INXS: Their Florida Vacation Didn’t Meet Expectations But Inspired a Song
Michael Hutchence, the lead singer for INXS, is enamored with strange sounds emanating from his tape recorder in a Brussels hotel room. He calls the music of the Cramps, Throbbing Gristle and fellow Australians the Birthday Party as “dirty, sleazy, pornographic music. It’s the kind of stuff that turns us on before we go on stage,” he says with a sly laugh.
INXS is in Belgium to tape an appearance before 5,000 fans for a music television show broadcast throughout France and the Benelux countries. “Most people listen to the type of music that we play when they want to just relax or hang out,” Hutchence asserts, “but we’d rather go back to our roots, those dirty sleazy things.”
Based on past experience, IXNS fans shouldn’t be surprised to hear elements of “pornographic music” and references to Belgium in the band’s next record. The Sydney-based sextet—Hutchence; Tim Farriss, guitar; brothers Andrew Farriss, keyboards, and Jon Farris, drums; Kirk Pengilly, guitar and sax; and Garry Beers, bass—is not the kind of band that holes itself up for six months in a Tibetan monastery and writes five years’ worth of songs. Their most productive writing is done on the road.
“I Send a Message,” the new single, is just one of a handful of tunes the band wrote on their last American tour. Hutchence, who looks something like an ’80s version of a Beatnik, recalls writing the song in Buffalo. “It’s all about telepathy, which happens to me all the time,” he says. He was thinking about his girlfriend at the time and found out later she was thinking of him at the exact same time. “It saves a lot on phone calls,” he jokes.
Boredom is sometimes the impetus for songwriting. The band, after experiencing the frigid environs of Buffalo and the like, was ready for a fun-in-the-sun vacation, but it didn’t exactly work out that way. “We all decided we needed a few days to work out ‘Original Sin’ and a few other songs we had in mind for the album [The Swing], ” Hutchence explains. “So we all decided to go to Florida—God knows why. You hear about places and you think, ‘Let’s do it.’ We had great expectations, but when we got there, we just sat around and that’s how we thought up ‘Melting in the Sun.’ ”
These days Hutchence has his mind more on the sky than the water. He has joined the growing ranks of hang gliders. “It makes me feel so free, so helpless. It’s just you, the hang glider and the wind. It gives me peace.” –Steve Zuckerman
