INXS recorded albums made for communal euphoria. With thick bottoms and light funk filigrees, their songs fit all the needs of 1980s pop radio, but it was singer Michael Hutchence who distinguished the Australian sextet from Duran Duran. Simon Le Bon could sing about unions of the snake but not shout, “I’ll take you where you really need to be” as INXS’ hit “What You Need” did. The lead single from 1985’s Listen Like Thieves inaugurated a five-year period during which they were as inescapable on radio and MTV as Whitney Houston, George Michael, and U2. Hutchence’s suicide in 1997 has lent this era a beguiling glow: for a while, INXS earned the right to act as if they were a new sensation, a shimmering novelty instead of vets six albums into a career.
If time has proven Listen Like Thieves a superior album, the 30th-anniversary edition of Kick makes clear why the six-times platinum release is better remembered. Thanks to Chris Thomas’ sumptuous production, miraculously free of the ’80s’ production stereotypes that scolds like to claim are “dated,” Kick fulfills the title’s promise. Besides, Listen Like Thieves didn’t have “Need You Tonight” and a trio of follow-up singles that kept Kick in the Top 30 for close to a year. By the time the album/tour cycle expired, INXS were one of the world’s most popular concert draws, competing with U2, especially in South America (where they remain, according to conversations with my students, as beloved and canonical as U2).
Meanwhile, one thing hasn’t changed: Kick sounds fucking great blasting from the car. This edition makes the point rather too sumptuously: a three-CD/one Blu-ray set, including a Dolby surround-sound version of the original release and a welter of previously available demos and 7” and 12” mixes. In case you don’t need the Kookaburra Mix of “Guns in the Sky” as much as I do, starting with “Need You Tonight” is a good idea. Before it hit No. 1 in January 1988, INXS’ biggest American hit sounded like a classic upon its release, and like many such miracles, its simplicity was the key. Guitarist-keyboardist Andrew Farriss, co-writer of many of the band’s hits, claimed that “Need You Tonight” came to him while waiting for a cab to pick him up at the airport; when he got to Hong Kong, he and Hutchence finished the lyrics.
What you hear is a beefed up demo: Farriss’ drum part recorded on a Roland 707 drum machine, keyboard bass, and that riff—maybe the most recognizable opening three notes of the late ’80s. Huffing, whispering, leaping into falsetto, and squealing, Hutchence turned in a performance that was a karaoke version of itself. When Bonnie Raitt covered it in 2016, she didn’t even try to compete; she didn’t have to. All “Need You Tonight” requires is a performer who understands the folly of outsinging the groove. In video form, “Need You Tonight” segued into the nonsensical “Mediate,” during which Hutchence and an obviously hungover band, imitating Bob Dylan in the iconic clip of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” but fabulous in leather, dropped title cards.
The other three singles aren’t so much advancements as refinements. Over a rippling guitar line that showed how much INXS had heard from their former producer Nile Rodgers, “New Sensation” shows Hutchence in the declamatory mode that best suited him, with Thomas isolating instrumental elements every time the chorus swings around: a sax bleat, a terse guitar interjection, synth horns; it’s “Original Sin” recast as a plea for world domination. “Devil Inside” is even better: Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” with bull’s blood in its veins. The fourth single, released as Kick’s promotional cycle wound down, was the first to peak outside the American top five, but ask anyone born after 1985 and “Never Tear Us Apart” will be the INXS song they know. This ballad, anchored by keyboard strings, is rather blowzy—Hutchence can do the grand manner, but he’s too intense, as if still in that declamatory “Need You Tonight” mode. But millions of fans of Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut disagree, and so did the band: “Never Tear Us Apart” blasted as Hutchence’s coffin was carried out of St. Andrews Cathedral in 1997.
If no one has tried reclaiming Kick as classic, blame the album tracks, which are vestigial at best. “The Loved One” is the band embarrassing themselves with Steve Winwood yuppie blooze. “Calling All Nations” and “Wild Life” boast identical dueling guitar parts, one of which is tuned to “shred.” For a while, though, INXS had enough concentration to cough up a reasonable facsimile like 1990’s X; the top ten single “Disappear” boasts Hutchence’s most convincing show of soul. As they entered the 90s, the band’s steady commercial decline mirrored Hutchence’s personal decline: drugs and a taste for violence led to desultory albums like 1993’s Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, in which Farriss can’t hide his distaste for the pseudo-grunge material he forced himself to write. Hutchence’s death forestalled an ignominious fade.
Enough of that. Releasing a collection as overstuffed as Kick: 30th Deluxe Edition in 2017 hearkens back to the opulence of the INXS era itself; to ask whether the album deserves the incense is beside the point. I’m sure U2, obsessed with significance, will get similar treatment. But Kick’s slithery grooves are at least a match for The Joshua Tree’s hymns, and, as the live versions of “Mediate” and “Never Tear Us Apart” included therein attest, INXS at their peak summoned a grandeur no less numinous for being sex-drenched. At this stage in their careers, INXS were more authentic about their lightness than U2 were about their meaningfulness. After all, Bono, a chum of Hutchence’s, also wrote about the devil inside; Michael Hutchence sang as if he’d confronted him—and liked the cut of his jib. The devil was himself.
