INXS MADE a pact with Michael and Andrew. Yes, since the two of them had come up with a whole slew of hits—‘I Send A Message’, ‘Burn For You’, ‘The One Thing’, ‘Original Sin’, ‘What You Need’, ‘Kiss The Dirt (Falling Down The Mountain)’, ‘Shine Like It Does’—they now had free rein to co-write the band’s material for Kick.
Michael had been obsessed with writing lyrics since he was a kid. He’d scrawl a line or two in his messy capitals across a serviette at dinner, reuse the backs of letters, rip the corner off a page from a phone directory. Some writers have a more carefully organised work style, but Michael was a jackdaw, a collector like another poet he admired, Emily Dickinson. When she died in 1886, Dickinson left among her unpublished writings ‘the scraps’: yet-to-be-used lines jotted onto chocolate wrappers, torn-off newspaper shreds and other bits of flotsam and jetsam she could repurpose. Michael’s songs were generally developed from ‘scraps’ too. Clues to future lyrics peeped from between the pages of whatever he was reading, were tossed in suitcases as he rushed to make a flight.
His main co-writer Andrew Farriss, meanwhile, was an extraordinary musical talent—one in a generation. He used the full range of orchestral instrumentation in the synthesisers clutched to the chest of pop-rock in the 1980s, plus guitars, organ, piano, harmonica—you name it, he could play it. He could come up with music to the most heart-rending, classic ballad like ‘Never Tear Us Apart’, with its slow, throbbing waltz, then create the strange, playful, slightly alien funk landscapes of ‘Need You Tonight’ and ‘Original Sin’ with the funkiest Chic-style rhythms. Mind you, the whole of INXS would have everything to do with how sharp and minimalist that could roll. The driving yet floating, bounce-on-air rhythm section of Jon and Garry was undeniable as an invitation to the dance floor. The two of them had a great understanding of the positive value of emptiness versus clutter. It was what they left out that made them so damn funky. Kirk was one of the greatest sax players in rock, extremely emotive, and his vocals and guitar work were always spot on. And then Tim’s sometimes humorous little guitar comments added to the sense of daring that was an INXS motif, while his slashing guitar-playing and adrenalin were what made the band rock more than anything—except perhaps Michael’s vocals, which could also really tear things up. Credit where credit’s due.
But Andrew was one of the most underrated talents around, and so prolific. He’d lay down a mass of ideas, riffs, melodies and feels on cassette tapes and send them from overseas to Michael, who was likely to be in Hong Kong, France or wherever.
Michael would then sift through his own fragments and clues of lyrics and begin to test them against sounds, like someone starting out on a jigsaw puzzle. Starting with an idea, a half-sentence on a scrap of paper, he’d work hard at it, crossing out, sing-testing phrases in his mouth out loud, searching for a new sound until he thought a song felt and sounded just right. Once they got into the studio, he might tweak that lyric further again, and again.
‘Hutchence’s instrument was his voice; he couldn’t explain what he was thinking in musical terms,’ Andrew Farriss told Billboard in October 2017. ‘He would say things like, “It needs to feel like this.” And I’d try to translate that into notes.’
Listen Like Thieves had already worked a treat, a step up into maturity and international embrace that proved the worth of the in-demand English producer Chris Thomas without a doubt. So INXS entered Rhinoceros confidently to record Kick with him, working through the experienced ears and hands of engineer David Nicholas, who made some good artistic decisions too, like how ‘Mediate’ works in the track sequencing. They created many good songs, but Thomas wanted a great album for them and knew they could do it. He sent Michael and Andrew away to Hong Kong to attempt to write an album of singles, and they came close. They also helped each other on songs they basically wrote alone—Andrew’s ‘Mediate’ and Michael’s ‘Guns In The Sky’—and agreed to give each other 100 per cent of credit in return for the swapped minor input. They flew into Sydney with a cassette tape full of roughhewn songs and took them to INXS to spin into pure gold. One of the gems from this collaboration intensive was ‘Need You Tonight’. After they had put the finishing touches to the vocals in Paris, they took the recordings to London for the master mixer Bob Clearmountain to work on. Over the years Bob has mixed, engineered and/or produced some of the best work from Bowie, the Stones, Icehouse, Roxy Music, Crowded House, Springsteen, the Pretenders, Jimmy Barnes and many more. Around the same time that he was recording Kick in Sydney, Michael stopped by to see our mother at her make-up school in Kirribilli, not far from where he and Michele lived. He was very emotional that day as he shared with her that he and Michele had decided to go their separate ways. He blamed the hectic lifestyle that came with his career.
Michele Bennett would find career success as an award-winning producer of films including Chopper (2000, winner of five Australian Film Institute Awards); I’m Only Looking: The best of INXS (2004); Leonard Cohen: I’m your man (2005) and several films with director/producer Nash Edgerton.
As his star continued to climb, Michael’s professional life not only kept him on the road, but ‘necessitated’, through the ‘guidance’ of Fisher, Paul and Diamond, that he live in the tax haven of Hong Kong. The trio had also devised schemes for the rest of INXS and Chris Murphy too initially, but Michael and Jon, the only ones who moved to Hong Kong to share an apartment, were perhaps the most affected. As time moved on, the pressures INXS faced, including this move, would open up splits between the band members, their loved ones and those they trusted to handle their affairs.
‘To me,’ Chris Murphy would later tell journalist Richard Guilliatt, ‘that’s where Michael’s life changed: separated from the band, finances separated. He had to move to foreign countries to be protected in this web of darkness.’
Mother recalled how healthy yet unhappy he looked as he waved goodbye. She was deeply concerned for her son, who looked so forlorn as he walked away. Fortunately he was not going to be alone for very long.
While working on the vocals for Kick at Studio De La Grande Armée in Paris, Michael took a short break in Cannes. He was staying with his friend Michael Hamlyn, who would go on to produce The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for both screen and stage, and also U2’s video opus Rattle And Hum. His father was UK publishing entrepreneur Paul Hamlyn, and the family owned a beautiful villa above Cannes, not far from where my brother would later purchase his own place.
It was the week of the International Film Festival (known later as Festival de Cannes, then simply nicknamed ‘Cannes’) and the streets were full of people-gazers. Strolling down Boulevard de la Croisette Michael suddenly saw a poised young woman walking towards him and realised he recognised her—the American model Rosanna Crash. They’d met once when he was visiting Michele, who was on a modelling assignment in Japan. He was so focused on this strikingly beautiful young woman that he didn’t immediately recognise that her companion was another Rosanna—Arquette—who was there at a producer’s invitation. The two Rosannas, both from New York, had more or less grown up together. They were in Cannes en route to Paris where Arquette was meeting up with her boyfriend, Peter Gabriel.
Michael invited Rosanna Crash to join him for dinner that night at the Hamlyn villa, then they met up again in Paris. After that, he and the girl he fondly nicknamed ‘Jonnie’ became more or less inseparable for almost three years.
After ten days in Paris, Michael was due in New York for a meeting with London-born Nick Egan, who’d designed artwork for The Clash and worked with fashion icons like Vivienne Westwood. Michael had met Nick backstage at a show and invited him to design the sleeve for Kick.
It was Nick’s view that INXS’s album covers so far had been a bit too ‘democratic’. After all, an album cover is packaging, just like a book or magazine cover. It has the sway to sell—or undersell—the music inside. Nick believed that INXS were undercapitalising on their very appealing frontman. He recognised that Michael was a natural in front of the camera, with a rare bravura in styling his clothes and hair—no doubt partly absorbed through being around the fashion parades and movie sets that Mother and I worked on throughout his boyhood.
INXS were a great-looking band, undeniably. Nick just wanted to put their most charismatic asset centre stage. The cover he came up with is surely one of his best. INXS were shot by Grant Matthews, one of Australia’s top fashion photographers, for the sleeve. Its sharp-focus portraiture, stark and striking, stands apart from the more colourful, abstracted early INXS album covers. Only one previous—The Swing—had even featured the band on the cover at all (albeit taking up about a third of the space, with Michael in the back row).
The Kick cover is predominately red, white and black. The big, half head-shot of Michael to the right on the front of Kick’s bold gatefold cover stands out. The smaller images of Kirk and Jon convey that this is collaboration while the other three band members wrap around the back, Tim dominant in a very rock-guitarist stance. Booted feet—Michael’s—straddle a flying skateboard. Gravity appears suspended, with the strangely angled figures suggesting secrets and intrigue.
Chris Murphy hated it. He said he didn’t want Michael to dominate. He would not use it. He demanded it be re-shot with equal space for all members. Michael stood up for Nick and in the end they used his design.
Beside Nick Egan’s credit for art direction, design and cover art concept, Michael was also credited with ‘cover art concept’ and I think that was very important for him at the time. Expanding on Nick Egan’s concepts, Richard Lowenstein and his crew shot groundbreaking videos for Kick’s singles.
Meanwhile, in America, Chris Murphy sat patiently while the man running Atlantic listened to Kick all the way through for the first time.
He hated it.
It was too black, too R&B. It would alienate the rock following that the band had built up; radio would get confused; INXS’s growing audience wouldn’t accept this sound.
He offered INXS US$1 million to record over Kick.
There were also unhappy noises from the top execs of their labels in Australia (WEA) and Europe (Polygram) over the band’s proposed sixth album. Atlantic refused to put it on their release schedule. Chris, alarmed but not panicking—yet—thought they were all insane. Luckily he was buoyed by one label manager, in France, who was absolutely having kittens over Kick.
Surreptitiously he met with Atlantic’s radio promotion department for some inspiration and advice.
INXS believed in this album. Their seductive, lively combination of rock and funk had been gathering force beyond The Swing and Listen Like Thieves. Now ten years of sweat and the lion’s share of their liquidity were on the line.
Atlantic’s radio promo team said they’d help give Kick a shot. Based on the information he gleaned from them, Chris sent the band on a self-funded college tour, bussing them to universities and college towns across the USA. Hallelujah for American campus radio stations—partly, sometimes even wholly, run by the students themselves. Who better to have their fingers on the pulse of the buying public than young adults? Campus radio was more open to creativity. Ahead of the field in breaking bands, it regularly foretold what commercial radio would be playing next. And INXS were at home with the feel of alternative FM community radio stations in Australia, like Melbourne’s 3RRR and 4ZZZ in Brisbane, who took risks, discovered and broke new music. In fact, that was very much the stations’ raison d’être.
Across the USA, so many college stations loved various tracks on Kick and warmed to the friendly, funny interviews Michael and the others did with them. INXS started to score serious airplay. They played and sold out popular college bars and auditoriums. The students loved the band and word spread fast.
Atlantic soon capitulated and Kick was released to an avalanche of airplay and worldwide critical acclaim. The songs on Kick were all written by Andrew and Michael except for ‘The Loved One’ (Clyne, Humphrys and Lovett). Its first single, ‘Need You Tonight’, was put on high radio rotation across America almost immediately, hitting #1 on the main Billboard chart and also at home in Australia, while peaking at #9 in the UK. ‘Devil Inside’ (#2 in America) followed its lead, becoming a crossover hit before 1988 had ended. The album delivered four US top ten singles, their videos on high rotation on MTV, with third and fourth singles ‘New Sensation’ (#3) and ‘Never Tear Us Apart’ (#7) also big hits.
Less than two months after its release, the album was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Altogether Kick spent 79 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 with 22 consecutive weeks in the top ten. After two years, in 1989 it went quadruple platinum in that country alone.
Over the years Kick has had several re-releases in various forms; remastered, with featured bonus tracks, in box sets and on vinyl. Over six million copies have been sold in the US and over 20 million worldwide. Following its 25th anniversary release in 2014, it topped the Australian charts again. I think that album must have purchased a lot of properties for a lot of people connected with the band.
Rosanna gladly had her name removed from her modelling agent’s register and moved into the apartment Michael now shared with Jon Farriss and his girlfriend, Lisa, in the seething metropolis of Hong Kong.
That tiny apartment was so noisy, Rosanna said, you could hear the other residents through the walls as you walked up to the front door. And when you closed it behind you, not even the constant loud hum of the air conditioner could drown it out. ‘Whenever I hear Michael’s lyrics for “The Stairs”,’ she said, ‘I am always reminded of Hong Kong.’
In ‘The Stairs’ Michael writes of people brushing past each other in shared stairwells and corridors, their repeating movements mirrored on each side of a wall.
In Europe, Rosanna rode behind Michael on his Harley, hugging his warm, familiar body for dear life. The scent of his stirring hair, the nape of his neck and his leather jacket were comforting as they roared through south-eastern France en route to Gordon Fisher’s new abode in Beausoleil, near Monaco.
In no time at all INXS took off on a tour that would stretch over a year and a third, travelling through Asia, Europe and North and South America.
Rosanna gave Michael the companionship he sorely needed and the support he wanted without a second thought. She was patient, kind and assertive. She’d speak up for him as he asked her to: for instance, with the crew if something needed attention, or helping his friends get backstage. Michael could actually be quite reticent, too reticent at times, about addressing things he had a problem with. He tended to claim he was ignored by INXS if he did speak up. He totally appreciated Rosanna’s personal and professional support and I have to say he performed extremely well on this tour.
The couple took small forays into the real world, away from the interviews, sound checks, performances and the air-conditioned artifice of hotel life. They ate macrobiotic food and practised tai chi and yoga in their daily routines, even with the tour’s rigorous demands.
Nicole Bartleet, Garry Beers’ girlfriend at the time, now a photographic artist, kindly shared her memories of the Kick tour.
‘I had an instant connection with Rosanna, an exquisite beauty who was so down-to-earth,’ she said. ‘Rosanna had substance. She wore simple, classic, casual clothes and Doc Martens with a camera slung around her neck, all of which suited Michael just fine.
‘She took a juicer on the road to keep him healthy, despite this sometimes being a big ask, with such extraordinary demands on him and virtually no downtime. She adored Michael and he adored her.
‘I have memories of them wrapped in each other’s arms asleep on yet another American tour bus, to yet another bizarre town. Rosanna seemed to fit perfectly inside Michael’s leather jacket. She would disappear and look so vulnerable. They would sleep most of the way, exhausted,’ said Nicole. ‘I came to understand that Michael lived for those two hours on stage; the rest became a pain and a blur after so long on the road.’
To keep him on his toes, and also as a kind of personal dare, Michael would ask Rosanna to wake him from a deep sleep just a few minutes before he had to go on. Being easily bored, he liked the challenge.
‘She would thread roses into his ponytail, and like a cat he would leap onto the stage and nobody knew the difference,’ Nicole recalled.
The two girlfriends had a favourite routine, every concert, of making their way down to the front of the stage for ‘Never Tear Us Apart’.
‘There was such beauty in that song, and that moment it was palpable in the audience. That never wore off. It gave me shivers.’
Things weren’t always easy though. ‘I remember walking out of the hotel with Michael and Rosanna in New York during the tour when he was trapped by hysterical fans. For all his talent, his beauty, inside and out, I knew he hated that feeling. Deep down he was an ordinary man who adored his family and had lost his privacy. He hated that, and Rosanna was always thinking a step ahead trying to protect him.’
Despite being so short-sighted, Michael was often without glasses, so he needed visual guidance too from his partner at times. Once they were seated at the same table as Madonna and several other celebrities, but Michael couldn’t make them out across the table; he could have easily come across as a snob if Rosanna hadn’t subtly interceded.
Nicole remembers INXS had dinner with Mick Jagger and his solo backing band three nights in a row at one stage. They were all invited up to Mick’s room, where the two lead singers were engrossed in conversation for hours. This led to an ongoing friendship between Michael and Mick.
Another strong friendship Michael formed in the music business was with U2’s Bono. ‘It felt like an amazing connection to witness,’ said Nicole, ‘and they seemed equally fascinated with each other. Their mutual affection was beautiful to see.’
She loved the thrill of travelling with such a stunning troupe of rock’n’roll performers and their companions and the eye-boggling this could arouse in fellow travellers. ‘What amused me,’ Nicole recalled, ‘is when we got on a commercial flight every morning in Europe, dressed in our black leathers, designer and colourful clothes along with these very serious businessmen. They looked at us over their newspapers with disdain as we entered the plane. We then took a sharp right into first class and the champagne was delivered with the daily faxes, distributed by the ever-patient tour manager. Loved that.
‘There were such highs and lows on that tour, in particular in Japan where it was a strange time and band relations were strained. Every morning when we left a hotel to get back on the road, there always seemed to be arguments and stress over the bills and mini bar, of all things. A lot of us dreaded it.’
There was also quite a food fight in an expensive Japanese restaurant with the record company at the table.
‘There were so many egos in the band, including Chris Murphy. It was a constant struggle to find peace,’ sighed Nicole. ‘The gigs, though, they were breathtaking.’
Sometimes for Michael, dangerously so.
Rosanna was closest of all to the toll taken on Michael as the demands wore on. Playing so many open air festivals through the European summer was hard on his vocal cords. He was in the habit of carrying inhalers, never having fully shaken off his childhood asthma, and was prone to allergies. Sometimes he experienced a major asthma attack.
‘There were times,’ recalled Rosanna, ‘when he was putting so much into the performances at the outdoor festivals that he would barely get to his inhaler on the side of the stage. Once he couldn’t find it fast enough on the afternoon before a show and he almost passed out. It was a very scary situation.
‘The Kick tour was long and gruelling,’ she said, ‘and, yes, we did take off sightseeing when he got the chance; and, yes, he did socialise with celebrities after a performance—they would naturally gravitate to Michael—but that didn’t give the band licence to tear him down.
‘When Michael’s vocal cords began to give him problems during the latter part of the Kick tour, it was because of the pace,’ she said. ‘He was exhausted. The other band members admonished him, accusing him of partying too much. There is a big difference between playing an inanimate musical instrument and relying on your voice.
‘But there was only one show,’ Rosanna said, ‘when he insisted that he honestly didn’t think he could go on that night.’ That was on 30 June 1988, when INXS played at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival alongside Sting, 10,000 Maniacs, Billy Bragg, Bryan Adams, Hothouse Flowers, John Hiatt and Leonard Cohen, to a crowd of around 60,000 people. Nicole witnessed a big argument fly out of control before the concert. ‘Michael had a sore throat and was exhausted,’ she recalled. ‘The band had a big fight; they blamed it on his partying. It rapidly deteriorated into a screaming match.
‘Somehow Michael did perform that night and was amazing. That night was unforgettable and the audience was hypnotised. Rosanna and I danced euphorically in that big European crowd, close to backstage and I fell completely in love with her and knew why Michael had done the same.’
There were also ‘fun times, earlier times when [band] relations were better’, Nicole recalled. ‘Michael bought his custom Harley-Davidson Softail, and not to be outdone Garry had to buy one too. Our bikes would be rolled off the planes and Rosanna and I would jump on behind our men. In Melbourne we jumped on our bikes and took off straight from the tarmac.
‘We rode to the Dandenong Ranges the next day and called ourselves Harley Honeys, lifting up our tops in the breeze and laughing. Michael complained about the insects he swallowed on the ride and was concerned that it would affect his voice later. But the day was fun and carefree. Michael had eluded the press.’
Kick had a hybrid vigour that was right of the moment and songs that only INXS would write. It had funk, melody, moving performances and the highest of production values. These were helped along by clips bursting with the band’s lusty, high-energy charms, igniting a passionate new MTV fan base. Worldwide fans were further whipped into submission by impressive live performances during INXS’s constant international touring. Kick became a phenomenally huge, worldwide success, with the tour ending at the Sydney Entertainment Centre in November 1988.