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Following Michael Hutchence's apparent
suicide last month, we pay tribute to the INXS frontman, whose flomboyant
lifestyle and high profile in the British tabloids often overshadowed his
20-year career as Australia's first true rock star.
That Michael
Hutchence should fail to reach his 40th birthday is, perhaps, no surprise
in itself - his career was distinguished by a wholehearted subscription
to the notion of the rock'n'roll star as a creature of excess. That Hutchence's
life should end as it seems to have is a real shock. |
At time of writing, all
that is known - some several acres of lurid tabloid speculation notwithstanding
- is that Hutchence, 37, was found hanged in his suite at Sydney's Ritz-Carlton
hotel on Saturday November 22. Suicide, accident... whatever, the reasons
should remain Hutchence's own. Attempts to turn the circumstances of his
demise into fuel for yet another fatuous live-fast-die-young tortured-artist
myth would be hopelessly misguided. It is no disrespect to suggest that
Hutchence, who spent the late '80s and early '90s filling stadiums in front
of a hugely successful band, amassing a tidy personal fortune and racking
up an impressive tally of celebrity girlfriends, looked more than anything
like the least tortured artist on earth.
Michael Kelland Hutchence was born in the Sydney
suburb of Lain Cove on January 22, 1960. His father, a wine importer, moved
his business and his family to Hong Kong four years later, returning to
Australia in 1972. When Hutchence's parents separated shortly afterwards,
Michael followed his mother to Los Angeles, where he stayed before coming
home to Sydney in 1976. This peripatetic childhood bequeathed Hutchence
his odd, unplaceable, trans-Pacific accent and, he would later claim, the
wanderlust and craving for attention that qualified him for the post of
rock star. It is worth noting that, even by the standards of the wealthy,
Hutchence's homes were notable for their number and diversity. He owned
property in London, France, Hong Kong and Sydney. |
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Hutchence
first sang with a band in 1976. The other members of the nameless trio were
a schoolfriend called Andrew Farriss, who played guitars and keyboards and
fancied himself as a songwriter and Garry Beers, who played bass. In 1977,
the band's personnel doubled. Andrew Farriss' elder brother Tim not only
owned a guitar, but knew a guitarist/saxophonist called Kirk Pengilly. Tim
Farriss brought both to rehearsals as well as a further Farriss, Jon, who
was willing to give drumming a crack. This six-piece, naturally enough,
called themselves The Farriss Brothers.
When Mr and Mrs Farriss moved to Perth, the three
non-Farriss members of the band followed (no small decision, given that
Perth is as far from Sydney as Moscow is from London). Sometime during 1978,
The Farriss Brothers - never a name likely to appear in lights at Madison
Square Garden - became INXS and moved back to Sydney, where they began doing
what all Australian bands do. They played in pubs. From a British perspective,
this seems a peculiar way to behave ("Drink up and move the dominoes,
chaps, this young rock band with a mix of influences including XTC, Roxy
Music and... oh, I dunno, The Jackson Five or somebody, need to set their
gear up"). In Australia, pubs are different, or were in the late '70s.
They had a stage at one end. They had a bar along one side. They could hold
anywhere from 200 to 2,000 people, and they were not places to attempt subtleties.
If crowds didn't like you, they'd bottle you off in ten minutes. If they
did like you, they'd slash your tyres if you didn't play for two hours.
Unsurprisingly, given this musical upbringing, INXS
arrived at a purposefully effective sound early on. They had a pop appeal,
but not such a large one that rock audiences would think them effete. They
had a rock appeal, but not such a large one that pop audiences would find
them threatening. This populist cross-pollination was the very reason they
went on to sell 20 million records to white-socked Euro soulboys and denim-backed
mid-western Beavises. INXS also had a funk undertow: just enough to make
them danceable, and not so much that anyone might find them weird. Their
first album, 1980's INXS, spawned their first Australian hit, Just Keep
Walking, which provided the template for their career. It doesn't require
much squinting of the ears to recognise 1987's global hit Need You Tonight
as essentially the same song with more money spent on it.
Mostly though, what INXS had was Hutchence - even
some die-hard INXS fans would  struggle to
pick the other members out of a line up. Hutchence was a rock star in the
classic mould, with hair, leather trousers and moves directly borrowed from
Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop. He lived the life, too. He was candid
about the regular canings he gave cocaine, ecstasy, methadone and alcohol.
He frequented no end of fashionable nightclubs. He thumped paparazzi often,
even back in the pre-Diana days before it was regarded as every decent man's
civic duty. He filled his dancecard with the sort of names that fuel the
fevered dreams of every adolescent tennis-racket-and-bedroom-mirror pretender,
dating Bond girl Virginia Hey, pop starlet Kylie Minogue and Danish supermodel
Helena Christensen, among many others, before setting up home with Paula
Yates and fathering a daughter, the uproariously named Heavenly Hiraani
Tiger Lily, a girl who'd have time to walk home from Basingstoke before
her parents finished calling her.
Away from the flashbulbs and back in the studio,
Hutchence's voice was an efficient baritone that seemed equally at home
crooning, grunting or yelping. His lyrics were generally ambiguous, and
contended themselves with the usual rock'n'roll preoccupations of love,
the loss thereof, and the occasional foray into geopolitical relevance.
"Cars and girls and world peace," was how Stuart Maconie summed
it up in a 1988 NME feature, and Hutchence never disagreed, possibly because
there was no need for him to care. By then, he had probably realised that
he was one of those rare people born with that insouciant charisma that
fills a stage as surely as most people struggle to fill their own shoes.
As INXS started to make inroads into the American college market with 1982's
Shabooh Shoobah and 1985's Listen Like Thieves, some bright spark came up
with the idea of a music television channel. Hutchence and MTV were made
for each other.
There was a time - about four years, in fact from
1987 to 1991 - when it was barely possible to watch television anywhere
in the world for more than an hour without seeing Hutchence at least once.
1987's Kick album spent two years in the British charts and sold nine million
copies worldwide. Five singles from the album, Need You Tonight, Never Tear
Us Apart, New Sensation, Mystify and Devil Inside are likely to remain radio
standards until the earth spins into the sun and our lord Beelzebub calls
us home. INXS were the right band in the right place at the right time,
thanks to MTV's relentless plugging, and to the fact that the band approached
Europe and America the same way they'd approached Australia: if they had
reason to think punters would turn up, they went and played there. During
that period, INXS were regarded as rivals to U2, and Hutchence as sort of
Antipodean Bono. |
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