KICK or peak INXS(take your pick)

On my 10 album thing on Facebook, the first album I posted was kick by INXS.

I’d originally seen INXS on Countdown in about 1981, we lived in Morawa and at that point in time Countdown and the shop that sold furniture and mixed tapes like rock on 81 and Hitwave 82 were the only source of music a kid could access. We somehow managed to not miss out on too much.

By the time we moved back to Perth in 1984 Original Sin was all over the radio( and the radio played music, not the price of wheat and lambs) and I loved it, couldn’t get enough. Hit after hit came from the band that year: Melting in the sun, I send a Message and Burn for you. Sadly I couldn’t afford the tape at the time but a tape with about 5 songs remixed came out called Dekadance, it was $4.99 and I paid for it entirely in coins. The girl at target must have thought I was povo. I guess I was. That tape got played a million times. I could easily make this a review of the swing but I won’t, perhaps another day we can walk backwards through the catalogue.

I met like minded friends at school who were into INXS as much as I was, my mate Ken had access to his sisters tapes of Shabooh Shoobah and we listened to that heaps. Listen Like Thieves came out and the band seemed to get bigger and bigger.

Finally my chance to seem them live came, January 10 1987, Australian Made, Subiaco Oval. The full line up was huge: Mental as Anything, I’m talking, The Triffids, The Saints, Divinyls, Models, Jimmy Barnes & INXS. In hindsight I wished I’d paid more attention to the Trifids and it definitely opened my eyes to the Saints but I was there to see INXS.

I recall they played at least one song from Kick that night: Mystify, there may have been others but it was 30 years ago.

The album came out later that year, I think it was October, I went to the shop and bought it the same day, I listened to it constantly for the next few days, weeks and months. Everywhere I went , I took the tape and got people to play it, I hope they liked it as much as I did.

Every single song on this album is good enough to have been a single(and almost half of them were) from the opening Guns in the sky(which had a video, but was not a single) right through to the final track Tiny Daggers. Hutchence’s vocals smoulder throughout part snarl, part croon, part choirboy. He plays the rock god to a tee and he’s got the band and the songs to support it, this is indeed peak INXS.

Highlights for me are the aforementioned Guns in the Sky, Tim’s guitar offsets Michaels swagger and snarl. The melodic New sensation and the cacophony of Wild Life. Mystify also has a soft spot because I heard it at Australian made and it sticks in my mind to this day.

Going forward no INXS album was this complete, some certainly had highlights but to me they seemed to be reworking the same formula to recreate the same result, I also believe they were victims of their own success, the massive tours that Kick spawned didn’t provide the same opportunities for song writing and development, as a result the quality suffered. The band carried on relentlessly though, even after Hutchence’s tragic death. Please don’t get me started on the reality show search for a new lead. A massive post Kick highlight is Michael Hutchence’s 1989 collaboration with Ollie Olsen Max Q. Do yourself a favor.

I recently commented to someone that I thought maybe the album hadn’t aged well, that I was a little over it, that I’d maybe heard it too many times, that it was maybe too tied up in my teen angst. Well I was wrong, listening again as I complete this blog, it still gets me, it still works. This is still peak INXS.