INXS unearth ‘emotional’ out-takes of singer Michael Hutchence for Listen Like Thieves anniversary
Listen Like Thieves was the album that catapulted INXS to global attention — now the band is celebrating its 40th anniversary with “time capsule” of out-takes featuring late singer Michael Hutchence.
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“OK groovers!” Michael Hutchence’s voice booms through the microphone as INXS pressed the record button on the demo version of This Time for the Listen Like Thieves album.
It’s an eerie flashback unearthed by executive music producer Giles Martin, who is the caretaker of both The Beatles and INXS catalogues.
Martin pored over hundreds of hours of cassettes and studio tapes to assemble the 40th anniversary of the album that broke the Australian band in America.
Hearing Hutchence being his cheeky self in the studio back in 1985 as INXS fashioned the songs for their fifth album sparked all of the emotions for the band’s guitarist and sax player Kirk Pengilly.
It has been 27 years since Hutchence died in his Sydney hotel room as the band prepared to go on tour.
“Yeah, look, I did get emotional with this (project) because there were some out-takes of the banter between us all,” Pengilly says at his home in Sydney’s northern beaches.
“And I’d forgotten we’d often do a take and then we’d talk for quite a while afterwards, each of us in different rooms in the studio with headphones on, discussing what we needed to do differently on the next take.
“But we didn’t keep a lot of that stuff, so I was really surprised when the tapes turned up, because tapes were expensive, so we would go over old takes for new songs, just record over the top of them.
“So this is pretty special, a real time capsule.”
WHAT THEY NEEDED
INXS was on the brink of cracking America when they hunkered down in Sydney’s Rhinoceros Studios in August 1985 to write the songs for Listen Like Thieves.
After four records and a back-breaking, relentless tour schedule, countless laps of Australia from 1978, first venturing to the US in 1983 where they supported Adam Ant, the Kinks and the Go-Gos, and then Europe and the UK in 1984, INXS and manager Chris M. Murphy had their eyes on the glittering prize of world domination.
Hutchence, Andrew, Tim and Jon Farriss, Garry Gary Beers and Pengilly were close to the end of the Listen Like Thieves sessions when producer Chris Thomas suggested the album lacked the “big hit single” — words from a producer or record company executive to anger, and inspire, every recording artist in pop history.
The frontman and his chief songwriter partner in the band, Andrew Farriss, foraged through cassettes of partially-finished tracks.
At guitarist Tim’s suggestion, they narrowed their search for Funk Song Number 13.
It became the breakthrough smash hit What You Need.
“It’s funny that we had overlooked that song; Chris made us record the rehearsal versions of all the songs because he wanted us to be able to actually perform the songs together before we went into the studio to perform the song together. So it was clever but we were all whinging about it, of course,” Pengilly says.
“I remember Tim bringing up that song and then we had to find it in all the cassettes and demos. Andrew had done the music but I don’t think Michael had put anything on it yet. I definitely hadn’t done the sax parts yet.
“Chris told us to go in over the weekend — it was just before the last week of recording — and make a song out of it and so we did. What made it special for me was we hadn’t really had any songs ever where the sax was kind of a feature.”
For Martin, What You Need’s magic was powerfully affirmed 40 years after it’s release as he listened to its creation, from inception to realisation via the master tapes, cassettes and digitised files of both that Andrew Farriss had the foresight to compile over the past 25 years.
The son of Sir George Martin, who has passionately helmed the remixing, restoration and reimagining of the Beatles catalogue over three decades, compares the secret of What You Need’s spell to the Fab Four’s Hard Day’s Night.
CATCHY CLANG
“I think I should put it as one of the best intros,” Martin says from his London home. “It’s a really weird beginning of a song, that is out of time in a strange way. It’s a bit like Hard Day’s Night in a way, if you think about it, that clang … like someone dropped a guitar, and that immediately makes you listen.
“Unlucky for me, it’s not the best song of the album — songs like Shine Like It Does and This Time touch me more.
“It’s catchy but without that intro, it would probably just be a normal funk song. The thing about INXS is they were, are, really good musicians, and they really pushed each other.”
What You Need was the first INXS song to crack the US top 5 and peaked at No. 2 at home. The album’s third single, Kiss The Dirt (Falling Down the Mountain) almost killed the band.
Pengilly recalls how INXS 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.
The guitarist, who is married to Australian surfing champion Layne Beachley, wrote daily in his diary.
They were shooting 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 says 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, so we spun in 360s off the runway,” Pengilly recalls, laughing at the memory. “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.
“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.”
The restoration of the band’s legacy began with Chris Murphy returning to manage their affairs in 2008, with the 2014 mini-series INXS: Never Tear Us Apart.
The Very Best compilation of the band’s hits has been in the ARIA charts for 621 weeks since its release in 2011.
Since Murphy’s death from cancer in 2021, Martin and a core team of long-time INXS reps, have curated anniversary editions of their seminal 80s records including the biggest of them all, 1987’s Kick.
It’s a deeply personal passion project for the 55-year-old sonic architect. He was a 24-year-old publicist, yet to follow in his father’s footsteps as an award-winning studio and technology genius, when he first met INXS.
Hutchence and his bandmates swept Martin into their after-party debauchery in 1994 during The Great Music Experience concert weekend in Japan. It was the first of an ambitious UNESCO-backed cultural series to marry “western” artists with local musicians at iconic architectural locations including the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico and China’s Forbidden City.
That pipe dream didn’t happen after the first concert in Japan, but INXS did perform on a stage which also hosted Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Bon Jovi in front of the biggest Buddha in the world at a temple in Nara. And they did administer many vicious hangovers to a young Giles Martin.
“My job, as the kid working under my dad, was putting everything together with the bands and rehearsing everyone, so I had to be on site all the time,” Martin recalls, laughing before he launches into his memories.
“INXS befriended me and were like, ‘You have to come out tonight, it’s going to be amazing.’ I had to be up at six in the morning … I was dead by the end of it. I was 24 and they wrecked me. By the time I got home, bits of me were falling off.”
Martin knew the Listen Like Thieves album intimately, having flogged a cassette version posted to him by an Australian schoolmate from his “posh prep school” when they were about 14.
He has built a mammoth collection of dozens of demos and outtakes for the Listen Like Thieves 40th edition.
The INXS team also unearthed a long-lost BBC recording of a concert at the Royal Albert Hall on June 24, 1986, which Pengilly wrote in his diary was attended by Mick Jagger who stayed for 45 minutes after the show and cited “Biting Bullets” as his favourite song.
“It took a long, long time putting this together. Because you have to do it right. It’s the only time it’s going to be done,” Martin says. “You want us to give a backdrop to how the album was made without takes. Having done this with Beatles stuff, I remember walking around a gallery and seeing Rembrandt’s pencil
sketches, and it’s the pencil drawings of the songs that you know so well that actually make you celebrate the final song.”
For Pengilly and his INXS bandmates, the album shores up their legacy as one of the most successful Australian music exports of all time having sold more than 75 million records worldwide.
While their repertoire flits in and out of the Zeitgeist in the digital era courtesy of social media moments or dance remixes, and that best of collection keeps on streaming, the guitarist loves the idea that Listen Like Thieves may turn people on to the songs they have never heard before, the album tracks that were never singles or played on radio.
“I always thought that our entire career was really quite sort of organic, and word of mouth, it all kind of came about because we just toured and toured and toured,” Pengilly says.
“Also because we weren’t like, say, ACDC where every record kind of sounds the same and you know what you’re going to get, everything we did was different so I think we were our worst enemies in a way with that. You had to come to see us live to get how everything worked together.
“With a re-release like this, I guess I’m amazed that anyone can hear us 40 years later. Some of the songs off this album, a lot of our songs, are still just played on radio all around the world. Still. That to me is a legacy in a way.”
Listen Like Thieves 40th anniversary deluxe vinyl and CD editions are released on May 9.
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