The best thing Australia has produced since Forster’s Lager, an Australian beer that is said to be very drinkable. This is how INXS was once described at the start of their career, a career that would last twenty years and tragically end with the death of singer, figurehead and sex symbol Michael Hutchence. Michael Hutchence and his men began their career under the band name The Farris Brothers. That’s not so strange when you consider that three of the band members are brothers. Two of the Farris brothers were already in a band together, the third brother was part of another band along with his schoolmate Michael Hutchence.
Sydney
The two bands come together and thus The Farris Brothers are formed, consisting of Michael Hutchence as singer, Tim Farris on guitar, Andrew Farris on keyboard and guitar, Jon Farris on drums, Kirk Pengilly on guitar and saxophone, and Garry Gary Beers on bass. It’s a band with potential but they feel that they are completely in the wrong place for discovery in the city of Perth. Therefore, the entire band moves to Sydney. There, the boys perform seven nights a week in pubs and quickly gain a loyal fan base.
Contract
One of those fans is Gary Morris, the manager of Midnight Oil. This man ensures that the band can tour with Midnight Oil in 1979. During this tour, INXS is spotted by Chris Murphy, who works at the top indie label Deluxe. He can’t guarantee them success but the fact that a record company is interested in the band is enough for The Farris Brothers. They give up their tour with Midnight Oil (and the financial security that comes with it) and sign the contract in 1980. Soon the first single ‘Simple Simon’ is released. Under the name INXS, because the band thinks that sounds better than the previous tame band name. A few months later, the first INXS album is released, simply called INXS. The album is not an immediate success. Only the third single gets airplay on Australian radio, making INXS suddenly successful and even achieving gold status. The second album, Underneath The Colours, also goes gold, and INXS wants to look beyond their home country Australia.
International
After their tour of New Zealand, the boys make a trip to the United States to write songs for their next album and to look for a suitable producer. Back in Australia, INXS changes record labels and in 1982 the band records their third album Shabooh Shoobah. This album also achieves gold status. The first single released in the States is ‘The One Thing’ and it reaches the Top 30 of the Billboard Hot 100. The accompanying video is also frequently seen on MTV. 'The Original Sin' becomes INXS’s first hit in the Netherlands in 1984. (The song is the band’s first number 1 hit in Australia.) In 1985, INXS flies back to England to record their fourth album Listen Like Thieves. Immediately afterwards, the gentlemen go on a world tour. The album goes triple platinum in Australia and platinum in America. The second single from the album, ‘What You Need’, becomes a big hit in Australia and America.
Kick
Kick from 1987 becomes the best-selling INXS album worldwide of all time. ‘Need You Tonight’, ‘New Sensation’ and ‘Never Tear Us Apart’ all become big hits in 1988. Kick makes the Australian band international superstars. INXS is seen as the biggest threat to. According to the press, Michael Hutchence is the new Mick Jagger. Unfortunately, the band’s success goes to their heads. Hutchence has a different (supermodel) girlfriend every other week (including Kylie Minogue) and, like the rest of the band, comes into contact with drugs. While grunge is emerging, opposing the jet-set life of musicians, the band members live it up cheerfully and this does not do them any good.
Scandals
Their next album is called X and receives very poor reviews, not only because of the quality of the music but also because of Hutchence’s arrogance. The first single ‘Suicide Blonde’ reaches the Top 10 in many countries. ‘Bitter Tears’ and ‘Disappear’ also become hits. After the albums Welcome To Wherever You Are (1992), Full Moon, Dirty Hearts (1993) and The Greatest Hits (1994), Michael Hutchence becomes involved in a number of tabloid scandals for Elegantly Wasted (1997), the most well-known being his relationship with TV presenter Paula Yates. She breaks off her marriage with singer Bob Geldof and in July 1996 has a child with Hutchence, who is given the unlikely name Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily.
Definitive
On 16 August 1997, INXS celebrates its twentieth anniversary. A few months later, on 22 November, Michael Hutchence is found dead in a hotel room in Sydney. Whether it was strangulation gone wrong or suicide is never made clear. The rest of the band members decide not to disband and continue with live performances featuring various guest singers such as Terence Trent D'Arby. The gentlemen stop this in 2001, realising that INXS without Hutchence is simply not INXS… At the end of 2002, Definitive Inxs is released. It is a best-of album with two new songs: 'Salvation Jane' and 'Tight'. The first real CD without Michael Hutchence appears in spring 2003. The frontman is Jon Stevens, former singer of Noiseworks.
Top 2000
In the 23rd edition of the Top 2000, INXS holds the following positions:
Sunday Morning Classic: Kick
INXS’s most successful album is Kick from 1987. A well-deserved Sunday Morning Classic. On 6 February 2022, this album was therefore on our turntable.
“We wanted to make an album where every song was a potential single,” explains guitarist and saxophonist Kirk Pengilly about the ambitions with which INXS started Kick. The group approaches the writing process differently. Keyboardist Andrew Farriss and singer Michael Hutchence, who together wrote the hit What You Need, are now appointed as the band’s two songwriters. The duo writes a collection of songs, which they rehearse with the rest of the band in the famous Sydney Opera House. Producer Chris Thomas is not yet convinced there is enough material for Kick, and advises Farriss and Hutchence to spend two weeks in Hong Kong working on more material.
That turns out to be excellent advice, because before the plane to Hong Kong has taken off, Farriss already lays the foundation for one of INXS’s best-known songs. The musicians are waiting by their motel for the taxi to the airport when Farriss is struck by a wave of inspiration and comes up with the guitar riff for the song.
The musician asks the now arrived driver to wait a moment while he goes to get something from his room. In reality, Farriss goes inside to record the riff on cassette. Three quarters of an hour later, he gets into the taxi to the airport with an angry driver. When Hutchence hears the recording of the riff in Hong Kong, he writes lyrics for it in ten minutes. It will become one of INXS’s biggest hits: Need You Tonight.
Another highlight on Kick is Never Tear Us Apart, the ballad that has long held the highest Top 2000 position for the Australian band. In its original form, however, that track sounded quite different. “It sounded like Fats Domino, a bluesy, Rolling Stones-like 60s song,” producer Chris Thomas says about the demo version of the song. That version was eventually released in 2012 on the anniversary edition of Kick.
Again, Farriss provides the music for the track and Hutchence adds lyrics. “In 1986, I sat down at a piano and played the chords that would eventually become Never Tear Us Apart,” Farriss says on Hutchence’s 50th birthday. “I gave the demo to Michael and the lyrics he wrote were insanely inspired. Straight from the heart. I know how much those lyrics meant to him. At that moment, it was a very personal love song for him.”
At Hutchence’s suggestion, the tempo of the song is slowed down, and so Never Tear Us Apart becomes a grand, orchestral ballad. It becomes a track that is covered very often, by artists such as Tom Jones and Natalie Imbruglia, Paloma Faith and Joe Cocker. The song was also played at Hutchence’s funeral in 1997, while his brother Rhett and the other members of INXS carried his coffin.
When INXS finished recording Kick, manager Chris Murphy immediately went to New York to show the record to the bosses of Atlantic Records. Despite the strength of the material, the reaction there was lukewarm. Doug Morris, then head of the label, even offered Murphy a million dollars to go back to Australia and completely re-record the album.
The stunned manager turned down that offer and tried to generate enthusiasm for Kick among lower-level Atlantic staff. “I wanted them to storm the castle with pitchforks and demand the album be released,” Murphy told Billboard.
He played Need You Tonight to a group of Atlantic staff, and during that session only one person reacted enthusiastically: Andrea Ganis, who was then working in marketing. “She shouted, ‘That’s a fucking hit!’” Murphy explains. “Finally, someone at Atlantic shared my confidence in this record. That was all I wanted to hear.”
Independent promoters
Eventually, there was enough confidence at Atlantic to release Kick after all, although Murphy says he hired an independent promotion team to get INXS on the radio. The goal was to get the songs from Kick played on radio stations in American university towns. That tactic worked wonders: Kick reached number three in the US charts, and Need You Tonight dethroned Michael Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel as number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1988.
Incidentally, the story of the independent promoters is contradicted by Atlantic. Label boss Doug Morris would later say that he immediately thought Kick was a fantastic album, and that he predicted Michael Hutchence would become a big star. But INXS songwriter Andrew Farriss also remembers the resistance from the label. “They all thought we were aliens. Their first reaction was: ‘You can’t release this!’”
(source: NPO)
