Three - INXS

“Say hello from the band in the interview”
Tim Farriss to Michael Hutchence
Rolling Stone Magazine, 1988

It is exciting being young and starting a band. Even if you were like me and not very good, and in a band that was very poor, and too timid to do anything more than a couple of gigs, even that kind of watered-down version of being in a rock band was exciting. So much more exciting then to be in a proper band, working its way up from the garage to the top of the charts.

I own two INXS albums: Listen Like Thieves (1985) and Kick (1987). These two albums represent this band’s peak. Listen Like Thieves was their peak as a group of musicians; Kick was the peak of their popularity. On the 1985 album INXS sound like they’re playing in a bar or a club, by 1987 they sound more like they’re playing in the corner of you room, on the telly, or in an arena for 70,000 people. Somewhere between these two albums something went wrong.

In the 1980s in New Zealand it seemed that there were quite a few Australian bands on the charts and that they all sounded the same: tough. Even if they weren’t doing straight out rock like Cold Chisel, The Angels or AC/DC they still sounded muscular, like they worked hard, all the parts of their band locked together snugly through graft. Bands like Midnight Oil, INXS, the Divinyls sounded like they could have taken Split Enz in a bar fight any day. Reading about that scene now it is clear why all Australian bands from that period had that edge to them:

[The punters come] to gigs… to let something go, a sort of catharsis. We always feel like there’s this implied confrontation between band and audience. They’re saying, ‘Lay it on! Do it to us!, and it’s like a veiled threat that if you don’t, you’ll get canned.
– Doc Neeson (The Angels)

Canned here means they’ll start throwing glass beer mugs at you.

Being in a band in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia meant playing in the thriving, testy world of the beer barns: spartan, terribly carpeted, sweaty, smoky, weathered and packed to the rafters.
- INXS, The Authorised Biography, p.38

For a suburban teenager growing up the 1970s and 1980s, pub rock was perhaps the ultimate rite of passage. If you hadn’t spent at least one night in a beer barn, where the carpets were tacky with spilled lager and sweat literally flowed down the walls, risking terminal ear damage and the ever-present danger of being conked by a beer glass, you just weren’t a real Australian, mate.
- Long Way to the Top, p.188

This is the music scene INXS came from and you can hear it on Listen Like Thieves. They play a set of songs that sound as though they have been worked on; not in the studio but in front of the punters. There are six musicians working together to put all the little pieces, all the fills, and all the short jagging riffs, into one thing called a perfect pop song. A perfect pop song is catchy, it moves around a bit with its riff, there are no boring bits, and then it stops.

Of course the other thing that is handy for a pop band is a hot lead singer.