INXS reveal how they cheated death in a plane crash on an outback video shoot

As their breakthrough album Listen Like Thieves turns 40, INXS guitarist Kirk Pengilly shares the behind-the-scenes drama of an outback video shoot.

INXS soared to global success 40 years ago with the edgy video for What You Need but their next film shoot brought them crashing back to earth.

As the band celebrate the 40th anniversary of their breakthrough record Listen Like Thieves, guitarist Kirk Pengilly has revealed how the band cheated death during the shoot for Kiss the Dirt (Falling Down the Mountain) in the Australian outback in early 1986.

What You Need was the first INXS song to crack the US top 5, with the animated video by director Richard Lowenstein blowing up on MTV which had usurped radio’s power to create hits.

Pengilly recalled how the band raced back from the US to film with Alex Proyas, who graduated from technologically-forward music videos to Hollywood director of The Crow and I, Robot.

Guitarist Tim Farriss in the outback for Kiss The Dirt video shoot. Picture: Supplied.

Lowenstein was unavailable as he was editing his feature film Dogs in Space, which starred INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.

The band members were shooting the Kiss the Dirt on the salt plains surrounding Coober Pedy and other outback locations.

In the post-Mad Max and Men at Work’s Down Under and pre-Crocodile Dundee cultural era, America’s fascination with Australiana was percolating.

Pengilly said the band travelled around the iconic filming sites “in our own little Cessna with a pilot who drank a lot (between flights) and we spun off the runway when landing one day”.

“A tyre blew out (when landing) so we spun in 360s off the runway,” Pengilly said.

They avoided another airborne disaster when the pilot took a nap after giving Andrew Farriss “a go” at the flight controls

“And another day, Andrew (Farriss) – who’s always a nervous flyer anyway – sat up the front and the pilot asked him if he wanted to have a go (flying), and Andrew sheepishly said yes,” Pengilly said.

“We’d all fallen asleep and Tim (Farriss) wakes up and the pilot is (asleep) with dribble coming out of his mouth and Andrew is frozen, holding (the stick) because he’s too scared to move to try to wake the pilot.

“So Tim shook the pilot awake. We survived! There’s been lots of near misses over the years, with all the travelling.”

Michael Hutchence on stage on the Listen Like Thieves tour. Picture: Supplied.

The band’s executive music director, legendary producer Giles Martin, pored through hundreds of hours of out-takes and demos to curate the 40th anniversary reissue of Listen Like Thieves, which is released on May 9.

Pengilly said listening to Hutchence and his bandmates talk about the songs as they built them up at Sydney’s Rhinoceros Studios in early 1985 was an emotional experience.

It reminded him of the frontman’s approach to writing lyrics and fashioning his vocal melodies.

INXS with producer Giles Martin. Picture: Supplied.

“A lot of the time Michael hadn’t finished the lyrics for the demos until much later,” Pengilly said.

“He just had scraps of toilet paper and napkins and things he would pull out when he and Andrew got together; a title of a song or a phrase he heard that he thought, ‘Oh, that sounds cool,’ and then he would elaborate on that.’”

The new deluxe vinyl and CD editions of the 1985 album also feature a long-lost concert, attended by Mick Jagger, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1986.

Pengilly kept daily diary notes during the band’s career and wrote how Jagger’s favourite song from the gig was ‘Biting Bullets.”

Read the full exclusive story about the Listen Like Thieves remake in the Weekend magazine in The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun and Courier Mail.

Originally published as INXS reveal how they cheated death in a plane crash on an outback video shoot