Whamania! and careless whispers

As a teenager in the 1950s, pop Svengali Simon Napier Bell entertained notions of becoming a jazz trumpeter - and there are those who'd argue that the flamboyant patter merchant, who made his name as one of the industry's movers and shakers in the 1960s, has been blowing his own trumpet ever since.

One-time manager of The Yardbirds, Japan and Wham!, these days Napier Bell, who lives in Thailand with his boyfriend of 15 years, is better known as the author of two highly scurrilous music biz tomes: the acerbic 1960s memoir You Don't Have To Say You Love Me (named after the hit he co-wrote for Dusty Springfield) and Black Vinyl, White Powder, a sex and drugs social history of rock and pop.

Now retired from pop management - 'I suppose I'd still do it today if the right person came along, but the problem with the music business is that only one in a hundred people are worth knowing, the rest are all idiots' - he once more finds himself on the promotion trail for his latest book I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch.

Part travelogue, part pop hype masterclass, the book details the three years Napier Bell and then business partner Jazz Summers spent in the mid-1980s crafting Whamania! It also chronicles the Machiavellian machinations that went into ensuring Wham! became the first Western pop group to play Communist China - a stunt aimed at breaking the group in the US.

But given that a lot of careless whispers, not to mention careless behaviour in an LA public toilet, has passed under the bridge since then, why publish the book now?

'The book isn't so much about Wham! as the three years I spent managing them and the way I was living my life at the time,' says Napier Bell, whose motto seems to be live fast, do lunch. 'It's also an attempt to move away from simply writing about music.'

But, despite his efforts, it's the industry bitching that catches the eye, such as the bizarre decision to get Left-wing film-maker Lindsay Anderson (If, O Lucky Man!) to direct a documentary, Foreign Skies, about the events in China.

'Lindsay was a complete pain in the arse from day one. The first time I saw the film it was about shopping and people carrying refrigerators around. Seventy miles of film and he didn't capture one conversation.' Then there's Napier Bell's prickly relationship with George Michael, who comes across as a surly, po-faced control freak.

'George's problem is that he doesn't trust anybody. Don't get me wrong: as an artist George is brilliant. After he left Wham! every single he released in America during the 1980s went to No.1. Nobody else did that, not Madonna, not Michael Jackson.' (In fact George Michael's seventh US single, Kissing A Fool, released in 1988, only reached No. 5).

'I had to laugh when he got 100 journalists together to tell them he was quitting the music business because he doesn't like publicity,' Napier Bell continues. 'That's so George. Ricky Martin gave up music three years ago to work in an Indian orphanage - the difference was he didn't tell the world's press.'