AUSTRALIA’S NULLARBOR PLAIN is the longest, spookiest stretch: ‘so flat, could well have been ocean’, as Perth band The Triffids’ David McComb moaned in their rather gothic live favourite ‘Lonely Stretch’. (Nullarbor in Latin means ‘no trees’; ipso facto The Triffids, whose music Michael loved, called their debut album Treeless Plain.) As you drive from the east coast to the west of an epic continent that’s bigger than Europe, you better watch out. You’ll be taking on a notoriously dangerous, isolated three- to-four-day drive across some of the most ancient country on the planet. If you break down or have an accident, it’s easy to die of thirst or exposure or just disappear in the desert before anyone passes.
In late 1977 the Farriss Brothers crossed the Nullarbor in three separate vehicles. The Farriss Brothers’ move from Sydney to Perth was in solidarity with their youngest member. Jon was based in the Farriss parents’ HQ in Perth and had his whole final year of high school to go before he could abscond to play drums with the boys full-time (he hoped). They were all still teenagers except Garry and Tim, who had both turned twenty a few months earlier.
It’s a huge sign of dedication for a whole band to move interstate, simply because they chose to stay with a single member. Cold Chisel spent most of 1975 in Armidale, New South Wales, because their song-writing keyboard player Don Walker was doing his honours year in physics at the University of New England there, and the Farriss Brothers went to Perth in late 1977 because their drummer Jon did. This demonstrated investment of being in it for the long haul, even when it meant moving to an area out of the limelight, meant both bands’ membership fidelity was excellent and they became tough as nails professionally.
According to Michael, the day after he finished high school (in late December 1977) Kirk picked him up in a bright red 1967 Holden panel van and the two of them rattled westwards with their heads teeming with dreams. Although my brother was well travelled for a seventeen-year-old, this was his first flight out of the family nest. Kell was not happy. He blamed Mother for encouraging Michael towards ‘showbiz’ when he should be looking for productive employment. Our parents had a blazing argument over the phone about it. Had Kell been living in Australia at the time, it is doubtful his elder son would have been permitted to drive the inland road to Perth in some clattletrap chasing this sketchy band thing at all.
Anyway, the band all arrived safe and sound in the end. Jon stayed at the Farriss family’s place in Nedlands and tried earnestly to pass his final year, while in nearby Subiaco, the band house was a hotbed of free love, joints, booze and rehearsals, I’m not sure in what order.
Terri-ann White was helping stage events with Paradise Promotions when they picked up the newly arrived Farriss Brothers.
‘The energy onstage was fabulous,’ she recalled. ‘I remember meeting Michael for the first time. Had no idea he was that young (one year younger than me) until recently. He was deeply charming in a very understated fashion … a gorgeous boy. Very attentive and interested in the world.’
Her colleague Michael Lynch met the other Michael in late 1977 or very early 1978, when the singer ‘was only seventeen, at his first Perth gig fronting the Farriss Brothers’. (Lynch had just turned 22.) ‘My company Paradise Promotions (in partnership with Larry Marsden and Terri-ann White) got the band all their gigs in the year they were in Perth.’ Lynch dealt mainly with ‘band leader’ Tim Farriss, creating the Farriss Brothers’ posters, ads and other promo material.
Perth is a beautiful, hot city on the Swan River with great Indian Ocean beaches abounding. But to its east and north there is desert. It may be the capital city of Western Australia—physically the largest state, taking up around one-third of the Australian land mass—but Perth’s population was small back then. True, small bars and clubs were proliferating and there were also some big beer barns, although not as many as in Melbourne or Sydney.
Tim booked a run of gigs himself in Western Australia’s tough, dust-slathered mining towns like Port Hedland. The macho-mad, heavy-drinking atmosphere at many of these outpost gigs (in Michael’s words, ‘like a rocket to another planet’) left the band with lasting memories, not all of them good. Some punters thought a guy who spoke and moved like Michael did must be ‘a poofter’, making him a major target in the often-homophobic outback of the 1970s. A New Year’s Eve show in some wild outpost he called ‘one of the most horrifying experiences of my life’.
Michael kept in touch. In early 1978, he wrote to our mother reporting that he was earning about $100 a week, and missing both her and Rhett. The fact that four pairs of his jeans had been stolen from their washing line and he and the band had all been ‘roughed up’ more than once—‘I even got punched a few times’—may have accentuated his homesickness. But he was quick to reassure our mother that they now knew how to look after themselves.
The Farriss Brothers had residencies ‘at the Broadway Tavern, the George, the Kewdale and sometimes [they played] at the Orient’, Lynch remembered, ‘often with me, Larry or Terri-Ann on the door collecting the cover charge. There was bugger-all money after expenses but lots of free drinks—luckily bar staff never twigged that [initially] both Michael [seventeen] and drummer Jon Farriss [sixteen] were under age—and it was a bloody great year partying with our other bands and particularly these guys who went on to become INXS.
‘One pool party at a mansion in Nedlands I can never forget is when everyone jumped in naked after a day and night doing everything in excess! I recall vividly when I went around to the band house late one morning that Michael was still in bed with two hot girls. He was a major chick magnet.’
The nascent punk scene was big in the late 1970s in Perth with guitar-based garage rock played by The Victims, featuring Dave Faulkner and James Baker, who would become Hoodoo Gurus down the track. Alternative music was making its mark with The Triffids forming in May 1978, along with the raw, dirty sounds of the Scientists who evolved from the Invaders. Blues band The Elks, featuring singer/actor Terry Serio, was very accomplished—a well-established drawcard throughout the Farriss Brothers’ time out west.
Notably the band appeared on a big,six-band bill promoted by Paradise, that included Dave Warner’s From the Suburbs and The Manikins, drawing 600 people to Pagoda Exploda at the Pagoda Ballroom.
In Perth, Tim, Michael, Andrew, Kirk, Garry and Jon rehearsed five or six days a week. They steadfastly wrote new material, replacing their well-known Bob Marley and Stones covers with their own, unknown originals. As they did, the commercial pressure to play more covers grew intense, but still they wouldn’t buckle, and in the end, they had to leave.
In late 1978, as Jon (barely) graduated high school and was finally deemed old enough to move out of home, the band members prepared their exodus. Tim and Andrew invited Michael Lynch back to their parents’ place. There they asked him to come to Sydney with them and become their full-time manager.
‘I said no, because although I was pretty good at promoting bands I would have been a crap manager,’ Lynch admitted.
Partly because of these trials by fire, the band had grown up during their WA sojourn. The six energetic youngsters had forged a tentative path and presence as an independent band able to scratch out a living from music.
Nevertheless, they were very excited to drive right back across the continent to their hometown, Australia’s biggest city. Their timing was perfect. Sydney’s population was growing, spreading quickly far out to the west, north and south from the inner eastern beach suburbs and city. Dozens of ‘Leagues’ clubs originally set up for returned soldiers filled with hundreds, even thousands of young music fans after a drink and a rage to their favourite bands. Sydney was becoming the boom town for rock.
Around the northern suburbs pub gigs, Tim began his New South Wales offensive. While sticking flyers under car wiper-blades one time he stuck up a conversation with Gary Morris, then manager of Midnight Oil. ‘The Oils’ were then forging a stronghold in the northern beaches en route to immense national popularity and eventual international fame.
Gary offered Tim a support gig, then ended up taking over management briefly. He wasn’t happy with the rather daggy ‘Brothers’ name of the band. Briefly they became The Vegetables (as per the B-side of INXS’s May 1980 first single, ‘Simple Simon’/‘We Are the Vegetables’).
But vegetable-like they weren’t. And by then there were several exciting bands using numbers and letters in their names: U2, UB40 and XTC from Britain and MC5 and the B52s from North America.
Street posters said it all to the punters, so the go was to have a name as short as possible, because then you could be huge on the poster. Midnight Oil’s sound and lighting guy Colin Lee Hong suggested INXS. The band liked it, although it was set out two different ways initially: first InXs, then IN X S, then INXS.
Their parties at their Newport Beach share house were legendary, and indeed Michael’s unique approach to stage, his mix of grace and jerkiness as he flung his body round, gave the impression that this was a party in action. Well, often it was. They were six incredibly handsome, sexy young men wearing some pretty unusual gear at times. They loved having partners and were in touch with their feminine sides. Kirk was heading for a real preppie look while the others often jumped into black, red and white, as they would in the Kick era, knowing these colours for their knock-out appeal. Long-sleeved shirts on Michael, T-shirts and simple black pants evolved into different looks every month or so. In the coming times their androgynous (some thought effeminate) lead singer would seem strange too, on the blues-based pub circuit of the capital cities.
The five of them first appeared as INXS at the Oceanview Hotel, Toukley, New South Wales, on 1 September 1979. On the second anniversary of their first gig, as the Farriss Brothers, they still had their original line-up. That wouldn’t change until Michael’s death.
I was visiting Australia with my family—husband Jeff, Brent and baby Erin—and the band were working so constantly that Jeff and I practically had to trail around after them to their gigs just to see Michael.
I’ll never forget the first time I ever saw him perform with INXS. It was a little gig in the heart of Sydney—maybe the Metropole Tavern, a weeknight, I think. They played there quite a bit around this time. Jeff and I went backstage before the show, and when their dressing-room door opened a virtual marijuana mushroom-cloud enveloped us.
The place was only half full. I was standing with Michael’s girlfriend of the time, a great barracker for him and INXS, Vicky Kerridge. Lights went down and Michael stepped forward and grabbed the microphone, head down, hair covering his eyes. Right on cue he looked into the audience and his voice burst forth abruptly. He sang about someone who found himself through love—their forthcoming first single ‘Simple Simon’—and his connection to that audience was instant and undeniable. I was mesmerised. This creature was still my brother Michael, but so intense. He threw himself into character for that song, and with barely a breath went directly into the next one, ‘Jumping’.
The inebriated down front were shaking up their beer cans then ripping back the ring-tops when Michael prowled near, showering him with rainbows of cold lager. He repaid the favour. One particularly big bloke doused him every time.
‘If you don’t stop doing that, I’m going to get to like it!’ Michael yelled to a chorus of catcalls, yowls, yips and yahoos from the crowd.
INXS were all so young and fresh back then. How can I forget the feeling of euphoria back in that tiny band room backstage after the gig? Not only Michael but Tim, Jon, Andrew, Kirk and Garry, dripping with sweat but so genuinely grateful for the support. They were warm and humble, jocular and fun to be around, sharing themselves without a second thought before turning, businesslike, to pack up their own equipment—all the while making jabs at Michael who was absorbed in yakking with us.
In those lean early years I kept my eyes open for potential stage clothes for Michael too. Like Mother, he was a great clothes horse and carried off all kinds of unusual looks, always understanding the power of the cut, fit and flow of a fine fabric, the impact of colour blocks and simple lines. I knew he’d spotted a pair of fantastic, military-style, lace-up boots in a shop window he’d been yearning to wear onstage. He just couldn’t afford to buy them. As a reward for his hard work and his manifesting of brave stage magic, I handed him an envelope with $150 in it and with profuse thanks he immediately went out and bought them. They were a perfect fit.
INXS continued to support Midnight Oil and other local bands like Cold Chisel, The Angels and Flowers (soon to become Icehouse), gathering an enthusiastic following and experimenting with their image and sound. In the more individualistic climate on the east coast, they were free to express themselves in their own powerful way. They were tight, high energy and musically intense. Their frontman/singer was extraordinary and the songs were unique and well made, with a wide palette of instrumentation to colour them and a rhythm section evolving into something critically intense, immediately recognisable. Having scored the right support spots, they instantly grabbed attention.
They were not really into all of Gary Morris’s management ideas though—such as being ‘inaccessible’ to the media. And since he was so busy managing the steady rise of Midnight Oil and their label Powderworks on the local and international scene, he did not really have time for them. So he decided to help out both the band and a friend—Chris Murphy—by putting them together.
Wendy Murphy Moss and I have been friends since I began taking my family to Australia on a regular basis in early 1980. In late 1979, Wendy was eight months pregnant with Stevey, their first child, a little girl, but insisted on going with her husband to see INXS.
‘We were immediately impressed,’ she told me. ‘Michael was shy, but he still had stage presence; the other five band members were excellent musicians.’ Little did the Murphys know that night that this slightly awkward, eye-catching young man would within a few short weeks be so embraced by them that he’d become their baby’s godfather.
Christopher Mark Murphy, now referred to as C.M. Murphy, had been working alongside his mother in the family’s booking agency MMA—Mark Murphy and Associates—since the age of seventeen, after his father suffered a fatal heart attack in his thirties. Wendy met him when she herself began working for his mother at MMA too.
The couple were living in Windsor, around an hour’s drive from Sydney (if the traffic was merciful) at this time. With Chris working day and night, Wendy was often coping alone with baby Stevey and fourteen spirited Arabian horses on a farm. Then when Chris fell asleep at the wheel one night on the way home from a gig and ran off the road, they knew things had to change. So they moved to Mosman, a modest business hub in suburban Sydney, where MMA was run from their home.
Murphy was good-looking, a little shorter than Michael (who was 5'10½", or 179 cm), and six years older, with an imposing, level stare. His thick hair was prematurely greying, which made him appear older than his 25 years. He was all about business and had a take-no-prisoners attitude when it came to protecting his interests. Chris would soon have INXS touring every little town in Australia. He proved himself to be a sharp, ambitious young manager, and in his first year in Mosman, whenever the band was in Sydney, Michael stayed with the Murphys.
This was a good time for young bands in Australia, as far as live music went. But while there was a healthy business in pubs and clubs, selling records was harder. The population for the whole of Australia in the early 1980s was about 15 million—a small market. Overseas artists were generally more valued, and the ‘industry’ had not yet produced the tough, experienced, daring and entrepreneurial music business managers essential for international success. ‘Stranded’ as the Saints called it, in those pre-internet days, cut off from the USA and Europe by sheer distance and opposing time zones, it was brutally hard for Australian recording artists to break out beyond local shores.
But Chris and the band shared an invincible ambition to succeed internationally. Chris made a plan. From 1980 to 1983, ‘Murphy’, as outsiders called him, spent nine of every twelve months either touring with or negotiating for the band around the globe. He had a healthy ego; he was tenacious, determined, ambitious and aggressive. There was no way he was going to take ‘no’ for an answer.
In early 1980 Chris played a rough demo tape of his charges to former AC/DC manager Michael Browning, who’d started up an independent label called Deluxe Records. Deluxe had signed Sydney’s promising trio The Numbers and Perth’s The Dugites. Chris took Michael down to check them out live in a small theatre in Wollongong, south of Sydney on the New South Wales coast. Without further ado the businessmen negotiated a five-album deal.
INXS’s debut single ‘Simple Simon’ on Deluxe garnered some interest around the scene. Although it wasn’t very well realised, the band had a fresh-sounding, punky, new-wave style personified by the fact that the A-side and its B-side ‘We Are The Vegetables’ came in at the very short, programmable times of 2 minutes 32 seconds and 1 minute 53 seconds.
‘Simple Simon’ was audaciously released in France, as well as Australia, in May 1980. The band made its television debut on Simon Townsend’s Wonder World!, the long-running children’s television show, designed to appeal to young adults as well, on the Ten Network. The show created a fabulous, raw, in-your-face little film clip for ‘Simple Simon’, playing up on the fact that the show’s host was called Simon, of course. Andrew got into a long overcoat and wore a pork pie hat, of the kind Madness from England might do. And Michael was singing with a strange, mannered English accent then, a bit working-class like Paul Weller of The Jam, holding his knees knocking-close, his arms falling or flailing puppet-like by his sides, his long neck holding his head so high he looked like a wild horse about to shy.
‘Simple Simon’ made some good initial noise for the band but didn’t chart anywhere. Nevertheless, INXS were happy to tour and tour and tour in their homeland (while they longed for overseas interest), mainly around the rock capitals of Melbourne and Sydney. They couldn’t wait to get into the studio with an album budget to play with.
Michael also sent me some newspaper clippings, which I still have, long since yellowed. Jen Jewel Brown (then writing as Jenny Hunter Brown) was a very early fan who wrote about INXS in both RAM (Rock Australia Magazine) and The Sunday Telegraph, where she had a weekly rock and pop column for a year or so. In her Sunday Tele story she begins with this observation of Michael:
He stares quite fearlessly, slightly surly, out at the milling pub crowd. And for a moment Michael Hutchence echoes the late Jim Morrison. He clamps both palms just beneath the microphone and clenches them. He’s 20, fit, a fine dancer. He swings side to side with the mike stand as axis in a mutant Austral skank. A great mat of damp curls flopping over one angry eye, he shoots out each rounded word like a rocket off a pad. Michael has reason to look fearless. He is fronting one of the brightest new bands on the horizon.
At this stage Michael used to drop into the RAM offices in Crown Street, Darlinghurst, unannounced and just sit slumped against the wall, kind of shyly trying to talk to its maverick editor, Anthony O’Grady, while the latter grappled with slinging another issue of his fortnightly, full-colour, national hit music paper together. Michael became a regular fixture for a while, showing a fascination with how the nation’s then leading young adult rock and pop paper, which also ran articles from New Musical Express and Melody Maker, ticked.
In the July 1980 issue of the Australian rock rag Roadrunner, another young rock writer called Elly McDonald wrote a piece on INXS. She’d later write a cover story on them for RAM. In 2014 she wrote on her blog, in remembrance of Michael: ‘a sweet, rather whimsical boy with cosmos-encompassing curiosity.’ He reminded her of a character from the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. ‘Snufkin was a wanderer,’ she wrote, ‘seeking spring and summer meadows … a provocateur, baiting authority and despising convention.’ Michael, barely through his teens, was dressed ‘like a fan of French new wave cinema, in a Breton fisherman’s long-sleeved T-shirt with horizontal stripes. He told me he was fascinated by post-War bohemianism, especially the literary and artistic bohemianism of the ’50s and early ’60s.’
Since his father, Kell, had been a textiles trader in Hong Kong, ‘Michael loved colour and texture and trends, so he loved textiles’, Elly continued. ‘And he loved Hong Kong. He loved noise and close-pressed flesh and variety and change.’
Deluxe gave INXS AU$10,000 to record their debut self-titled album in a good Sydney studio, Trafalgar, at Annandale in the inner west. The band co-produced with renowned session bass player Duncan McGuire. Duncan was a wonderful musician, a bass player with Doug Parkinson in Focus (that band’s beautiful rearrangement of The Beatles’ ‘Dear Prudence’ went to #5 on the Go-Set national charts in 1969), Leo De Castro and Friends and also Ayers Rock.
The whole band co-produced the debut LP and, although Andrew had written the lyrics for ‘Simple Simon’, they also shared co-writing credits on the suggestion of Chris Murphy. Such an arrangement was unusual for the time, but it was a good incentive for band harmony. After playing gigs five or six nights a week, sometimes two gigs a night, they’d head into Trafalgar and work till dawn. They released their self-titled debut album INXS in October 1980. This was the point when Garry Beers, whose name had always been spelled ‘Garry’, added the extra ‘Gary’ in the middle of his name. He’d been given the double name as a nickname at school, and after it was misspelled ‘Garry Gary’ on the debut album, he took the eccentricity as his permanent stage name.
Looking back, Michael would shrug when asked about the first album, calling it ‘naive’ and ‘cute’. He recognised the early struggling for a sound of their own, something youthful that would evolve.
The album INXS included ‘Just Keep Walking’, a second single that made a great impression with its originality. It was their first national Top 40 entry, just scraping into the Kent Report at #38.
The track had the stabbing, automaton feel of a super-modern, too-busy industrial city. Its cut-up-style lyric and Michael and Andrew’s early love of the pogo punk moves lent it extremely well to a remix-revision called ‘I’m So Crazy’ in 2001, by Italian house duo Par-T-One Vs INXS (categorised as ‘Punk-House’), which has an intense film clip featuring punks dancing.
In 1981, INXS played almost 300 shows, crisscrossing Australia on four separate tours. Chris Murphy spaced them out so that each had a special name and poster to keep the public, record company and press interest up. There was the Stay Young tour, the Campus tour, the Tour With No Name and the Fear And Loathing tour.
Road life was less than flash in those forging days, of course. Two vans to tote six band members, two crew members and all the gear. Of course there were plenty of pretty women, fans, parties, hilarity and a certain amount of free drugs—which basically meant an ongoing supply of powerful, earthy, organic marijuana grown by mates at the tops of rainforest mountain properties and freely shared. Accommodation was the cheapest motel, three to a room. They’d take turns sleeping in the van en route to the next motel and eat whenever they could. They shared their resolve to conquer the world along with soggy hamburgers, eggs and beans, and fish and chips awash in tomato sauce.
In March 1981, INXS released a third single: a cover of the wonderful Australian hit of 1966, ‘The Loved One’, by Melbourne cult band The Loved Ones. INXS’s stylishly rearranged version was produced by Richard Clapton, himself a fine singer and songwriter who had also been managed by Chris Murphy. Cheered by ‘The Loved One’ becoming a Top 20 hit, Clapton would go on to produce INXS’s second album.
Underneath The Colours was a moody, artistic second album; one a young band could be proud of. The title track seemed to speak of the dangers of nationalism and war and the universality of tribes. Released in October 1981, it reached #15 on Australia’s album charts. The first single was ‘Stay Young’ and its charming video, directed by Jim Warpole, had a homemade look. Just friends and their children dancing around the band playing on the beach. INXS enlisted everybody’s help, of course. They had a great big happy friendship group to call on. Mother did the make-up and held reflectors when the sun began to go down. It was shot in Clontarf, on the beach in front of a house belonging to our parents’ friends Elizabeth and Oliver Campbell, who had a daughter called Hiraani. She’d grown up childhood friends with Michael, playing on the sand, splashing and thrashing around in the Pacific. He would never forget her beautiful Hawaiian name.
Working in the studio helped define the inner dynamics of the band. Each member brought creative excellence and special musical qualities to the test. Andrew took charge, becoming very specific about musical arrangements, while Michael’s poetry was emerging into commentary on society and relationships.
Michael made a call to me in America to ask if Chris Murphy could stay with Jeff and me while he was in Los Angeles hunting for an American record deal for INXS. Success was of course a long road in the USA, and Chris came back more than once. He brought INXS T-shirts and posters that I handed out to my childrens’ babysitters. I drove him to his appointments and often accompanied him to business dinners. There was a real feeling of teamwork. So many of us were dead keen to see the boys make it.
On those early visits, Chris kept us up on the latest news of the band. He would grill me about Michael, what made him ‘tick’. He told me that women really loved Michael, that he had a strange, charismatic power source that he was only half aware of at this stage.
Nevertheless, Michael was evolving rapidly into a confident frontman, a guy who could find just the right thing to say to an audience. The best thing about it was that he did it just by letting his true self out of the box.
He was still reading enthusiastically and writing down streams of lyrics. Poetic fragments often ran through his consciousness. His confidence kept building and building, but it takes a lot to walk out in front of an audience. The person at the microphone carries the load. Michael just needed time and experience—and the ability to find his calm centre and bring it to each show.
It was difficult to find a quiet place on the road, but Michael began with breathing exercises: deep breathing in a quiet place, even if that meant sitting alone in the van. You can see from even early videos of the band that he seemed to exude a Zen-like confidence. Sure as hell he owned that camera. He seemed to know instinctively that he could contact people directly through that medium—that beating hearts and willing minds were waiting to play with his own on the other side of the glass.
He told me about the visualisation techniques he used, so he didn’t get stressed out performing.
‘The afternoon of a performance, I close my eyes and play it in my head—just as I want it to go,’ he told me. ‘I see the crowd and build them to a crescendo.’ As far as I know he used this technique for many years. In the latter years, as his pressures increased, he came to depend on other, more dangerous crutches.