The Twenty-First Century’s Yesterday: INXS

The late John McGeoch once opined that, “everyone remembers where they were when they first heard Public Image”. Certainly, that was true for me. I was in my bedroom, where I spent all my time when not in record shops. I recall I was lying on the bed.

I also remember where I was when I bought INXS’s The Greatest Hits. I was at a record fair at Victoria in London. I was in my early 40s. Adulthood meant that I now had a separate, dedicated room for listening to records and I could venture further afield than Belfast city centre to acquire them.

I was browsing a huge box of CDs which were 99p each or 6 for a fiver. You know the kind of box. The kind of box that has Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints; a limited-edition enhanced CD of the second Spice Girls’ album, and INXS’s The Greatest Hits. The kind of box you should never waste your time looking in at a record fair because you just end up buying a load of shite you could stream for free if you really wanted to, and oh look, the bloke next to you has found an original Japanese Kick Out The Jams complete with obi for £3.99 in the LP box.

The packaging was unappealing. It looked like something put together by a giant record company with minimal creative input. It had twenty tracks on it suggesting that no quality control had been conducted. It was bluntly entitled, “The Greatest Hits”. I didn’t like INXS, but I had a fondness for New Sensation. I bought the CD.

The first INXS song I can recall hearing was “Need You Tonight”. The video was unappealing. It looked like something put together by a giant record company with minimal creative input. I was amazed when my then girlfriend described the singer as ‘horny’. I remember with sharp clarity the mixture of astonishment, jealousy and slight class-consciousness that statement occasioned. Her teeth bit down on her lower lip as she spoke. She was a lovely girl.

Where I was from, we would not have used the effete, southern-English, upper-middle-class word ‘horny’ to describe the singer. No, had we chosen to discuss Michael Hutchence’s svelte hips and bee-stung lips, we might have said he was a ‘fucken ride’, as we imagined sweeping his cascading mane from his bare shoulders. But we definitely wouldn’t have chosen to discuss that, as we definitely weren’t gay. My vision of ideal manhood at that stage was probably someone like Rat Scabies. So as far as I was concerned, the singer was a preening, girly-haired fucker who clearly needed his lights punched in.

The next time I remember hearing INXS was about a year later. I was on the dole and living in a house with other dissolute characters. It was both liberating and limiting being poor. If you have never truly experienced hunger, it is difficult to imagine how debilitating it is. Aside from the weariness, you are constantly cold. It was a hard winter. I had a hole in my shoe. I smoked as much as I could and watched a lot of TV. The New Sensation video was in circulation as winter became spring. Its bright riff reminds me of standing tentatively in the backyard being warmed by weak sunshine. The line, “the sun comes like a god into our room” sat perfectly atop the riff and says something of the hope and freedom I imagined at the time, despite my straitened circumstances.

One of my housemates had a copy of Kick which he used as a skinning-up tray. I used to stare at the cover in fascinated horror. It looked like something put together by a major label with minimal creative input. You could imagine the wardrobe people handing the jackets and stripy tops and -Jesus Christ- the skateboard to the non-Hutchence drongos in the band whilst asking them to set down their cheese sandwiches for a minute whilst the photographer took the shots. I’ll warrant that Hutchence had a separate photoshoot and moreover, didn’t need dressing by a third party.

I cannot recall anything about, or distinguish between, the non-Hutchence members of INXS. They seemed completely interchangeable. Possibly one had spectacles, and another had a slightly more dreadful mullet than the others. Their sole purpose, aside from writing, recording and playing their enormously successful music, seemed to be as a foil for Hutchence, to further highlight his godlike looks. Perhaps their lumpen, blokeish ordinariness also helped sell the band to your average Australian in the street who might otherwise want to punch Hutchence’s lights in to confirm his masculinity.

I apologise for the unacceptable generalisation in the concluding sentence of the previous paragraph. Raised on a TV diet of The Paul Hogan Show, The Flying Doctors and a film I once saw called Razorback, there was possibly a time when I considered Australia to be a cultureless, arid desert, peopled by burnt-faced, homophobic racists with corks hanging from their hats who hunted irradiated, Frankensteinian creatures made from bits of other animals. I have since learned from Wikipedia that Australia has an enormous variety of landscapes and biodiversity, and one of the highest proportion of immigrants per capita.

In preparing to write this piece, I sat down and listened for the first and probably only time to INXS’s The Greatest Hits. It was a tough experience. I had to drink heavily, but I got through it. It is hard to put into words the terrible emptiness at the heart of their music. It is like sonic chewing gum. Almost every song comprises a memorable riff (occasionally borrowed from elsewhere), repeated endlessly and without deviation, save for the odd key change. One could say that about The Fall too, I suppose (apart from the key change), but The Fall does not suffer from bombastic and clattering production. The saving grace, if there is one, is Hutchence’s voice. Again, the ordinariness of the band contrasts with the soulful dynamism of his vocal.

Whilst I listened and drank, I read the Wikipedia page on INXS. I frequently discover that an artist who I think had a handful of hits and whom I consider a footnote in history is actually one of the most successful commercial enterprises of all time. For example, did you know that Enya has sold 75 million records? That’s 5 million more than INXS and 74,999,818 more than These Animal Men. When I read things like that, or the INXS Wikipedia page I think, it’s me that has it wrong, the mass of humanity must be onto something I am not.

In 1994 I watched Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates seduce each other on a bed whilst I ate a slice of toast. Paula was a punk rock hero to me. She faced the most terrible misogyny during and even after her short life. I was glad when they were happy together and sad when it ended as it did.

Sleep, baby, sleep
Now that the night is over
And the sun comes like a God
Into our room
All perfect light and promises

by Mike McConnell