Happy 35th Anniversary to INXS’ sixth studio album Kick, originally released October 19, 1987.
In this year’s long-anticipated second season of HBO’s Euphoria, middle-aged Cal Jacobs (Eric Dane) was the star of a flashback episode that allowed the predominantly Millennial/Gen Z audience a glimpse into why he’d repressed his homosexuality over several decades. In the opening scene, a teenaged Cal selects INXS’ Kick, pops it into his Jeep’s tape deck, and races through ’80s streets to “Mystify” to pick up his best friend (and crush) Derek.
In true Euphoria fashion, the camera’s gaze lingers and, as the song continues, we get a glistening montage of Cal and Derek wrestling in a high-school gymnasium, as Cal’s unwitting girlfriend cheers them on. The episode then settles fully into the ’80s and, after lots of furtive glances and will-they-or-won’t-they, culminates in Cal and Derek slow-dancing in a gay bar to “Never Tear Us Apart.” (Tragically, Cal and Derek are torn apart when Cal gets his girlfriend pregnant, and he’s forced to settle into an unwanted family life.)
It’s easy to understand why Euphoria’s music supervisors chose Kick as a touchpoint. In 1987, INXS were one of the biggest bands in the world, a band that found popularity with everyone from jocks (like Cal) to your usual loveable black-clad weirdos. But there’s also the fact that, from the moment Michael Hutchence whispers “come over here,” the album pulsates with a potent heterosexuality that, at the time, seemed all the more fiery in a New Wave climate of cool, detached androgyny. (Though INXS were New Wave, they added funk, disco, and R&B to the mix to create something slinky, sinewy, and unique.)
So, if you wanted to turn the compulsory heterosexuality of the late Reagan-Bush era on its head (while still introducing your young audience to something hip), you’d be hard pressed to find something more heterosexual yet more subversive than INXS.
Kick was such an integral part of the late ’80s that it’s hard to believe the album almost didn’t see the light of day. Though Kick was, for many fans, their first introduction to INXS, the Australian band had been toiling for more than a decade to become rock stars, beginning in the Farriss family garage, then graduating to Australia’s pub scene, then putting out music videos and albums that steadily built up an ever-growing fanbase, and then, eventually, opening for well-known bands like Queen, The Go-Go’s, and XTC (who, along with an Australian brand of jelly called IXL, had inspired their name—in the early years, INXS were known, rather boringly, as The Farriss Brothers).
In the midst of becoming ever more popular, the band found a young manager named Chris Murphy who, according to their autobiography INXS: Story to Story (written with Anthony Bozza), managed to cut sweet deals with competing labels—PolyGram in Europe, Warner Bros. in Australia, and Atlantic in North America—to distribute INXS’ albums, all the while (except for North America) allowing the band to retain ownership of their music. Over the years, Murphy played the labels against each other, to INXS’s advantage. “Taking all of that into account, it must be said that Chris Murphy had some set of balls,” Bozza writes. Indeed.
When INXS recorded Kick, they had just come off of Listen Like Thieves, their best-selling album to date, and both the band and Murphy were confident that Kick was going to blow every music executive away. Murphey flew to New York to play it for the bigwigs at Atlantic, and they rejected it flat out. “They hated it, absolutely hated it,” Murphy told Bozza. “The president of the label told me that he’d give us one million dollars to go back to Australia and make another album. I was speechless. I could not reconcile what they were saying with what I knew was so right about the music. And I didn’t know what I was going to do. I never told the band—the only people that know this are the three people who were in that room.” Murphy then played the album for the band’s European and Australian label executives, who also hated it.
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So, Murphy decided to use guerrilla tactics, implementing a divide-and-conquer strategy within the echelons of Atlantic Records. He broke protocol and, unbeknownst to the label higher-ups, scheduled a meeting with Atlantic’s radio promotions department to play them “Need You Tonight,” even though the label hadn’t agreed to release that song or any others off of Kick. The only person who loved it was a woman named Andrea Guinness, the head of college radio promotions, and so she worked tirelessly to make “Need You Tonight” a hit on the college charts. Murphy then booked a succession of concerts at colleges to create, he prayed, a buzz in advance of the supply. He spent all of the band’s money to finance the tour, and he smartly hired a few independent publicists to promote it. With the money he had left, Murphy bought as many ads on college radio as he could. It worked. Halfway through the tour, Atlantic added Kick to their release schedule, but committed to very little in terms of promoting it.
“Need You Tonight” dominated the college charts, while the band’s second single, “Devil Inside,” crossed over onto the rock stations and made INXS a regular on Top 40 radio. Over the course of four back-to-back Top 5 singles, Kick won the hearts of American fans, from the “alternative” to the very mainstream. It’s not hard to understand why INXS came to consider Chris Murphy their seventh member.
When I first heard “Need You Tonight,” I was younger than Euphoria’s Cal Jacobs and, therefore, wasn’t really in a position to have a sexy, clandestine affair that involved slow-dancing at a hideaway bar. But I did have a secret crush. His name was Jamie, and he was another army brat whose family had recently moved to our American army base in Cold War Germany, right across the hall from Debi, who watched my brother and me and a bunch of other kids after school. Jamie and his older brother were seriously into skateboarding, and, suddenly, all the boys at Debi’s were into skateboarding, too.
By the time Kick came out, I had aged out of Debi’s, but the skateboarding scene that exploded upon Jamie’s arrival had become its own whole thing. My brother, especially, had become a really good skater, and so there were always a bunch of sweaty, shirtless older boys around right as I hit puberty. There were also always other girls around who wanted to watch the boys, and so that became my preteen social scene. Possibly because of the skateboard on its cover, Kick wound up in heavy rotation among our little crew.
Kick kicks off with the stomping “Guns In the Sky,” an unflattering critique of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative, which entailed, as part of the Cold War, setting up lasers in space that would deflect Russian missiles. The video features flashes of Reagan and Gorbachev, as well as a flash of the acronym “SDI,” which stood for what the whole dumb shebang was called: “Strategic Defense Initiative.” “Guns In The Sky” was written, like all of the other songs on Kick, by multi-instrumentalist Andrew Farriss and singer Michael Hutchence. Prior to Kick, INXS’ other albums had been collaborative efforts between all six band members, but, obviously, there was something magical about the Andrew-Michael formula.
Hot on the heels of “Guns In the Sky” is “New Sensation,” a song about throwing caution to the wind and embracing a party lifestyle. “Live, baby, live,” Hutchence urges. And, oh, did he. Hutchence was known to indulge in mountains of coke, groupie orgies, and overall debauchery. The song features a scorching sax solo by band member Kurt Pengilly, and it’s infused throughout with funky, infectious dance beats. The song is a bit dated in that uniquely ’80s sort of way, but it’s also what makes it so much fun.
“Devil Inside” is a slithering, rollicking ode to a she-devil, and the video features big-haired ’80s babes in a dark smoky club full of ’80s hipsters. “Devil inside, devil inside, every single one of us the devil inside,” Hutchence growls, and it’s another tribute to the party life. At the end, unwitting boys on skateboards slide down the street as limos and motorcycles leave the party, on their way to god-knows-what kind of carnal afterparty.
Next up is one of the sexiest songs of all time, and the only INXS song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Need You Tonight” is, undoubtedly, the band’s signature song, the one you think of when you think of INXS. Hutchence and Andrew Farriss were under tremendous pressure to write the album’s lead single, and Farriss had planned to fly to Hong Kong, where Hutchence was living, so the two could hole up and, hopefully, emerge with something great.
As Farriss was getting into the taxi to take him to the airport, he was struck with inspiration. “I was actually sitting in the back of the car that was taking me to the airport,” Farriss says. “Just before the guy could pull away, I heard the guitar line in my head, told the guy I’d forgotten something, and ran upstairs.” Forty minutes later, Farriss returned to the cab with a tape in hand. He had recorded the song’s hook-y, shimmering guitar part, its bassline, and a simple drumbeat. For me, the secret to the song’s success is that, while it oozes with sex, it still manages to be subtle. My favorite part is when Hutchence sings “I’m lonely,” the music suddenly stops, and he audibly exhales. It’s the sexiest single second of a song ever—and yet it’s also possible to miss it.
More magic happened on Kick when engineer David Nicholas realized he could do some beat matching to fuse “Need You Tonight” with “Mediate,” the song that immediately follows. In fact, it was almost uncanny how similar the beats were. “I rewound [the] tape and hit PLAY just as ‘Need You Tonight’ ended and it synced up so perfectly that I actually thought something was wrong,” Nicholas said. “It was one of those very spooky studio moments where you aren’t sure what’s happening.” The trick melded two songs with very distinct vibes—fiery seduction and detached introspection—for an interesting yin-yang.
Charmingly discordant and passionately soulful, “The Loved One” is a cover of a 1966 song by Australian band The Loved Ones, and it’s a nice middle-of-the-album interlude. Meanwhile, “Wild Life” is another nod to the sexy, feral party scene—“like animals, locked in a zoo.” Then comes the bluesy, waltzing, and poignant “Never Tear Us Apart,” which, if it doesn’t punch you hard in the gut, then you’re not fully alive.
Next, the finger-snapping “Mystify” is another song hot with seduction, but, in the vein of that audible breath in “Need You Tonight,” shows that Hutchence is paying attention to the details, as time slows down even as the world keeps up its pace—“Some silken moment / Goes on forever / And we’re leavin’ / Broken hearts behind.” Then, when the song actually does slow down, he sings “Mystify, mystify me” and the drawn-out moment is like dew on skin, or the quick brush against a lover in a crowded room.
The album’s title track “KICK” is a wild, philosophical dust-yourself-off song – “Sometimes you kick, and sometimes you get kicked.” “Calling All Nations,” another high-energy track, combines a call to party with a political stance for peace. And the final song, “Tiny Daggers,” narrates a taking-stock of one’s life: “Do you lose sleep at night/ Do you ever stop to think/ Where it went wrong for you/ Who turned your reds to blue.” It’s hard to hear it and not think of Michael Hutchence, whose life began to spiral not that long after the success of Kick.
In the ’90s, INXS began having difficulty finding their niche in a landscape suddenly dominated by grunge. But Hutchence was also partying constantly, and in a series of tumultuous romances, and so it’s hard to know whether the band would have found their way had their singer not been so troubled. Then, in 1995, while visiting model Helena Christensen in Denmark, Hutchence got into a fight with a taxi driver outside of a nightclub, and one of the blows caused damage to a nerve that controlled his sense of smell and taste. The loss of those senses led to personality changes and depression. On November 22, 1997, Hutchence was found dead in his hotel room with a belt around his neck. It’s possible he had been engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation and died by accident, but the coroner ruled it a suicide. His friends and family are divided on what they believe happened, but nonetheless Hutchence died far too young.
Kick remains a gorgeous album full of deep feeling, soulful vocals, and poetic lyricism that will no doubt ensure Hutchence’s memory lives on for many more anniversaries.
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