On Monday, Chilean-American singer-songwriter Marilyn Hucek auditioned for The Voice Season 30 with her own take on Latina superstar Shakira’s dancehall crossover hit, “La Tortura.” OG coach Adam Levine praised her for pulling off such a tricky and vibrato-heavy song, and she ultimately joined Team Adam.

Hucek made it to the Battle Rounds — also turning the chair of new coach Queen Latifah, who told her, “You managed to capture that cadence, that pocket, and you did it your way” — on the strength of her performance alone, without relying on any sob story. But when she sat down for an LPTV interview last year at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, on the night of her vinyl release party for her debut album MARILYN, she opened up about her first, unsuccessful Voice audition, which took place way back in 2017.

“I went to a convention center, and there were thousands of people and I waited in line all day. It was not at a time when I felt I was at my best artistic level, so I’m not surprised it didn’t work out,” said Hucek, who didn’t make it far enough in the casting process to actually sing in front of those four big red chairs. At the time, she didn’t even tell anyone that she’d auditioned.

“I kind of felt like I was a closeted artist, so to speak,” Hucek mused. “I never would sing in front of people. There was a time where I stopped singing in front of people, because I think I was taking it too seriously.”

Hucek confessed that she truly had no idea how to break into the music business, which is why she answered NBC’s open call. “It was kind of funny because I was like, ‘Oh, this is how you make it! You have to audition for The Voice and you have to get on the show,’” she chuckled. “It’s really not the case anymore, but that’s how I felt: that this was the only way to do it. And then I was like, ‘OK, well, I auditioned for The Voice, so I can put my dreams to rest and move on.’ But the truth is, I could never move on, and it was always in me. It was like I had locked my dream in this Pandora’s box and just tucked it away. It was always in there beating, trying to get out.”

Hucek continued to focus on her career as a fashion blogger/buyer in New York, until her musician father’s long battle with early-onset Alzheimer’s — another personal-life detail that she opted not to mention on The Voice this week — inspired her to reopen that Pandora’s box. And in 2020, she made the bold and risky decision to leave her cushy job at Ralph Lauren to pursue her long-deferred musical dream.

“It wasn’t until around the pandemic, when I started writing my own music, that I felt more confident in my artistic self, and that’s when I started releasing music and really going after it,” she explained. “Before that, it was a lot more just singing covers. … And I think that singing covers, you kind of compare yourself to other artists, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m never going to sound like them.’ Well, of course you’re never going to sound like them! Because you have your own voice and your own unique ability to just be yourself, which is what I learned.”

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Ironically, Hucek will be singing cover songs again on The Voice (which, unlike rival talent show American Idol, doesn’t regularly allow contestants to do originals), so she won’t have the opportunity to perform her deeply personal tracks from MARILYN — many of which were inspired by her father, who died in 2023. But at age 34, Hucek returns to the show with much more professional experience, as well as life experience. She has attended New York University’s summer songwriting workshop, the female artist development program New Roots Nashville, and a nine-month course at the Los Angeles Academy for Artists & Music Production (LAAMP), which was co-founded by Norwegian super-producers Stargate and is executive-directed by industry veteran Chris Anokute (who has worked with Katy Perry, Rihanna, Fifth Harmony, Zara Larsson, Bebe Rexha, and Joss Stone). So, she is clearly ready for battle.

“I don’t think I’ll ever not continue to hone my craft,” Hucek asserted. “I’m the type of person who always wants to get better and always wants to learn.” Surely she has made her late dad proud, and he will be watching over her as she continues her Voice journey. Read more about that journey in the LPTV video above and the Q&A below.

LPTV: Before making music your full-time career, you were a successful fashion blogger with The Lunar Phase, and you had a day job as a fashion buyer in NYC. Why didn’t you pursue music seriously before?

MARILYN HUCEK: Honestly, I will say that I’ve always had a passion for music very early on… but it wasn’t until 2020, when the pandemic happened. My late father had been suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s for a very long time, and he got COVID and he was in the nursing home, and we weren’t able to go visit him. It was so tough and painful. I ended up writing a song in his name [“Memories”], and I felt compelled to release it into the world. And ever since then, I haven’t looked back. That’s when I took that leap of faith. So, now more than ever as an artist, I feel like I have this dual purpose of not only pursuing my dream as a musician, but also using my platform to raise Alzheimer’s awareness. … In fact, $3 for every [MARILYN] vinyl record sold is going to the Alzheimer’s Association, and five percent of the royalties for [the MARILYN track] “Neil Young” are going towards the Alzheimer’s Association. I hope to make a bigger impact as I grow.

When you quit fashion to pursue music, was there any self-doubt? Or were other people, maybe even family members, saying, “What are you doing?” Music is not the most stable vocation, after all.

Interestingly enough, no one that I spoke to questioned it, which is funny. But no, I didn’t have any doubts. I think that’s how I knew it was the right thing to do, because as soon as I started pursuing music, it felt like I’d found that last piece of the puzzle. I was like, “Yes! I have found my purpose!”  I think when I was working in corporate fashion, I was searching — and I didn’t know for what.

Are you from a musical family?

Interestingly enough, my parents met through music. My mom is Chilean, and she was in Chile studying to be a musician. My dad was a piano hobbyist. He actually was a scientist, working for NASA, but he really enjoyed the arts. And they met in the piano room.

When you wrote “Memories,” was your father able to hear it and realize it was about him? Did you play it for him?

Yeah, I played it for him a lot. Music was always something that connected us through the years.

In “Neil Young,” there’s the standout line: “You don’t even know I’m a singer now.” I’ve read that musical therapy can help people with dementia, Alzheimer’s, or brain injuries, because music holds such deep core memories. And I know you used to play Neil’s Harvest Moon for your father.

Exactly. And at the time that I decided to take that leap of faith, I’m not sure if he knew [that I had become a professional singer]. I can’t be certain. But that’s where that line came from. … It’s a very heavy song, about how he eventually forgot my name. But with music, if I played him his favorite songs and his favorite artists… the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Eagles, Bob Marley… he’d come to life.

Are there any other especially meaningful or emotional MARILYN tracks you’d like to discuss?

I would say one of the toughest songs to write was “Love to Hate You,” because it revealed the messier sides of me and the character traits that you don’t really want to brag about. But the comforting thing about that song is now people are like, “Oh, that’s my favorite song. It’s really relatable.” And I’m like, “Oh, thank God I’m not the only one!” … I wrote that song when I was at LAAMP and got a lot of great feedback, so it was very encouraging. But during the week that I was writing it, it was torturous, because I was really just digging into my soul, just trying to get at the heart of my feelings. Now that I’ve gotten it into a song, when I’m singing it and performing it, I feel like I’m healing from that experience, which has been great.

Is it ever hard for you to perform these songs live, especially in an intimate setting like Licorice Pizza Records?

Yeah, it depends. I recently was performing at the Annapolis Songwriters Festival, and it was broad daylight, and I had all these faces looking at me. In the past, I haven’t had an issue, but it’s really day-to-day or show-to-show, because I remember in that moment I was like, “Oh my God, all these faces!” I was like, “I’m just going to close my eyes for a second.” Usually, I try to just do the songs justice and perform them so that people can experience them how I want them to. But sometimes, it’s unpredictable.

Sadly, watching a parent suffer from Alzheimer’s is something many adult children have gone through. I imagine you’ve had fans reach out with stories about how your music has helped them, or that they relate to your story.

Yeah, absolutely. People DM me or tell me after shows that they have a loved one, or that someone in their family has gone through Alzheimer’s; they’ll tell me the music has connected with them. It’s touching and it’s sad to know that other people are going through it, but that’s the reality. I just think the more we can talk about it, the more we can make a difference and heal and educate people.

Did making your MARILYN album help you heal?

Well, songwriting is my therapy, through and through. Even growing up, I would just do poems and stuff whenever I was in my feels. And yes, I think that it’s been very, very healing, especially with this album, because it’s so personal and so introspective. It’s gotten me through a lot of adversity on my emotional rollercoaster.

Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear chillingly begins with audio of his 911 call on the night of 2008 South Carolina private plane crash that took of lives of the Blink-182 drummer’s two close friends and left him drummer fighting for his life with third-degree burns of 65 percent of his body. The new documentary ends with Barker finally deciding to fly again, after not setting foot on an airplane for years and even taking the nine-day transatlantic Queen Mary voyage every time he toured internationally. While Louder Than Fear’s production began almost a decade ago, Barker says the film couldn’t have come out any sooner.

“I couldn’t have put it out even five years ago, because I hadn’t flown,” he explains. “I started filming it in 2017, shortly after my book was released… and at that time, we had filmed a lot of this cool footage on the boat going to England, and [the filmmakers] had put a first pass of the documentary together. They had sent it to me and said, ‘We have an idea for the ending where you walk to a plane — like you’re going to fly one day.’ At the time, my plan was to never fly again in my entire life. Even thinking of it gave me anxiety, made me lose sleep for days. So, I said, ‘I can’t do that. I can never do that. … Honestly, that will never be the ending. I don’t know what the ending is to this movie, but if we can’t figure it out, just put it out after I die. I don’t have an ending for it.’”

Spoiler alert: Barker got his happy ending after all. Speaking via Zoom from the Calabasas home he shares with the love of his life, wife of five years Kourtney Kardashian (with whom he was good friends for about 15 years before they finally started dating in 2020), his face lights up as bright as a stadium stage every time their nearly 3-year-old son, Rocky, toddles into the living room. It’s a life that the 50-year-old Barker — who was working as an Orange County garbageman before he got the fateful opportunity to become Blink-182’s supposedly temporary replacement drummer in 1998, and has battled PTSD, addiction, and various health problems in the years since — never imagined for himself.

“I didn’t set out for much, besides trying to figure out a way to play drums and survive, have money to eat and somewhere to sleep,” Barker admits. “So, everything now is magnitudes above what I could have ever dreamed of.”

Barker developed his love for drumming when he was not much older than Rocky is now, after his mother Gloria — his biggest champion, who sadly died right before he started high school — bought him an Animal-themed Muppets drum kit. And the drums still feel “like a toy” to him. “I’ve never gotten over it, since I was 4 years old; it’s the same way I look at BMX bikes,” he gushes. “I can smell what they smell like when they’re brand-new. Drums are like a piece of art when I look at them. I never get sick of it. I eat, sleep, and breathe it. … I feel weird when I don’t play the drums! It’s a form of communication and expression that you just can’t do besides playing the drums.”

However, Barker also presciently developed his fear of flying at an early age, also from his mother. “I’ll share something with you that didn’t make it into the documentary,” he says. “When I was 19 and I was playing in a band called Feeble, and I told my manager Mike one night — I was completely sober, it’s not like I was drinking or anything like that — ‘I’m going to die in a plane crash.’ I was emotional and upset, and he was like, ‘Dude, what are you talking about?’

“I had only flown once, with my mom, and she was just hysterically crying. So, I had all these signs,” Barker continues. “I had a fight with it for a while. I was like, ‘Did I cause [my own accident], because I was so afraid of it and always talking about it?’ I would have my mom’s rosary from when she passed away and I’d carry it with me when I flew, and I was always what they call ‘white-knuckling it’ during takeoff. I was super-scared. I’m like, ‘Did I just put it in the air?’ And I could believe that [making that prediction at age 19] was probably what led to me being in a plane crash. It’s something that haunted me way before I even sort of knew what it was.”

Exactly 18 years ago, on Sept. 19, 2008, there were other signs. When Barker left that day for his concert at South Carolina’s Five Points complex (a “TRV$DJAM” event with his friend Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein, who was the other lone crash survivor but died a year later from an accidental overdose), Alabama, Barker’s daughter with ex-wife Shanna Moakler, uncontrollably sobbed, “The roof is on fire!” as she begged him not to go. And when Barker later saw the Learjet 60 idling on the tarmac of Columbia Metropolitan Airport, he had such a bad gut feeling that he phoned his father to express his concerns before he reluctantly boarded.

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“I had every sign. I had Alabama warning me, and then I had my feeling when I got to the plane. Everything was there for me. But I had no life lesson to teach me to act on it,” Barker recalls. Now that he’s flying again — albeit only when he absolutely has to, mostly for work — he knows to never ignore his instincts again.

“There’s been times where I get to a plane and they’ve switched the tail number, and if I don’t know anything about the plane and we’re flying private or something, I just say, ‘I’m going to get off the plane and I’ll meet you guys in a day,’” Barker says. “I have to go through a certain process just to feel safe. I want to know what plane we’re on. I want to know its safety records. I want to know the pilots are good. I’ve been on tour and I’ve looked side of stage and I saw our pilot drinking, partying, and I was like, ‘We are not flying tonight, I’m sorry. This dude is s—faced. We’re not going anywhere tonight. Can we please let him sober up for when we fly in the morning?’ I’m so clued-in to everything that it’s really easy for just the smallest error to really have a big effect. Now if I have a feeling or I see something like that, I just call it.”

Barker was gravely injured in the 2008 crash, which occurred when the plane overran the runway, broke through a fence, hit an embankment, and exploded during takeoff. After Barker managed to escape through an emergency exit door, he was covered in jet fuel and flames before he stopped/dropped/rolled to extinguish most of the fire enveloping his body. Despite his injuries, he never gave up on the idea that he’d eventually play the drums again. “I broke my hand once. I broke my foot once. I broke my arm again, and toured with one hand. I’ve toured with one foot. As long as I’m here and I’m breathing, I’m playing the f—ing drums. I’m going to find a way,” he asserts. However, as he spent more than 11 weeks in hospitals and burn centers, undergoing 16 surgeries and multiple blood transfusions and skin grafts, there were even more serious concerns.

“Yeah, there was a lot of talk like ‘you might not play drums again’ … but it started off way worse than that,” Barker reveals. “The first month at the burn center, I was in such critical condition, I would overhear them [wondering] if I was going to live, if I didn’t get through these next couple surgeries, if this blood transfusion didn’t work. It went from being really, really scary then to being, ‘We are more than likely going to have to amputate your foot, because these grafts are not working and we’re running out of skin.’” To this day, Barker still has nerve damage in the pinky and ring fingers of his left hand, but he stresses, “They work. My hand works. I can’t complain.”

Now Barker is considered one of the greatest working rock drummers today — Questlove, Sheila E, Lars Ulrich, Tommy Lee, the late Taylor Hawkins, and even Stewart Copeland praise his talents in Louder Than Fear — and he actually has a career goal to become to most collaborative drummer in music history. He’s currently working again with pop/punk band Yellowcard (after co-producing their 2025 comeback album, Better Days) and he just finished a record with Alkaline Trio (whose Matt Skiba fronted Blink-182 before Tom DeLonge returned in 2023); the classic Blink lineup, whose emotional reunion with DeLonge following band member Mark Hoppus’s cancer battle is also explored in Louder Than Fear, plan to begin work on a new album next year.

Another, posthumous collaboration, with rapper/singer-songwriter Oliver Tree, will hopefully be released eventually. The end credits of Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear includes a sadly very long list of dedications to Barker’s deceased loved ones (including DJ AM and two other friends who died in the 2008 plane crash, Barker’s assistant Chris Baker and bodyguard Charles Still), and a last-minute addition to that list is  Tree, who died in helicopter accident, at age 32, while on tour in Brazil this past June. “That was awful for me,” says Barker, who recorded “a bunch of unreleased stuff” with Tree and is waiting for the right moment, out of respect for Tree’s family, for that music to come out.

“He had actually hit me up two weeks before [he died]. I think he said, ‘I’ve been recording in fiftysomething countries’ — he said something crazy — ‘and I want to bring it back to the studio. I’d love to work on this with you.’ And I said, ‘Yes, anytime, anything. That’s always how it goes with you.’ Because I loved working with him,” Barker reveals. “There’ll never be anybody like him.”

Flying is, understandably, still a struggle for Barker, who finally was able to board a plane in August 2021 thanks to his wife Kourtney’s support and encouragement. “I had to first overcome the idea of just, ‘You’re not going to die. Just get on the plane, have faith in God, everything’s going to be fine.’ That’s still the process for me,” he explains. “I acknowledged that this thing had such power over me and was controlling my entire life, controlling how I lived, how my kids lived, how I toured. So, I just set out on this road to overcome it. And then it wasn’t until afterwards — I didn’t even tell anyone — but after I flew, I said, ‘Now I can start thinking about my documentary again.’ I had years of sobriety under my belt. I was flying, my kids were flying. Now my story could be told.”

Barker admits that he also still grapples with “survivor’s guilt,” and he still sometimes wonders why he was given a “second chance.” Along with the plane crash, and an addiction to prescription painkillers that he finally kicked in 2008 (ironically, while he was recovering in the hospital), in 2018 he developed blood clots in his arms and then had to fight off a resultant staph infection and cellulitis.) However, making Louder Than Fear provided him with some answers.

“They say when something really traumatic happens to you, you can curl up in a ball and just waste away or die, or you get up and fight. And I definitely chose to get up and fight,” Barker states. “So, I feel like my purpose is to talk about my experience and what I lived through — talk about my story of having nothing, coming from nothing, and making something of myself, being relentlessly determined and not giving up, getting up and fighting time and time again, any time I faced adversity. I feel with the stories and the lessons you can learn from my documentary, maybe ultimately that’s why I was spared — to share this with the world.”

Barker has been deeply touched by the response to his film, from fans who’ve told him that it inspired them to get clean, face a phobia, seek mental health help, reconnect with estranged friends, or simply pursue their dreams. “I’ve never experienced so much love from anything I’ve done in my life,” he says proudly. “I’ve had a lot of highs. I’ve made some amazing albums. I’ve played the Grammys with Drake and Eminem and Lil Wayne. I’ve lived so many of my dreams. But I’ve never had anything like the overwhelming abundance of love like I’ve had from the documentary. It’s been really cool.” And the movie-making experience has made Barker thankful for even the bad things that have happened to him.

“Life’s not promised,” he states. “It’s not for certain that you’re just going to go through life and everything’s going to be perfect. I’m a good example of that. But I’m so grateful to be here. I did everything they said I couldn’t, and I’ve lived through it all. I couldn’t imagine life any other way now.”

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This interview orignally appeared on Gold Derby..

Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 6, 2001, Britney Spears, at the peak of her it-girl pop powers, delivered one of the most electrifying and gabbed-about numbers in MTV Video Music Awards history — one that not only solidified her status as the 2000s’ reigning pop princess, but established her equally sinuous co-star as a member of reptilian royalty.

Showcasing a sultrier, more sophisticated sound on the Neptunes-produced “I’m a Slave 4 U,” Spears strutted onstage at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House with a seven-foot albino Burmese python draped around her dainty shoulders, looking like the ultimate in-control snake-charmer. But that was just a testament to her professionalism at the time — because she was actually deathly terrified of her scaly co-star, according to that evening’s veteran python-wrangler, Mike Hano.

“She was extremely, extremely scared at first. I was very impressed with the way that she was able to just focus and force herself to do what she needed to do,” recalls Hano, a former vice president of the New York Herpetological Society. “She’s from Louisiana, and there are several types of venomous snakes down there and people do get bit sometimes. So, when I first showed up for the first rehearsal day, she was very frightened.”

Spears did have some reason to be concerned. Hano, who didn’t initially realize when he was hired how elaborate the “I’m a Slave 4 U” production would be, explains: “Britney Spears is pretty small — and she was going to be dancing with [the python]. She had to position the snake on her shoulders by herself and dance around, and then she had to hand it off to a third person. … It’s easy to screw up that kind of thing. You know, it gets wrapped around your arm and doesn’t want to let go. It could have been really risky, because that was a live performance. One take.”

Hano calmly notes that Spears’s snake was a “relatively young animal” and not fully developed, and that the Burmese breed is usually “pretty mellow” and “pretty handleable” when raised in captivity. But two years before the 2001 VMAs, it had become illegal to keep Burmese pythons as pets in the New York City area, so he still had to obtain a special permit from the NYC Department of Health in order for one to be used during Spears’s MTV performance.

photo courtesy of MTV/YouTube

“The bad thing is [Burmese pythons can get] tremendous, and most people have no business keeping one, because they get big enough to kill you easily. And it’s not that they mean to kill you; it’s usually a so-called accident, a feeding response, where they think that they’re constricting a prey item,” Hano explains. “Once they’re wrapped around something, they can’t even see what they’re wrapped around. All they know is [the object they’re wrapped around is] warm and it’s struggling — so, the snake keeps squeezing. There was an incident back in the ’90s where a young man, I think about 19 years old, right here in New York City, was killed by his pet Burmese python.”

It’s no wonder that Spears — who was the same age as the above-mentioned unlucky python victim, just 19, when she performed at the 13th annual MTV Video Music Awards — was skittish when it came time to rehearse with the python. So, it was imperative to Hano that he spend some quality one-on-one time with her, to put her at ease. However, in order to do that, he had to get past her entourage.

“They had some person who I guess was supposed to be my ‘handler’ or whatever, my liaison, and they had me sitting in the audience area,” Hano remembers. “So, I’m just waiting until they’re going to need me, and I told this guy several times that I would like to have a few minutes alone with Ms. Spears, so that if she had any questions or concerns, she could speak to me in private. And if she’s going to be holding the snake, she could try it away from everybody watching — just me, her, and the snake. Sometimes with that kind of thing, if [an inexperienced-with-reptiles performer is] a little uncomfortable, they can hold the rear part of the snake’s body while I’m holding the front part of the body, and as they get more comfortable with it, they can gradually move to the point where they can hold the snake on their own. That’s the way that I prefer to do it. Why would you want a hundred people watching you, if you’re scared and you might be a little embarrassed? And I told this guy that a couple of times, ‘Give me a few minutes alone with her, especially if she’s scared.’ I don’t think she had ever handled a snake before.”

Hano was eventually granted his request for private meeting with the pop starlet, although the ensuing encounter was explicably awkward. “They didn’t even let me speak to her before. This is my first time face-to-face with her — and I’m holding this python! And all of a sudden, she’s not ready to do that. I could see that she was uncomfortable. But [the liaison] gave me a few minutes — and it only took just a very few minutes — where she was able to sit with me on the sidelines and realize that it’s not a big deal to hold a snake. So, we did the rehearsal that day, and then it was either later that day or the next day that I got a call from the agent: They wanted to do an additional rehearsal with the snake, just so that she would get very comfortable with it.”

On the second rehearsal day, Spears “said something to me about how she ‘broke out in hives’ everywhere that the snake had touched her during the rehearsal — which is just really not possible,” Hano chuckles. But in the end, she was “very professional, very focused. I remember a couple of times when the director said, ‘OK, everybody take five’ and basically everyone walked offstage, she [stayed onstage] by herself. You could kind of hear her counting: ‘One, two, three, four…’ She kept practicing her moves by herself, without the music playing. You could tell that she was a really hard worker. And she did fine. She did great.”

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Interestingly, there was also a tiger in Spears’s jungle-themed “I’m a Slave 4 U” number — but even though it turns out that that big cat was handled by none other than future Tiger King star Doc Antle, most fans only remember that yellow python. Animal rights activists groups like PETA did condemn Spears’s VMAs performance at the time, but Hano recall the public outrage being more focused on the tiger back then. “And I sort of agree about that,” he notes. “Those animals are not really meant to be around pyrotechnics and loud music. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t be doing that with tigers. But with snakes it’s different, because they can’t see or hear or whatever.”

And so, Spears’s “I’m A Slave 4 U” number became iconic largely because of the leggy pop star’s legless dance partner. It has been referenced in pop culture many times since —Grimes’s “Genesis” music video, Kaley Cuoco’s epic Britney tribute on Lip Sync Battle, Witney Carson’s slithering tango routine on Dancing With the Stars, even a sci-fi/Jungle Book-esque animated short  that MTV commissioned to commemorate the 2001 VMAs’ 20th anniversary. And the golden girl herself has even shared fond memories, retroactively christening her golden co-star “Banana” in a 2012 tweet, and declaring this performance one of her all-time favorites in a 2023 Facebook post, even if she later claimed in her autobiography The Woman in Me that Banana — as the female python will henceforth be known for the remainder of this article — got up in her face and hissed directly at her mid-song.

Sometimes I wonder what this snake is up to these days… Anybody know where it’s at? haha http://t.co/cfKClrGe

— Britney Spears (@britneyspears) August 19, 2012

Hano isn’t sure where that moniker came from, because “Banana” was nameless at the time — “It can’t even hear you saying its name, you know!” he quips — and he certainly didn’t expect this Y2K-era moment to be so epic and enduring. While he was excited to work at the Metropolitan Opera House (because he had sung in a children’s choir there from 1976 to ’78, and had even shared the stage with Luciano Pavarotti at a televised 1977 concert special), he wasn’t well-versed in modern pop music, and wasn’t even aware that Spears was pop’s most mega megastar at the time. It was only when he returned home that evening with Banana, after the VMAs wrapped, that he realized he’d been part of MTV history.

“I actually took the subway on the night of the job — because how are you going to park down there? — so I just had the snake in a cooler,” Hano chuckles. “It was a half-hour later that I came out of the train station and walked into my building, and there’s all these kids hanging out on the front stoop. They all knew me, they knew that I had a bunch of animals, so they saw me coming and said, ‘Hey, did you see that VMAs thing with Britney Spears? She had a snake!’ The whole neighborhood already knew about this thing! And I’m telling them, ‘Yeah, yeah, I just did that job. I got the snake right here on my shoulder, in this cooler.’ … And then I actually took out the snake for them to check out. They could not believe it.”

Hano, who was just the wrangler and not the actual owner of the superstar snake, says that as of 2020, the original Banana was still alive and residing “somewhere in upstate New York,” although at an estimated age of 28, she is now “getting up there” in her golden years. (The average lifespan for a Burmese python is 20 to 25 years, but well-kept domestic pythons can live to be 30 or older.) However, Hano and Banana did collaborate again on Steven Klein fashion shoot for a W magazine September 2007 issue — when he was shocked to see how much larger the python has become. The Burmese python is one of the biggest snake species in the world, and Banana, who’d been about seven feet long and weighed about 25 pounds in 2001, had now more than doubled in length and quadrupled in weight.

photo courtesy of Mike Hano

“The snake had gotten much bigger, but the owner failed to admit it to me. And when I picked up the snake on the way to the job and realized how big it had grown, it was too late to look for another one,” Hano recalls. “Fortunately, at this job the models were completely covered in greasy black body paint — which I had also not been informed of! — so the decision was made to suspend the snake from the pipe structure behind them, instead of draping it on their bodies.”

There have been other changes, much more serious, since Spears’s landmark MTV moment. Just five days after this performance — Sept. 11, 2001 — New York City was a very different place, obviously. And Spears, who racked up 28 VMAs nominations and six wins over the course of her career (including the lifetime-achievement Video Vanguard Award in 2011), will probably never grace the MTV Video Music Awards’ stage again. (Her most recent VMAs performance was amlonst exactly a decade ago, when her comeback appearance was actually hyped by a promo starring a slithering Banana lookalike.) But Hano has fond memories of the VMAs, and he wishes Spears well, still impressed by the talent and work ethic he witnessed during their brief time together.

“As far as her professional career or career in entertainment, I have no thoughts or feelings about that,” states Hano, who hasn’t closely followed the #FreeBritney movement or Spears’s many ups and downs over the past 25 years. “But I’d say that she’s already accomplished an awful lot. I hope she’s able to get through that and enjoy her life. She’s worked hard and she’s had a lot of success, and she deserves to enjoy it. And if she does work again, I hope it’s just because it’s something she wants to do — not for anyone else, and not for money. She should be able to do whatever she wants to do.”

This is an updated story that originally ran on Yahoo. The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards will take place Sept. 27 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

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.