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 illfated 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* 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?”
* 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 poprock 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.
Michael’s close friends were of the notoriety hall of fame: Simon [Le Bon]** 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.
** 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.
“HOLD ME NOW”
At the start of the decade, the Thompson Twins were a seven-strong band of Dickensian scruffs whose heavily percussive shows inevitably ended with drunken British students invading the stage and pounding trashcan lids and empty soup cans not quite in time with the beat. And then suddenly they weren’t a seven-piece, and they weren’t scruffy. The Thompson Twins evolved quickly and skillfully into a Benetton advert made flesh, an unthreatening three-piece hit machine with big hats and even bigger hair. The Twins’ output also evolved: Where once they were rhythm-driven, their greatest hits emphasized their melodic strengths. No one heard “Hold Me Now” and started banging on a trashcan lid.
JB: The Thompson Twins were my hate-watch—my Newsroom. Even in that age of artifice, I found them suspect. I didn’t buy their skin-shedding. To me they would always be one of these bands that wasn’t good enough to be Pigbag. I found Tom Bailey’s voice devoid of emotion. Their image turned my stomach. The hair made me heave. And as for those songs … I still remember every note, every intro, every chorus. I will say this for the Thompson Twins: Their best songs were built to last. Even though I professed to hate them, I still had a tiny place in my tiny heart for “Hold Me Now” that pleaded for the chance to be understood, forgiven, and loved.
LM:
One of the most romantic moments in cinematic history has to be when Samantha Baker thanks Jake Ryan for getting her undies back. “Make a wish,” he says, the titular sixteen candles ablaze on a birthday cake between them. “It already came true,” she answers. Kiss. Have to admit, though, I wouldn’t love that scene half as much if the Thompson Twins’ “If You Were Here” weren’t playing in the background. That Tom Bailey knows romance—and he knows women too. That’s what I always think when I hear “Hold Me Now.” I miss the Thompson Twins. They are one of the few bands in this book who’ve truly disappeared—no reunion tours or acoustic reimaginings of their greatest hits for them. For that reason, we forget how massive they were. But whenever I hear one of their big, perfectly produced smashes, I’m transported back to a time when they were kings for a day, presiding over a sold-out Madison Square Garden like the Black Eyed Peas of the eighties.
TOM BAILEY: Although we could be accused of being somewhat formulaic, we were trying to express ourselves—in a cartoonish way, maybe, but in a real way. In those days, there was a rule of thumb that to give an album a fair crack at achieving maximum sales you needed four hit singles. You would write songs until you were pretty sure you had four or five that fit the bill, then you could maybe stretch out with some of the other material, make it longer or slower-paced or more experimental. It was a formula in the sense that the industry presented a gateway filter to you: Your songs had to be radio-friendly, they had to be a certain length, they didn’t have to have long intros, you had to go out on a chorus—all those standard songwriting things that are nothing more than conventions but you have to learn about them in order to seriously have a go at it.
You know you’re writing [songs about] the same subject that’s been written about a thousand times before. It’s how you stop it from becoming clichéd and try to retain some kind of credibility for the cultural demands of the moment. “Hold Me Now” came partly from a real situation. Alannah [Currie] and I at this time were lovers. We’d gone somewhere to do some writing, and after an argument, we kissed and made up, and that song came out of it. No one sets out to say, “What would we do if we’d fallen out? How would we write a song about making up again?” But it actually happens, so you just latch on to that moment. It’s a precious thing that you can write about quite easily, and it’s something people want to hear about, even though it is a little sentimental. It’s a part of human nature.
There were difficulties being part of a couple and being in the band, and you manage those. But there are also great advantages. Your business doesn’t take you away from your home when you’re both in it together. We thrived on that for a long, long time. We always had separate hotel rooms, which is something we started doing because we didn’t want people to assume we were a couple and we wanted to keep that side of our lives private. So we pretended that we were separate, but then we found that it was a great way of not burning out on each other. So we were together when we were together, but we also built in this time apart. It led to a rather strange way of conducting our relationship. Even subsequently, when we bought a house, we had separate bedrooms because that’s the way our relationship had developed. It was quite odd looking back, but it seemed to be very healthy for us at the time.
The band started in Sheffield [in 1977]—it was three school friends: myself and a couple of friends [Pete Dodd and John Podgorski]—then we decided to move to London and try to make it. I’d gotten in touch with an old friend and told him I was moving, and he said, “Well, I’m squatting, and there’s a place around the corner.” I squatted in South London for years and years. I had … it wasn’t exactly the dole but supplementary benefit, which was 16 pounds a week plus 4 for paying my housing co-op fees. I had to be really careful about whether I bought a packet of cigarettes or a bag of chips, and I’d jump over the barriers of the Tube. It was slightly embarrassing because I never quite got round to leaving the squat until our third album.
When you listen to those earliest recordings, you can hear we were a guitar, bass, and drums outfit, and the songs we were keen on were very much in that punk or post-punk vein. I remember being a big fan of Wreckless Eric, that chugging guitar and relentless spewing of lyrics. I became interested in what was known as world music and, in particular, Indian and African music that had something going for it in terms of everyone getting involved. There was an underground enthusiasm about our first album [1981’s A Product of … (Participation)], which I like, but it sounds small and a little bit fragile compared with how the band sounded onstage, which was raucous and noisy. It got to the stage where we were making instruments out of tin cans, and there were so many lying around that other people joined in. We encouraged that, but it’s a funny thing to be famous for. In fact, it became destructive in the sense that people would show up just to jump on stage. When we became the stripped-down version, the three of us [the recognizable lineup of Bailey, Currie, and Joe Leeway] decided we couldn’t do that anymore. It was dangerous.
“We wrote almost a manifesto and said, ‘Instead of hoping or pretending to be pop stars, we’re actually going to be pop stars. We’re going to treat it as a serious job.’”
We were coming to the end of our second album [Set, 1982] with Steve Lillywhite. That felt like a big moment for us, with the big-name producer and working in an expensive studio, and it happened so quickly that we hadn’t had enough material. I had finally earmarked enough money to buy a synthesizer and a little drum machine. I wrote “In the Name of Love”—every single part including the percussion—lying on my bed with the synthesizer on the mattress next to me. It was the writing on the wall for that version of the band. Instead of seven people writing it, only one person had written it and it was very much the fruit of technology. They all got to play a little bit on it, but they were basically playing the things I told them to play.
I got a phone call: [“In the Name of Love” is] number one in the Billboard dance chart.” I said, “What does that mean?” My interpretation was kind of naive and British, which was that it was like the dance chart in the back of Smash Hits. But people said it was a really massive thing. The searchlight of interest had wandered around various departments of music, and suddenly everyone was very interested in knowing what was going on in nightclubs.
We toured that album in Europe and the U.K. quite successfully in terms of getting bigger audiences, but I don’t think the band really knew what to do next. By that stage, Joe, Alannah, and myself were living in squats on the same street. When everyone else went home, the three of us would carry on scheming and coming up with ideas. We had become a central core of activity. The original band ground to a halt, and it left the three of us to pick up the new direction. The new version had a very strange division of labor: I did all the music, Joe designed the live show, and Alannah wrote lyrics, but her main job was looking after the visual side: videos, photographs, that kind of stuff.
I remember someone in the Human League saying they woke up one day and it was okay to be a pop musician. “Pop” had been a dirty word for so long during the punk era, then someone said, “It’s okay, you can have intentions to be popular. You can make music that’s not for enthusiasts only.” We decided that we must have a solid idea. We wrote almost a manifesto and said, “Instead of hoping or pretending to be pop stars, we’re actually going to be pop stars. We’re going to treat it as a serious job. If we haven’t had a major hit in the next 12 months and been on Top of the Pops, then we’ve failed in our intentions and can go back to being experimental musicians.” It seemed like an interesting thing to do—not because we were hell-bent on being famous, but it seemed like the serious way of approaching that task. It was the template for everything we subsequently did over the next three albums.
In terms of MTV, “Lies” was the first hit. I think MTV were just looking for something wacky and British, and they picked half a dozen things and put them into rotation. “Lies” failed in the U.K., but “Love on Your Side” became a bona fide Top of the Pops hit,
and one of the promotions guys said something like, “Enjoy the next couple of weeks because it only ever happens once”—that kind of giddy ride to the upper atmosphere. At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about; for me, it was just more of the same. But in retrospect, it’s something you never really recover from—suddenly aspects of normal life are taken away from you.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs by Three-Piece Groups 1. “Smalltown Boy,” Bronski Beat 2. “Tunnel of Love,” Fun Boy Three 3. “Robert De Niro’s Waiting,” Bananarama 4. “Life in a Northern Town,” The Dream Academy 5. “Sonic Boom Boy,” Westworld
For me, the era that I look on fondly as a golden age of synth pop started with the Human League and ended with Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Something happened there with the celebrity hype machine. It had become so powerful and so effective and so silly. I remember Frankie Goes to Hollywood releasing a different mix of their record every week, and it was just to keep their chart position. I thought, Wow, has it really come to this? Also at that time, videos had become the most effective way of selling music, and I realized I spent more time and more money on videos than I did on music. I didn’t want to do that anymore. I spent half my time hanging around video and photographic studios spending a fortune on looking good.
That was around the time of Live Aid. I was in New York recording [1985’s Here’s to Future Days] with Nile Rodgers, and we took a break from the session to drive to Philadelphia to do Live Aid, which is how come the band we played with was members of Chic, Madonna, and Steve Stevens from Billy Idol’s band—all people who were hanging around Nile’s empire, which was very exciting. I thought that was an amazing event but also completely overblown, and I didn’t feel that we had a successful performance. I met Joan Baez, who had been a massive influence on me as a kid, so that was my biggest thrill of the night. Nile was under strict orders not to go drinking after the gig, because that had been a problem. Can you believe we went back to the hotel after the show and played Scrabble? We didn’t even stay for the rest of the night. Maybe our enthusiasm for the big time was waning.*
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