Like their British counterparts, Australia's INXS were as influenced by funk as by punk. Unlike their British counterparts, they weren't afraid of getting their hands dirty. INXS were sweaty, dirty, and sensual, and most of that sweat, dirt, and sensuality emanated from their snake-hipped lead singer. Without Michael Hutchence, INXS would have been a hardworking traditional Australian rock band. Without INXS, Michael Hutchence would have been a tousled, enigmatic singer who fancied himself a bit of an artiste. Together, they were a potent mixture of muscle and mystery, a band of brothers that came from a land Down Under to dish out hit after international hit for more than a decade.
LM: Watching Michael Hutchence was my sexual awakening. He was a pockmarked ruffian with greasy hair, but I couldn't deny the fire he lit inside me as I took in my first INXS concert at Manhattan's Felt Forum. Yet for all that rock-god smolder and swagger, Hutchence had the soul of a poet. My favorite INXS songs reveal a Romeo who yearns for lasting love and a life partner. Some say that this may have been his undoing. Hutchence's death was the first time I'd lost one of my idols. The day after, I was in Prague, so I thought it apt to visit the Charles Bridge, the setting for the "Never Tear Us Apart" video. There were already a few dozen fans there. That's when I realized he was our generation's Jim Morrison. While interviewing Andrew and Tim Farriss for this chapter, I could tell that they were still dealing with the loss 16 years later. But they weren't melancholy conversations, because we were talking about the part of Hutchence that will never die: his songs.
JB: I started wondering about who INXS's closest modern equivalent might be. A funky rock band proficient at writing pop songs led by a spotlight-hogging singer who makes the ladies itch and drool. The only band anywhere in the vicinity of that description would be Maroon 5. And Maroon 5 don't even measure up to INXS's shoelaces. I listen to "Devil Inside," "What You Need," and "Never Tell Us Apart," and I think, Boy, could we use a band like that today.
ANDREW FARRISS: "Original Sin" was a song that Michael and I wrote. Michael had written a lyric about watching white and black kids playing in a schoolyard, and we both knew we didn't want it to be some gratuitous holding-hands, love-song thing. We wanted a song that was funky, which is part of the reason we'd approached Nile Rodgers.
TIM FARRISS: Nile loved the funk in the band, and the fact that we were obviously big fans of his had a lot to do with [his wanting to work with us]. Nile was my hero—that is, Nile Rodgers the producer. I'd heard his stuff with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, and I was like, "It's the same guitar player. Who is that guy?" Then it blew me away when Bowie used him, and Madonna. I used to drive the rest of the band crazy playing his solo album [1983's Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove] on the tour bus. In fact, we used to sing one of the songs, "Yum-Yum," right before we went onstage every night: "Poontang, poontang, where you want it / Slept all night with my hand on it / Give me some of that yum yum / Before I sleep tonight."
NILE RODGERS: I was in Canada going to check out U2, and INXS were opening. I had never heard a bass drum sound like the bass drum in INXS. I was like "Wow, who is this guy?" I went to their dressing room, and they were huge Nile Rodgers fans. They started singing a song from my solo album in four-part harmony! I was like, "Hey, guys, you want to work together?"
ANDREW FARRISS: [Having Rodgers produce "Original Sin"] really was a big deal, a defining moment. We knew exactly the importance of what that meant, and we put everything we could think of into that recording. We had never been treated with that kind of respect by that level of musician and producer. He was mixing funk up with jazz and blues. In 1983 these guys were the guys—they were top-line, front-end, on-the-radio-all-the-time people and in the consciousness of music, fashion, everything right-there-and-then. So we were no longer skirting the edges of the scene, we were in it. We couldn't believe he'd want to work with a bunch of young people from Australia. At first people thought we were British because we had funny accents. People would say to us, "Are you guys from Austria?" And then you had Paul Hogan throwing a shrimp on the barbie … The funny thing is, we don't call it "shrimp," we call them "prawns."
TIM FARRISS: We were the first young white band to use Nile. I remember seeing John Taylor, and he was saying how much [Duran Duran] would love to work with him: "You used Nile Rodgers, eh? How was he?" I was like, "Awesome, man, but I don't think he likes bass players." I was trying to turn him off to the idea. Sure enough, they ended up using him. That trick didn't work.
ANDREW FARRISS: When we tracked "Original Sin" in the Power Station [in New York City], I remember Kirk [Pengilly, saxophone], Jon [Farriss, drums], and Michael had done some backing vocals, and Nile said, "Yeah, that's pretty cool, but you know what? I think we need a different kind of voice on one section of this." The next minute, Daryl Hall walks through the door, and we're like, "Daryl Hall's in the room?!"
RODGERS: When I walked into the studio, they were intimidated. I said, "I can't make a record with people who are in awe of me." They had already done a vocal arrangement of one of my songs that was a flop. That's some kind of weird hero worship. I picked up the guitar and said, "We're gonna rehearse the song." Then I went out and secretly told the engineer to record the rehearsal. This is a true story: "Original Sin" is a one-take record. After we finished rehearsing, I said, "We're done." They said, "What do you mean?" I was like, "That's it, that's the take."
ANDREW FARRISS: The song caused some difficulty for us—not so much everywhere else in the world, mainly in North America. It was virtually banned from U.S. radio, and the record company freaked out. We'd had quite a lot of success with the first two singles, "The One Thing" and "Don't Change." Then, when we pulled "Original Sin" out, they were like, "You're going to do that?" It just wasn't the kind of song that people would have had on the radio at that particular time. We loved the song. Michael was very proud of his lyrics. We sought our own way of putting an idea of love and peace and humanity into a song. It's not that the lyrics were crazy, but I think once you get close to identifying something or talking about a subject, it's like the elephant in the room: No one wants to get into it, so you just don't go there.
RODGERS: Michael always thanked me, because I'm the one who changed the lyrics to "Original Sin." The lyrics were not [originally] "Dream on black boy / Dream on white girl." They had written "Dream on white boy, dream on white girl, wake up to a brand new day / Dream on black boy, black girl …" I felt bad, like I was superimposing too much of my own life. I was raised by interracial parents, and I've always seen the conflict of interracial relationships. I was like, "Guys, wait a minute. If we talk about original sin, we can make this even more taboo by making it an interracial couple?" What's really funny is, I get Daryl Hall to sing, and his manager, who was Tommy Mottola at the time, called me up and said, "Nile, are you trying to get my guy killed? What do you mean by all this 'Dream on black boy, white girl' stuff?" I said, "Well, you know, Tommy, it's a better song like that."
ANDREW FARRISS: "Original Sin" was the most important song at the early part of our career. It helped us to define what we wanted to do musically. We took it much further with [producer] Chris Thomas. We really developed that funk rock. We were always experimenting and chopping and changing with our big melting pot of music influences. It's not that we stopped doing that—it's just that we found something we thought was a magic formula, and it worked.
TIM FARRISS: Michael and Andrew were a great team. They were like chalk and cheese as people, and that is important, because you'd have yin and yang in the room. Andrew would be pensive and withdrawn and very thoughtful, deep-thinking, whereas Michael was more vivacious and very spontaneous. They started out as close friends. Michael was quite the shy person. I think that some people do that because then they're the dark horse or the quiet mouse that roared. Once fame and fortune became involved, Michael would prefer to be sitting at the runway at an Yves Saint Laurent thing surrounded by models, where Andrew would rather be at home on his farm putting in fence posts.
ANDREW FARRISS: Michael and I were unlikely friends. We met in a schoolyard [in Sydney]. He came from Hong Kong, and he didn't know anybody. I think he was feeling very intimidated, and I helped him through that. I was interested in sports, which Michael was never really interested in. He liked motocross and dirt bikes, and poetry, Hermann Hesse and Siddhartha. We didn't talk about music much at all when we first met. Then he went to live in Los Angeles for a while. When he came back to Sydney, I realized that his experiences of going to school in Hollywood made him a lot different than a lot of the other young people I was playing with in my high school bands. He'd experienced cultural things that none of us could have dreamed of. He'd already spent some of his childhood growing up in Asia, and that was very unusual. Also, girls were crazy about the guy.
Michael probably wasn't a great singer when he started, and I don't think he was a particularly good stage guy. But he was always a good lyricist, and later on he became a great lyricist and a great live performer and a fantastic singer. Michael wrote the bulk of the lyrics—he usually came up with all the music and feels and grooves, and sometimes melodies. His lyrics changed [over the years]—they became more and more important to him. Michael felt he could actually talk to people through the lyrics and discuss things without someone judging or misquoting him. One of the most beautiful legacies is a song that millions of people know, because you're like, "Well, there you go. No one's going to screw that up, because they all know the lyrics, and they know exactly what I was thinking."
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs from Down Under 1. "Under the Milky Way," The Church 2. "I Got You," Split Enz 3. "Down Under," Men at Work 4. "Send Me an Angel," Real Life 5. "Streets of Your Town," The Go-Betweens
We liked all kinds of music and, as a young INXS, we used to mix it all in together. In Australia, when we grew up, you wouldn't have different formats of radio stations like you have now. Back then, you would hear every style of music—pop, rock, sometimes even classical—on the same station. So I was a fan of David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, but the other guys in INXS and I, we were also fans of blues-based music, straight rock, and our own Australian pub scene. The scene that we came out of, it's very much a big pub environment where you have large rooms with working-class men smoking cigarettes and just getting drunk all of the time. If you wanted to play music and make it, you'd have to survive in that environment.
For the first album with Chris Thomas, we recorded "What You Need," another big game-changer for INXS. That was our first Top 5 hit in North America and a Top 10 around the world. I remember getting a call at the time from our manager, Chris [Murphy]. He said, "Aren't you excited? We should be opening a bottle of champagne." I said, "Yeah, that's great. Thanks for calling," and put the phone down. I suddenly became really uncomfortable. I thought, What's wrong with me? I should be thinking, "I'm awesome" or something. Then it hit me like a freight train: "If we don't do that again, then that's as far as we got." It hit Michael too. We thought, Holy shit, we're going to have to try and better that somehow. How the hell are we going to do that?! That's where the next album, Kick, came from. We were on a bus in Germany, and we said to the others, "Look, we know everyone's a songwriter. But we really need you guys to seriously consider letting Michael and I run with this next album artistically and creatively. If you just trust Michael and I, we'll give you the album you want." I'll never, ever forget that moment.
TIM FARRISS: We could have made vocal objections, but we didn't. We said, "Cool. Whatever's clever for Trevor."
ANDREW FARRISS: To give Michael and me that nod of approval was very wise of everybody. We just had to write some great songs. Kick was a monster album for us. It had four Top 5 hits in the United States and also had another song, "Mystify," which went Top 10 in Europe and other places in the world. There are three brothers in the band—we've had our differences, but as brothers, we sorted all of that shit out when we were young.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
INXS was one of the biggest bands on the planet through the mid-nineties, ultimately selling more than 40 million records and racking up a total of 61 singles from 12 studio albums. Their driving, guitar-funk sound was buoyed by Hutchence's rock-god persona, which he cultivated via glossy, high-profile romances with Helena Christensen and Kylie Minogue (reportedly the inspiration behind the hit "Suicide Blonde"). Hutchence was dating British TV presenter Paula Yates, the mother of his daughter, Tiger Lily, when he was found dead in his Sydney hotel room in 1997. The coroner concluded that it was a suicide. The surviving members subsequently performed with several singers, including J.D. Fortune, the winner of the ill-fated reality-TV competition Rock Star: INXS, before calling it quits during a 2012 concert in Perth, Australia.
TIM FARRISS: The last tour we did was with Matchbox Twenty. We got such respect from those guys—clearly they were influenced by us to a large degree. Rob Thomas[1] worked with us on the [2010] album Original Sin that has remakes of a lot of our songs. We had a different song choice picked out for him, but he said, "Sure, I'll do that song if you give me a go at 'Original Sin.'"
ANDREW FARRISS: When I think about many acts, some of whom I really love, I can think of maybe one, two, three songs of theirs that I would know why they would be in people's consciousness or memories. But I think that one of the interesting things with INXS is that we had different songs in different countries that attracted different people, and over a long, long period of time—decades.
TIM FARRISS: [I remember when] Queen took us under their wing. We did the opening for them all over Europe, doing stadium after stadium. I remember sitting in Freddie Mercury's big, palatial hotel suite overlooking Lake Geneva after the Montreux Pop Festival. Freddie was playing some new material that he'd written on this huge stereo, and he and Michael were singing at the top of their voices into each other's faces with their noses literally an inch apart. It was like a sing-off. It was one of those moments where I felt like, "What am I doing here?"
Michael's close friends were of the notoriety hall of fame: Simon [Le Bon][2] and his wife; toward the end, Bono and [his wife] Ali. I think other celebrities could understand Michael, and he felt more comfortable around them than hanging out with people who just wanted to adore you because of who you are, whereas [other] celebrities don't give a shit. They're leading the same life you are.
I took my son to see AC/DC—or Acadaca, as we call them in Australia. We went back[stage], and we're hanging out with Angus Young, and I said to him, quietly, "How did you guys deal with the loss of Bon? How long does it take you to get over that?" And Angus said, "Oh, about three weeks." I went, "God, it's been six years for us," which it had been at that time.
We were collectively openly discussing [coping with Michael's death] only when people asked, like media. It's been our own journey and one that we had to discover for ourselves without being influenced by too many other people. My wife said, "Maybe you guys, particularly Andrew, should get counseling on how to deal with this." It has affected him in just the way you think it would: floundering, looking for a song…It was very hard for him when we worked with other singers. He couldn't work with [INXS singer from 2000 to 2004] Jon Stevens, so that wasn't going to happen. Even though Jon was a great friend and an amazing singer, he wasn't the frontman Michael was. But then, who is?
ANDREW FARRISS: It was my younger brother, Jon, who was the one who got up on stage [in 2012 to announce that the band was splitting up]. Having been touring for 30-something years on and off, we figured it was about time we did some other things. It doesn't mean we don't want to be INXS; it doesn't mean we may not record together again. We probably will. We just wanted some time out to explore other things. I like the guys in INXS. I know what they've been through, because I went through it too. They're good musicians, and they're good people. If I'm not with them, I miss them.
Notes
[1] ROB THOMAS, Matchbox Twenty: We got to see them play with Michael once at a radio festival we played together. To see them play is to realize, "Holy shit, this is one of the best pop-rock bands on earth." Years later, Jon Farriss came out to a show in Australia. That led to them asking me to sing on the remake of "Original Sin." I wasn't going to try to "do" Michael. He is impossible to imitate, so you don't even try. Michael is hands down one of the greatest frontmen in music. The style, the voice—all of it. Any way that I was ever influenced by him really comes down to small, pale imitations compared to the real thing. There is a fearlessness about him. Watching him at Wembley Stadium with 70,000 people, he looks as comfortable as if he were in his own living room.
[2] SIMON LE BON, Duran Duran: Michael was my best friend. We were two singers who didn't feel that we were in competition with each other. We had a great love of life, and a lot of our passions were very, very similar. [Duran and INXS] were two bands who really embraced that rock star lifestyle. Michael and I just clicked with each other, and we just had a fantastic time together—we really did.
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