Inxs

A daydream, ended in the most tragic way. Nothing less than this was the trajectory of Michael Hutchence's Australian Inxs, one of the most charismatic and beloved frontmen of his generation. “(Dream on) to play with fire… (Dream on) in the name of love… And wake up to a brand-new day/ To find your dreams have washed away”. He didn't know it, but in those eerily prophetic lines from the splendid 1983 single "Original Sin", the Australian singer had written his own fate, which came to an end on a November night in 1997, when he was found hanged with a belt in a room at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Double Bay, in his native Sydney. The coroner ruled it a suicide, but theories multiplied: depression fuelled by substance abuse, the crisis of his turbulent relationship with Paula Yates (the English music journalist and wife of Bob Geldof, with whom he also had a daughter, Tiger Lily), even autoerotic practices gone wrong. What's certain is that Yates and Hutchence dragged each other down into the abyss, amid drugs, alcohol and all manner of excess, up to that 22 November 1997 which still carries an air of mystery about it. A tragic end for a formidable band, which from then on would try to replace its frontman – an almost impossible task – dragging itself wearily on until 2010, the date of the last album released under the name Inxs, paradoxically titled "Original Sin".

A Daydream

Before that, though, it had been a waking dream. An irresistible acceleration through a decade lived entirely in crescendo. Formed in Sydney in 1977 within an Australian scene in full renaissance (Saints, Church, Midnight Oil etc.) under the name Farriss Brothers, Inxs settled on their definitive name in 1980. The lineup featured brothers Tim Farriss on guitar, Andrew Farriss on keyboards and John Farriss on drums, alongside Michael Hutchence, a singer-performer with moves reminiscent of Jagger, Kirk Pengilly on guitar and saxophone, and Garry Beers on bass. After debuting with "Inxs" in 1980 and following it up with "Underneath The Colours" (1981), the band started making a name for itself outside Australia with "Shabooh Shoobah" (1982), which cracked the US Top 50. But the real international breakthrough came with "The Swing" (1984), propelled by the aforementioned single "Original Sin", and continued the following year with "Listen Like Thieves", which firmly cemented their presence in the European and American markets. It was the prelude to their definitive consecration, which arrived in 1987 with "Kick", the album destined to turn them into one of the most popular rock bands of the second half of the Eighties.

Inxs's musical recipe absorbed and incorporated the trends of the decade, yet stood apart through its own uniqueness. An elusive formula, one that would baffle the usual pigeonholers. Pop? Rock? Funk? It's impossible to find a single word capable of describing the Australians' musical journey. Champions of a quirky but effective brand of pop song for some, the usual stadium rockers for others, and for others still, authors of frivolous but enjoyable chart-friendly hooks. Inxs were all of this and, at the same time, none of it. When asked directly, the band themselves would answer with the idea of "white boy dance-music". A sort of impossible middle ground between the arena rock of U2, Aerosmith and Guns'n'Roses & co., and the funk of Michael Jackson and Prince, whose ascent in those years was continuing respectively with "Bad" and "Sign O' The Times".
The only certainty is that behind the many number-one hits, the heavy-rotation radio tunes and the crowd-pleasing performances that followed them everywhere, lay the flair and imagination of six genuine musicians who knew their craft damn well, and who, moving comfortably through the full-blown new wave era, managed to surprise. Hitting the mark more often than not. But above all with "Kick".

A Kick Right in the Top Corner

Produced by Chris Thomas, recorded between Sydney and Paris and mixed by Bob Clearmountain in London, "Kick" was released on 12 October 1987 with an ambitious goal in mind: "We wanted an album where every track could become a single," guitarist and saxophonist Kirk Pengilly later revealed. They may not have fully succeeded, but they certainly came very close.
Recording began in January 1987 at Rhinoceros Studios in Sydney, with Thomas at the helm. The producer, however, felt that some crucial songs were still missing and convinced Michael Hutchence and Andrew Farriss, by then the group's main songwriters, to isolate themselves for two weeks in Hong Kong to write new material. It proved to be a fortunate choice: those sessions gave birth to "Need You Tonight", "Kick" and "Calling All Nations". The famous riff of "Need You Tonight" came to Farriss while he was waiting for a taxi to the airport: he went back to his hotel room to record it on cassette, while Hutchence, upon hearing the demo in Hong Kong, wrote most of the lyrics in about ten minutes.
The album's artwork, perfectly immersed in the spirit of the era, was created by Nick Egan, who had designed covers for Clash, Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop and would go on to direct music videos for Duran Duran, Oasis and Belinda Carlisle. With wide-lapel leather jackets, baseball bomber jackets and sneakers, Inxs's image perfectly captured the pop culture of the moment, right down to the classic "PsychoStick" skateboard featured on the cover. The Australian band also proved adept at exploiting the MTV explosion through innovative pop videos, starting with "What You Need", which caused a stir thanks to its pioneering hand-coloured rotoscope technique.

Musically, on the other hand, "Kick" perfected the Inxs formula by merging the funk and soul already present on "The Swing" with the more direct, mainstream rock of "Listen Like Thieves", which had tried to compete with the U2 of the time, then in full ascent with "The Unforgettable Fire" and "The Joshua Tree". It's a shape-shifting pop record whose DNA is built on economy, groove and irresistible hooks. Dance rhythms, heavily syncopated bass and guitars, funk sensuality, pop immediacy and a crisp production combine to create a sound that was both modern and original. Hutchence found one of his ideal expressive territories, while Farriss's songwriting aimed to move beyond the dominant formulas of the time: the intention, in his own words, was to create songs that sounded "like the future".
Some tracks changed profoundly during the recording process. "Never Tear Us Apart", for instance, was initially a piano-based blues ballad, before Thomas decided to replace the piano's role with strings, giving it its characteristic orchestral sweep. Even the famous "Need You Tonight"/"Mediate" sequence came about almost by accident, when engineer David Nicholas noticed that the two tracks fit perfectly into one another.

The album's first, formidable 45-rpm lead single is "Need You Tonight", a genuine bombshell that topped the charts everywhere, finally hitting number 1 in the UK too, thanks to its electronic beat, Hutchence's sensuous vocal delivery and a memorable guitar riff. At the heart of the track also lies the perfect synergy between the Farriss brothers: Andrew sketched out its rhythmic backbone by programming a Roland TR-707 drum machine, over which Jon added acoustic drums, layering in cymbals, toms and fills that gave the groove a more dynamic, natural feel. Hutchence completed the job with his vocal theatrics, made up of sighs, whispers, sudden falsetto surges and shouts, right up to the "fake ending" around the 2:30 mark, a false close that suspends the song for an instant before the final surge. Many years later, Dua Lipa would "accidentally" replicate the track's famous hook in her hit "Break My Heart", confirming just how deeply that maddeningly catchy riff could lodge itself in the subconscious.

Four more knockout singles followed. "Devil Inside" boasts another breathtaking riff and a brash, rocking swagger, matching the frontman's Mephistophelian torments, with its murky imagery of knives, leather and inner darkness: some swear it was one of the models Bono drew on a few years later for the characters of The Fly and MacPhisto. "New Sensation" is another sparkling dance-pop romp with a funk flavour, boasting an all-conquering hook and finding Hutchence in his most natural declamatory mode, while Thomas isolates various instrumental elements each time the chorus comes around: a puff of sax, a sharp guitar stab, synthesized horns. The arrangement shows some common ground with Prince's Minneapolis Sound, with brazen synth horns, incursions from Pengilly's sax and processed gospel harmonies, all topped off by Hutchence's rough-edged voice. A curious footnote: it's the song's opening line ("Live baby live") that gave its title to the only live album ever released under the Inxs name, dated 1991.

But adrenaline isn't the only thing running through the grooves of "Kick". Because Hutchence and co. also had up their sleeve one of those take-no-prisoners ballads, destined to remain (perhaps) their definitive anthem, as well as – in the words of Louder – "the coolest doo-wop ballad of the decade". Underpinned by synthetic strings and punctuated by backing vocals and Pengilly's sax, "Never Tear Us Apart" is Hutchence's vocal apotheosis, here reaching peak solemnity as he rides a heart-wrenching melody. It was producer Chris Thomas who recognised the song's full potential, helping to transform its arrangement through dramatic synthesized strings and towering drum hits, right up to an ending that takes on Fifties doo-wop shades in its interweaving vocal lines. It's the tear-jerker of the record, and it would later be covered by various other artists of different stripes, with mixed results (Joe Cocker would deliver its most famous cover version) but always falling well short of the beauty of the original. It was also given a new lease of life by the soundtrack to "Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut", and it rang out mournfully inside St Andrew's Cathedral in 1997, as Michael Hutchence's coffin was carried out at the end of his funeral.

The album's fifth – and inexplicably least successful – single, "Mistyfy" is a splendid soul-rock number that arrives like a bolt from the blue at the ninth spot in the tracklisting. A finger-snapping piano-and-voice intro sets just the right mood; then comes that sudden funk-rock explosion, a real gut punch, with Hutchence rising to the occasion in a tumultuous instrumental crescendo to describe a magnetic love capable of confusing and hypnotizing: “All veils and misty/ Streets of blue/ Almond looks/ That chill divine/ Some silken moment/ Goes on forever/ And we’re leaving broken hearts behind/ Mystify”.
Although as a single it wouldn't achieve the same results as some of the album's other tracks, "Mistyfy" would go on to become one of the absolute classics of Inxs's catalogue.

The Singles That Got Away

But if the goal was to "write every song on the album as if it were a single", there's no denying that many of the other tracks left off the 45rpm pressing could have just as easily hit that mark. Take "Mediate", for instance, one of the album's hidden gems, stamped with Pengilly's soprano sax and a minimalist drum machine accompanied by a thunderous handclap beat. Its video also appears in the documentary film about the making of the record, directed by Australian filmmaker Richard Lowenstein, spliced together with the one for "Need You Tonight", a song with which it shares the same opening notes. The "Mediate" clip sees Inxs paying homage to the Bob Dylan of "Subterranean Homesick Blues", with deliberately inserted "meaningful" typos on the cue cards that flash by over the course of the song.

Rounding things off are less striking but still well-crafted tracks, like the overture "Guns In The Skye", opened by thunderous drum machine loops, and the raw-edged "Calling All Nations", with its gritty hard-rock guitars; or the driving title track, another vocal tour de force from Hutchence marked by soul horns and the eerily prophetic manifesto-line: "Sometimes you're the hammer, sometimes you're the nail".
Harder to imagine as singles, on the other hand, are genuinely minor episodes like "The Loved One", with its retro Sixties jangle, "Wild Life", an unpretentious guitar-driven uptempo number, and the closing "Tiny Daggers", which lifts its opening hook from Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" while indulging in a formulaic arena rock that sounds almost like an outtake from Bruce Springsteen's productions of the era.

But on the whole, "Kick" is a triumph — credit also due to Thomas's lavish production, which steers clear of the decade's clichés and gives the songs an insurance policy for the future. And to think that Atlantic initially gave the record a cold reception, deeming it "too funk and dance" for American rock radio, even going so far as to offer Inxs a million dollars to go back into the studio and redo it. Luckily, manager Chris Murphy refused, managing instead to push "Need You Tonight" through college radio. It would mark the beginning of a massive success: "Kick" would reach number 3 on the Billboard 200, earn six platinum certifications in the United States, and send four singles into the American Top 10 ("New Sensation", "Never Tear Us Apart", "Devil Inside" and "Need You Tonight", the latter hitting number one).
The success was amplified by a massive sixteen-month world tour spanning North America, Europe, Japan and Australia, with Inxs now playing to arenas and stadiums. The tour wrapped up in Australia in November 1988, cementing "Kick" once and for all as the pinnacle of the Australian band's career.

But the devil inside was already starting to creep up on Michael Hutchence, undermining a career that had made him one of the most successful frontmen of the decade, and which would carry on through ups and downs until that fateful day in 1997. The rest is history: the tragic end to the Sydney "white boy"'s waking dream.

(Contributions by Giuseppe D'Amato)

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11/10/2026