not “cool.” They were not cool in the early 2000s, especially. And I think probably Ann Powers has spent a few decades unlearning as well some of the myths she believed about her own taste. … So, I don’t hold it against anyone who came up in that time, because it’s an impossible hill or place to climb out from. And I think some people never climb out from it and still are holding a lot of internalized misogyny. Probably being a lesbian helped me get over it faster!

MCLACHLAN: Honestly, I think I always said to the people who shit on us or said we were all the negative things: “Show up. We will change your mind.”

PANKIW: And you did.

MCLACHLAN: Come and be part of it. And yeah, I think Ann even alluded to that as well, where it’s just like, “Oh, yeah, dang it, this is kind of fun. It’s kind of cool. Oh, I’m not allowed to say that, but…”

We can all say it now!

MCLACHLAN: We were too busy just doing it. We were busy celebrating each other’s great music and having incredible times every night performing with each other and getting to know each other and creating this community that didn’t exist, and getting rid of the competition that existed to keep us apart. It was like, “No, we’re going to break down all those walls.” And so it was, for me, incredibly joyful. I mean, certainly there were some moments of PTSD watching some of the press conferences! But honestly, I glaze things over and I’m always looking for silver linings. I forgot how prevailing and pervasive that negativity and that bro culture really was back then. I had friends who were still in the closet because they didn’t feel comfortable coming out. And now I think about that, and that’s crazy. Back then, it didn’t seem so crazy. And it wasn’t that long ago.

A recurring theme throughout this film is, we didn’t really have the term “safe spaces” back then, but that Little Fair was a safe space. Even the film’s producer, Dan Levy, who was a closeted young gay boy in the ‘90s, said it’s an early memory of him feeling safe when he went to the festival. Women, in the audiences and onstage, felt safe, whether that was safe to be themselves and just have a good time, or physically safe, like safe from being groped or leered at or worse. Tell me about what it felt like to be there.

MCLACHLAN: I think that was one of the big desires in my mind, to create this safe space, this place where all these women can be together celebrating each other, getting to know each other, learning from each other, like having mothers and aunties there. That kind of community is so powerful and so important. I think we’ve really lost that as a society. I certainly didn’t have that. I grew up in isolation. My family were on the other side of the coast, so I just had my immediate family and I didn’t have a lot of friends and felt really lonely for most of my childhood. So, to come into this situation where you are instantly held and honored for who you are, without any pretense, on a very equal footing, it felt like coming home in a lot of ways. It took a bit for that to come out. I was a little bit shy and didn’t know that I could just come up to people and start talking to them. Honestly, when the Indigo Girls showed up, that was so amazing because they were just like, “OK, we’re going to play with everybody! Don’t you want to play together?” I’m like, “Yes, I so do! I don’t know how to do this.” I remember Jewel saying the same thing, like, “I didn’t know how to ask.” They really blew everything open, and then that’s when the floodgates sort of opened. And it was multi-generational too, because Emmylou Harris was there, Bonnie Raitt was there. Learning and witnessing women from a different generation, who had been through so much more than we had been through, and hearing their stories and feeling their respect and admiration and cheering us on, it felt really, really powerful.

In Vanity Fair’s Lilith Fair oral history, Bonnie Raitt actually said Lilith was the best live experience of her 50-plus-year entire career.

PANKIW: And imagine the generation that she came from and what the industry looked like. When you talk about Sarah creating a safe space and this sort of utopian ecosystem… I think this doc is a nice reminder that the systems built by women — not just in arts and entertainment, but if you broaden that out, it can apply to many places and many parts of our society — they’re safer, they’re more equitable, they’re more diverse, they run more smoothly, they protect people, they’re intergenerational. They don’t leave different generations behind. But I think this is an important thing to mention too, especially in the moment in time we’re in right now and all the sort of backsliding that we’re seeing everywhere: It wasn’t just a warm, fuzzy feeling. It was incredibly financially successful and commercially viable and this massive success, sold-out everywhere. … I think it’s also still the most successful financial touring festival. I think about that so often, like what a great example that women investing in their systems and ideas is not a risk. It’s a huge opportunity, and it’s not just to tick a box. Again, to go back to Taylor Swift and these massive [female] artists, no one would think of those people as business risks. But Sarah started that and opened people’s eyes to that thinking, specifically in music. And so, I think that’s a huge thing that she needs to be applauded for.

Sarah, did you feel at the time that you were doing something important or game-changing, or is that something you only realized in retrospect?

MCLACHLAN: All of the above! Yeah, in the midst of it, I was too busy to even know what we were doing. I didn’t really understand the larger ramifications of it until halfway through the first tour. Actually, in 1997, we did four test runs, which proved the model with the promoters that we had relationships with. And then we went into the greater world and said, “OK, we’re going to do this.” They were like, “You can’t do that,” and I’m like, “Well, we just did, and we sold out every time! So yes, we can!” But even then, with promoters, or many of them, we had to shoulder 100 percent of the guarantee. There was no underwriting it. They didn’t want to take the chance. It took us a while to prove ourselves, but we did. But in the middle of it, it’s very hard to have any kind of perspective other than, “This is amazing, this is so much fun, this is so much work, it’s so exhausting, it’s so all-encompassing.” This idea that we are moving the dial forward, I think that came over time with the success of it, with the second year, getting more diverse artists that initially said no because it was not cool enough or not proven, whatever reasons. I went, “Listen, just look at how many fans show up. Do you want to diversify your audiences? Do you want to get new fans?” It’s actually very simple, and it’s financially a smart choice to make, and a smart choice any manager should make for their young artist. It took a while for those things to build and to become understandable.

And now, having years of time in between, women who were there as young people are coming up to me over the years and saying, “I was there, and you showed me that I could do and be anything I wanted to be, to dream big! Now I’m the head of my law firm and I’m bringing along women to be my partners.” Hundreds of stories like that. So, that legacy of celebrating each other, of caring for each other, of supporting each other and bringing each other alongside, that has continued in the same way. That was the legacy, of giving. A big part of it for me was being able to leave a lasting impact, not just musically, but on the community. Like, how do we actually help the community? So, being able to give a dollar of every ticket sale, which is a nominal amount, but sometimes that was upwards of $30,000 and sometimes the biggest single check that any of these [local charitable] organizations [in ever tour stop] had ever received. That is what made the press conferences so much less painful, because they were generally very painful, but I got to be the lucky person at the end to give the check to the local charity. It’s amazing that all of us together built this thing that could go out and not only put on a great show and entertain people and bring people together and create a community, but could leave a lasting impact to continue to help women and marginalized citizens in that community. I took the money I made from Lilith and put it into foundation and started my music schools. And so, that legacy of giving continues, 25 years later.

PANKIW: If everyone could be Sarah McLachlan, the world would be a much better place.

I wish that were the case, but there’s only one Sarah McLachlan! We were talking about safe spaces, and the last year of the original Lilith Fair was also the year of the infamously violent Woodstock ’99, a festival that couldn’t have been more opposite to Lilith. It seemed to signify an abrupt culture shift, back to toxic masculinity or bro culture, that’s still very prevalent today. What happened?

PANKIW: That’s a big question, but I often reference a really brilliant book by this author named Sophie Gilbert called Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. It talks about this shift from some of the power and autonomy from women in entertainment. The pendulum swings, and sometimes it is in response to progress. She has an interesting chapter about music transitioning from the ’90s to the 2000s. She says it did feel a bit like a punitive pendulum swing, and she has a line that is so chilling: “The women of the ’90s were replaced by the girls of the 2000s.” And I think that was not just in music but in pop culture in general, in terms of who was becoming a star and a celebrity. It felt like people with ownership over their own careers, and then there was then this push to have a lot of young people that didn’t have full ownership over their careers, where a lot of a bigger machine could own a piece of the money of these younger artists. I don’t think that fully answers your question, but I think it’s indicative of some of that shift into the early 2000s. As for how Woodstock ’99 plays into that, I mean, Sheryl Crow [who played both Lilith Fair and Woodstock ‘99] says it in the doc. She says [in a press conference scene], “I hope [Woodstock ‘99] is not an indication of where we’re headed as a country!” And you kind of go ugh when you watch that line, because for a moment it felt like this vulnerability and sentimentality and lyricism was front and center. And then different types of music and art and movies kind of rushed in to replace some of that in the early 2000s.

MCLACHLAN: I often wonder what would’ve happened if we had done a fourth year of Lilith. I was exhausted and I was done, and my record label was screaming for a new record. And I’m always of the mindset of “end on a high note.” I just had this feeling that by doing it another year, the success of it might start to wane, and that would be a real bummer. But it’s true that I felt by the next year, [pop music was dominated by] boy bands and girl bands and very fabricated, part of a larger machine typically run by men, created by men, to make a lot of money and be a very particular narrative. It did kind of feel like the door slammed closed a little bit. [The women of Lilith Fair] as individual artists all continued to make music and continued to be successful, but the media machine moved on to something else, as it does. There wasn’t massive focus. And so, it is cyclical in that way. But hindsight is everything.

@livieshq watch the #LilithFairDoc to hear how the women of the festival impacted our very own @Olivia Rodrigo “lilith fair: building a mystery – the untold story” is now streaming on @hulu and hulu on @Disney+ #OliviaRodrigo #LilithFair ♬ original sound – livies hq

It’s touched on very briefly in the film that you did try to revive Lilith Fair in 2010, but maybe it was a bit too early to do that, because it wasn’t as successful as it had been in the ‘90s. But next year is the 30th anniversary of the festival, and with everything we’re talking about, where society is at right now, plus there are many amazing female artists re dominating the pop space right now, is there a chance Lilith could be revived? Maybe even for just some kind of one-off anniversary event next year? I feel the world needs Lilith Fair right now.

PANKIW: And you’re like, “Can I get tickets?” [laughs]

MCLACHLAN: Actually, I didn’t even realize it was the 30th anniversary coming! Stay tuned. I have nothing in the plans, but there are always things brewing, moving forward.

This Q&A, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch Sarah McLachlan & Ally Pankiw discuss full interview in the video at the top of this page.

photo: Facebook

When Clay Aiken triumphantly returned to the American Idol stage for this week’s Season 24 finale, rocking a new fashion-forward look (palazzo pants, pastel polka-pot blouse, peroxided pixie), he performed his first original single in 18 years: the smooth adult-pop bop “Rewind,” which jumped to No. 1 on iTunes’ pop chart the next day. He also dueted with finalist Braden Rumfelt on Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” the ballad he fatefully performed during his own season’s Wild Card round on March 4, 2003… the very day that Braden was born.

Aiken’s appearance was full-circle in so many ways, and yet another iconic finale moment in his long and never linear Idol journey. For instance, when he placed second to Ruben Studdard back in Season 2 (which still holds the Nielsen record for the highest-rated Idol finale of all time, with a whopping 38.6 million viewers), he became the stuff of urban legend when he accidentally peeped Ruben’s name on the results card, five minutes before Ryan Seacrest actually announced the winner.

But that wasn’t nearly as wild as Aiken’s surprise cameo on the second-most-watched Idol finale, the one that capped off the series’ most-watched season overall, Season 5. That was the night that a glowed-up and almost unrecognizable Aiken — sporting an even more drastic makeover than this year’s, with his flat-ironed, Lego-hair emo bob and designer suit — ambushed No. 1 Claymate Michael Sandecki for sing an unrehearsed “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” duet. And chaos ensued.

Clay Aiken with Lyndsey Parker at the ‘American Idol’ Season 24 finale

The hype surrounding those watercooler-chatter moments — in an era of “appointment television” when people actually gathered around TV sets every week to watch Idol, and in office breakrooms the morning after to gossip about the joke auditions, performances, eliminations, and Simon Cowell’s most vicious one-liners — solidified Aiken’s status as Idol’s first non-winner to break out as a superstar. (Over the course of his career, he’s sold roughly 5 million albums in America.) And to this day, Aiken is still considered one of Idol’s all-time greatest success stories, the ultimate representation of what the show was always supposed to be: a platform for atypical, unconventional, but extremely gifted singers who would never otherwise get a real shot at pop stardom.

While Aiken hasn’t released new original music in a long time, he has stayed busy and stayed in the headlines. He’s done Broadway; toured with Studdard (and even competed with Studdard as the Beets on The Masked Singer); co-founded the disabled children’s charity the National Inclusion Project; and worked with other charitable organizations like UNICEF, the Ronald McDonald House, Make a Wish Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. And in his personal life, he came out as gay in since 2008 — the same year that his last pop single came out, and the year that his son Parker was born.

Aiken, now 47, also had a credible if brief political career, running for the U.S. House of Representatives in North Carolina’s 2nd congressional district in 2014 and actually winning the Democratic primary, and then running in the Democratic primary for North Carolina’s 4th congressional district in 2022 and finishing third. But as he spoke with Lyndsanity on the Idol set, he made it clear that he hadn’t put music on hold to focus on being a politician.

“No, that was not why I left. It’s not why I stopped doing music,” he stressed. “It’s maybe why I came back to music, because I think politics is disgusting, broken… what are other negative words I can use? It’s just not healthy for this country. And I’d hoped it would be. I don’t feel like people are doing things that improve people’s lives and make them happier. And I think music can. And does.”

In the thoroughly entertaining Q&A below, Aiken rewinds to the start of his Idol career, as he reminisces about those historic Season 2 and Season 5 finales, the scandalous “Breast Friend” photo that sparked a tabloid frenzy, and why now is the perfect time for him to relaunch his music career, now that he’s an “empty-nester.”

Suffice to say, this wild card held nothing back.

LYNDSANITY: Your whole theme tonight is “Rewind,” and along with your single by that title, you sang “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” with Braden Rumfelt. But this year marks the anniversary of when you appeared on probably the most bonkers American Idol finale ever, Season 5’s. There was a duet by Katharine McPhee with Meat Loaf, a surprise performance by Prince… but the moment I remember most of all is when you did “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” with Michael Sandecki. What do you remember about that duet?

CLAY AIKEN: I remember that [Sandecki] scared me! Oh my God. I remember that he scared me so much in that moment that I missed my entrance. And I missed it tonight, too. Braden didn’t scare me, but I missed it tonight. And he rescued me. That’s a true professional right there, Braden.

I did not even notice.

Of course. But he noticed! I’ve done that song many, many times myself over the years. I did it with Ruben Studdard on tour a few years ago, and the way they arranged it then, they shortened a little break between his line and mine. And I never could get it in my head to wait to come in before two measures. And tonight, I was so intensely concerned about coming in too late that I came in too early.

Well, no one will remember that. But people still remember you and Michael Sandecki. I don’t even think if it was advertised at that time that you were going to appear on the Season 5 finale, so you shocked everyone.

Yes, it was surprise, which you could tell by Michael’s face.

How did you keep it all under wraps?

Well, believe it or not, I did not have access to tell Michael Sandecki that I was coming on the show. So, it wasn’t very difficult to keep a secret from him. [laughs]

Fair enough. The real surprise that night was your “makeover,” though.

Oh yeah, the brunette. That [Season 5 finale] makeover was not planned. The makeover was sort of accidental. Do you think I decide what my hair’s going to look like? [laughs] I sat in the chair this evening with Dean Banowetz, who did my hair back in the day, and I said, “I don’t care. You do what you want to do.” So, I sat in the chair back that day [in 2006], and Steve Davio was his name, and he just invented all of that. That was a new look. You notice it didn’t last long, because I didn’t know how to do it!

That was exactly 20 years ago, and here you are, doing that song on the show again.

So, I’ll see you again in 20 more! [laughs] Maybe. I’ll be 70.

Since we’re “rewinding” now, I do have to ask about maybe the biggest Idol urban legend ever: That you saw the Season 2 finale results card in Ryan’s hand, saying Ruben had won, before Ryan made the announcement. Is that really true?

Yes. I have absolutely no doubt Ryan has never, ever done that again. When we were on Season 2, we didn’t know it was going to be big when we auditioned. We didn’t know it was big while we were on it! I think Ryan probably did, because he had access to the real world and he was doing his own shows too, but we on the show didn’t know it was a big deal. There were 50 people who worked on our season, on the production, and there’s probably 300 here now. So, it was a lot more laid-back, for sure. I have no doubt in my mind that Ryan has never made that mistake again. But it wasn’t even a mistake on his part. He was turned around, and all I did was look over his shoulder. I just kind of peeked at it real quick, looked over his shoulder right before we all walked on. So, I knew — which was better for me, right? Nerves are gone that way.

I don’t recall your expression giving anything away. You had a good poker face.

Are you kidding me? Hold on! The whole time, I’m looking at Ruben. There was no disappointment, because we weren’t competitive from the beginning. Would I have liked to have won? Sure. But the only reason that I wished I had won was in Seasons 3 and 4 and 5 and whatnot, the winner’s pictures were in the artwork, and mine wasn’t.

But you set the template for successful non-winners. Before there was Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson, or Adam Lambert, people would cite you as an example of how winning the show isn’t everything. Rolling Stone even put you on their cover first, before Ruben!

I wonder if they regret that! [laughs] I didn’t even know who they were. I didn’t know what Rolling Stone was. Oh God, I was such an idiot. I was so sheltered in North Carolina. I mean, I’d heard of it, but I thought it was more about the song.

“Like a Rolling Stone”?

No, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”

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For your whole “Rewind” campaign, you’re doing these cute flashback posts, and you recreated your Rolling Stone “Growing Up Clay” cover pose. Why did you do that?

Because I have professionals who are social media experts, who are telling me, “Stand here and then pull your shirt and we’re going to pretend it’s Rolling Stone.”

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[pauses to chat with a woman passing by on the set, then resumes interview] I’m so sorry. That was Mezhgan [Hussainy]. She did makeup on the season I was on. She did my face. And I’ll tell you — which I probably shouldn’t, but I’m going to tell you, and you can use it as you want — we both got in trouble because we took a picture one time [back when Hussainy was actually dating Simon Cowell] with me standing behind her, and my hands were on her boobs.

as seen on TMZ 

Like that famous Janet Jackson Rolling Stone cover?

Well, I was in the picture with her. It was obvious they were my hands. Oh my God, I got in trouble for that! It was like, a tabloid story. At the time, I was not publicly out, but I mean, people figured, so ironically, I was like: “So, which is it, motherfuckers? Am I gay or am I ‘molester’? Make up your damn mind!” Oh, I got in trouble for that, and she just said she got in trouble for it too. But that was brilliant. … Someone [a fan] just posted it the other day and said she had put [the photo] on her wall. She’d taken it and put her face over [Hussainy’s] face and put it on her wall, as like an aspiration. This is what she had hoped for.

I can’t believe how long ago that was! It was a very different time. And I can’t believe it has been 18 years since you released a single.

Yeah, 2008 — right before my son was born. He’s 18 now, and he wants me out of the house! I’m about to be an empty-nester, and a big part of why I stopped [doing music] was I didn’t want to be on the road or working when he was growing up. Now I’m done with that job. So, I’m going back to the old one! [laughs] It just felt right. I went on tour with Ruben, and I kind of realized that I missed it more than I thought I did. I realized this was an opportunity to do something that I wanted to get back to.

Carrie Underwood is always flying the flag for hard rock and heavy metal on American Idol (who can forget her impromptu audition-room covers of Korn and Drowning Pool last year?), so when she got to perform “Home Sweet Home” (a song she recorded as Idol’s farewell anthem in Season 9) and “Kickstart My Heart” with her heroes Motley Crue on this week’s Season 24 finale, she was in rock ‘n’ roll heaven.

“It was great. They were very lovely, and I’m like, ‘Welcome to my fever dream!’” the champion-turned-judge excitedly told reporters backstage Monday. “I don’t know how to describe this. It’s so random and amazing. I feel like American Idol has given me so much. Obviously being on the show, winning the show, coming back as judge… and now I’m singing with Billy Idol and Motley Crue? I’m just loving life right now.”

Unfortunately, while Underwood was thrilled with country singer Hannah Harper’s victory this year — describing herself as “a stan for Hannah” and saying, “I see a bit of myself in her” — her hopes of crowing a rock champion, or even just having rock representation in the top 10, were quickly dashed this year.

All of Season 24′s hard-rockin’ early standouts — like Noah Orion (that double-demin’d dude who cruised up to the auditions in his “wall of sound” deconstructed school bus, screeching Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”), emo belter Vincent Fondale, butt-rockers Kutter Bradley and Isaiah Moro, alt girl Genevieve Heyward, or even seasoned Great White frontman Brett Carlisle — went home early. Only Kutter and Genevieve even made it to fan-voted rounds.

But Underwood revealed that it was the elimination of another rocker in the top 20 (one that covered Heart’s “Alone,” a power ballad that was a breakthrough for Carrie in Season 4) that upset her the most. “Madison Moon was my girl,” she lamented. “She had such an incredible voice. I was devastated when she left.”

Underwood is all for having a metal-themed night in Season 25, although she “might pick more, like, nü-metal” if it was up to her. But which rock star would she want to be Nü-Metal Night’s guest mentor or judge?

“I’m friends with Jacoby Shaddix and he’s so uplifting and positive and amazing. I think he would be an incredible mentor,” she suggested, referring to the lead singer of recent collabortors Papa Roach. “I mean, there’s a lot of subgenres within the metal genre, so I think there’s something for everybody.”

So, Underwood still hasn’t given up on her fever dream that a hard-rocker from any subgenre could win American Idol one day, following in the footsteps of Season 13’s Caleb Johnson. “I’m always trying to encourage the rock singers when they come on the show, and I will give them a chance,” she declared. “Maybe we just need to keep at it. If we keep at it, then eventually America will be on board.”

For the past three years, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees have been announced live on American Idol, with the news often excitedly delivered by an actual Hall of Famer, the Class of 2022’s Lionel Richie. And Kelly Clarkson, the first Idol champion, will become eligible for Hall induction next year —  yes, artists become eligible 25 years after their first commercially released recording, and incredibly, Clarkson’s “A Moment Like This” came out in 2002! — the same year that Idol will celebrate its landmark 25th season.

Backstage at Season 24’s Idol finale, when this surprising math was pointed out and Richie was asked about the possibility of Clarkson ((who performed with Class of 2024 inductees Foreigner at that year’s Hall ceremony) being nominated or even inducted, he noticeably brightened.

“This will be the best thing ever for American Idol!” Richie exclaimed, although he acknowledged that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame committee’s behind-closed-doors nominating process baffles him sometimes. “The trick with [the Hall] is, you don’t know. Whenever you have that society… I’m sitting there going, ‘OK, it’s about time for Tina Turner.’ And then all of a sudden, years later [in the Class of 2021], it was Tina Turner. But one thing I will say is, that would be the fairytale ending story of life [for Clarkson to enter the Hall] —  if we can pull that off.”

On the Season 24 Idol finale, Richie was joined by his fellow judges Carrie Underwood and Luke Bryan for a performance of his 1986 crossover country hit “Deep River Woman” — Underwood’s idea, which he said was “one of the greatest compliments” that made him feel like a “proud bird.” And that wasn’t the first time this season that one of Richie’s songs was performed on the show — top 10 finalist Daniel Stallworth memorably had a breakthrough moment when he covered “All Night Long” in Hawaii. But as Richie and reporters discussed the subjects of rock ‘n’ roll, classic Idol moments that might be revisited to celebrate next year’s 25th season, and Lionel Richie covers, the conversation turned to one of the most historic and game-changing performances in Idol history.

So, what did Richie think of Season 7 winner David Cook’s “Hello”? Richie brightened even more when asked that question.

“Normally, I’m a nervous wreck when somebody says, ‘I’m doing this song,’” he admitted, recalling his initial reaction back in 2008. But as Richie often likes to say on Idol, Cook made “Hello” his own.

“When someone takes your song and makes it theirs, where you just don’t think anymore about me singing it, you just go, ‘I love the interpretation.’ He wore it out. Killed it. I’m glad you [asked about] that, because [Cook's performance] happened so fast. Again, the show is still running, but that was an amazing moment. I’ll go back now and watch clips, because now you can stop and think.

“We all have a little joke with this: If you are memorable, let’s say you’re top 40, and If [viewers] can remember a performance or a name, that’s a star,” Richie continued (adding that “the real hard work, and the real competition” is about to begin for newly crowned champion Hannah Harper). “You have to understand we’re at that point now where it’s: make it memorable. And that [Cook performance] was a memorable moment.”