Back during the pandemic I got the idea of texting still shots from old MTV videos to my friends on our “COVID Kids” thread (see “Always Ascending”). My idea was to start a game where we challenged each other to identify videos—band and song—from single photos. Years earlier there was an Excel spreadsheet circulating by email in a similar vein: pasted into it were hard and tricky stills from movies. You typed answers into it and clicked a submit button for your score. I worked on my answers for weeks. Fast-forward back to 2020, and it seemed to me a “Stump Your Friends” game would be a nostalgic and fun way for members of the MTV Generation to pass the time. So in July 2020 I posted this photo, with the caption “Today’s Name That Video Challenge …”
Here’s what I heard back:
Stumped! Guy on the right is giving me John Taylor vibes?
Lead singer in the black sleeveless shirt looks like either Bowie or Jagger. Is this a top 40 band though or is it something crazy obscure that aired once on MTV at 4 AM on a Monday morning?
Is that a girl by the drums? Maybe Dexis midnight runners?
I had to post two more stills before anyone guessed INXS, and still nobody could name the song. As it turns out, the video was for “Don’t Change” (Apple Music, Spotify), but all you geniuses knew that already, because of the post title. Also, half the readership here was probably in that text thread.
My “Stump Your Friends/ Name That Video” idea never really caught on. I was the only one who ever issued any challenges. I still think this is a worthwhile pastime that, if done right, could be fun as hell. Maybe we can (ahem) get a round or two going in the comments. But for as much as my concept fell flat, I did learn something in this process, which is that none of my oldest friends had any memory of this video, which was super-important for me. Only after I offered additional clues—including a front-facing photo of lead vocalist Michael Hutchence’s face—did any of them hit on INXS as the band, and even then they were still hard-pressed to name the song. Alli ultimately got there on her third try, after offering “The One Thing” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “To Look at You” (Apple Music, Spotify). These were near misses, to be sure: the other two singles from the same LP, 1982’s Shabooh Shoobah. Still, though: how could none of my OGs know this video?
Maybe this shouldn’t have been so surprising. I was nine years old when this video was airing. This was before I met any of the friends on this text thread—and probably before any of them had met each other. We wouldn’t have any shared musical experiences together for several more years, and it could simply have been the case that I was fortunate enough to see this video a handful of times, when none of these others were.
If neither Alli nor Sean nor Brad nor Mark nor Bob ever saw “Don’t Change” in the early ’80s on MTV, my heart bleeds for them. If they did see it and it just never landed and stuck, maybe that’s excusable, too. After all, other, much more notable things were happening on the network around this time: Greg Kihn’s wedding guests were turning into zombies (YouTube), Miss Sakamato was blinding Thomas Dolby with science (YouTube), and A Flock of Seagulls were scaling great heights of coiffure inside their hall of mirrors (YouTube).
By contrast, the “Don’t Change” video is brilliant in its simplicity: five of the band members are riding in the back of a truck. The keyboard player and guitarist are playing the intro. The truck passes through an open garage door into a warehouse space, where the band’s drummer is waiting for them behind the kit. He counts off four beats on his sticks, the rhythm section kicks in, and INXS jump down from the truck into concert formation. The band plays for three minutes, then the singer, two guitarists, bass player, and synths guy go back on the truck and leave, playing as they go. The truck is fifty yards clear of the warehouse by the time Jon Farris takes one final swipe at his crash cymbal, drops his sticks, and walks out of the frame. It’s a clean concept, elegantly rendered, leaving the song to do most of the work. Which of course it does, because it’s a goddamn beautiful song.
Looking back, it’s a funny thing that the play-it-straight “Don’t Change” video made such an impression on me, as against its companion clip, “The One Thing” (shown below), which was off the hook. Young, attractive women seated with the band at a banquet table, noshing, slurping, and sucking on avocados and figs. One of these figs lands half-eaten on the table, the camera zooms in on it, and it’s a dead ringer for a vagina. There are obligatory shots of the band playing—most notably during the sax solo—but the food orgy shenanigans take prime of place. By the song’s third verse all table manners are cast aside and everyone’s gorging themselves on bread rounds, bunched grapes, and a turkey carcass.
So in addition to all this unsubtle eroticism, we’ve got Biblical references, too, with Eden’s figs and the Body and the Blood put in play. None of this is assembled into any kind of coherent messaging or allegory. It’s literally all-you-can-eat symbology, a Vegas Buffet of Obvious crammed in our faces. Far from “The One Thing,” it’s everything. If I had been a certain age when this was in rotation, it might have gone to work on my brain like, I dunno, a hundred Madonna videos and Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love” (YouTube). But I was nine, and I therefore didn’t remember any of it, until YouTube brought it back to my attention in my late 40s.
But “Don’t Change?” That one I never forgot. At bottom—and I haven’t had to think too hard about this—they had me from the jump with that synth solo. For all my years in the wilderness scorning synthesizers and preaching strings-only orthodoxy, I’ve always been a sucker for that particular kind of electronic sound: shimmering, smeary, hypermelodic. The other like song I took from this era and kept forever close was Modern English’s “I Melt with You” (Apple Music, Spotify). These two tracks are of a piece in that the synths first articulate the main theme, but the guitars fall dutifully in line and play the same notes, adding to their force. Beautiful pieces of work, both of them.
As often as the videos aired for “Don’t Change” or “The One Thing,” I would read the band’s name in the corner caption and was flummoxed. I-N-X-S: a single vowel leading into an unpronounceable three-consonant pileup. Inks? Inxes? I had antennae up, listening for any of the VJs to say the name of the band out loud, but I could never catch a break. It would be another few years at least before somebody came to my rescue, uttered the phrase in excess, and the light bulb switched on: That’s the band with the song I like so much, where they’re on the flatbed truck. Now I can say their name.
In the late 1980s I bought a copy of the fourth LP, The Swing, on cassette. I don’t know why I picked this one out. It wasn’t their latest record—that was Listen Like Thieves, with funked-up opening track “What You Need” (Apple Music, Spotify) grasping at radio play in the States. By contrast, few if any of the song titles on The Swing were familiar to me, though I might have heard the “Original Sin” single (Apple Music, Spotify). Probably I was just looking to diversify my portfolio, and it was what they had in the store, behind the INXS tab, in that moment.
This was an impulse purchase, but most certainly a sound one, because I wore that tape out. These were my prime Walkman years, and I had a model with a switch that could change playback direction on the fly, so that I had no reason ever to eject this cassette from the deck—not even momentarily, to flip sides. That single hunk of plastic and spooled magnetic tape poured the same ten songs into my ears for weeks on end. Now and then I might have subbed in U2’s War or The Joshua Tree, just to cleanse the palate. I.e., I wasn’t irrecoverably obsessed. But whenever I sat down with pencil and paper to write out my list of favorite albums, as I was inclined to do from time to time—don’t judge me—The Swing was consistently my #1.
Not so these days. I’ve been playing it all day today, and I have to say: it’s not great. They’re most certainly reaching for something here. It’s just that at various times that something is Duran Duran (see “Dancing on the Jetty” (Apple Music, Spotify)); Robert Palmer (see “The Swing” (Apple Music, Spotify)); Talking Heads (see “Burn for You” (Apple Music, Spotify)); or Simple Minds (see “Love Is (What I Say)” (Apple Music, Spotify)). This makes for an eclectic record, but lately I can as easily slap together a playlist with “Girls on Film” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Addicted to Love” (Apple Music, Spotify), “(Nothing But) Flowers” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Alive and Kicking” (Apple Music, Spotify)—and that compilation is orders of magnitude more tuneful and confident.
In those olden days, the aforementioned “Jetty” was the track on The Swing I treasured above all others, and I was most especially taken with the chorus:
Watch the world argue, argue with itself. Who’s going to teach me peace and happiness?
Timeless as the underlying sentiment may be, the expression of it here isn’t especially powerful or effective. Compare these lines from another cassette I carried everywhere in the late ’80s (Apple Music, Spotify):
Broken bottles under children’s feet, and bodies strewn across a dead-end street. But I won’t heed the battle call. It puts my back up—my back up against the wall.
How long must we sing this song?
Before I pile on too much, I need to check myself: was The Swing objectively mediocre, or did I just grow out from under it? There was certainly a point, right around the time I bought my first CD player, when I set this cassette aside and never went back to it. Like, for over three decades. Most other “life-changing” LPs from far-removed times in my life resurface in the rotation periodically and are refreshed in my mind. Maybe 35 years was too long a hiatus for me to be able to tap into any residual feelings here?
On the other hand, nothing happened during those 35 years to prompt me to dig back into this one, and that’s telling. I hear The Swing now and it sounds like INXS forgetting who they were and what they stood for—or worse, rejecting it.1 Nile Rodgers produced this record, and it could be he egged them on down this road. There is certainly enough beat funk, slap bass, and guitar chucking here to register his influence. Carry these elements forward two years, and you get the Kick album, which went U.S. platinum in two months in the fall of 1987—my freshman year in high school. Over the course of the next year, four singles garnered well-earned Top 10 chart placements.
Kick found INXS strutting out of whatever identity crisis The Swing had revealed. They were fully transformed and fully realized. I died a thousand deaths missing their 1988 tour stop in Cleveland. Classmates poured into the halls of Howland High the next day wearing their bad-ass “Devil Inside” (Apple Music, Spotify) concert tees, rubbing my nose in it. Come to think of it, maybe it was Kick that did the essential work of ejecting The Swing from my tape deck into Listening Purgatory.
A year later, a sort-of girlfriend (this is me we’re talking about: sort-of was as far as it went in those days) loaned me a cassette copy of INXS, the super-hard-to-find first record dating from 1980. How she’d managed to get hold of this was never explained. A few years ago I was able to buy this album on CD, and a few weeks ago I bought it on vintage vinyl at the record store down the road. Playing it on and off as I have lately is what motivated me to write this week’s post about the band.
INXS is an interesting document. Rather far afield, sound-wise, from where they would end up, and not unlike that first Waitresses record (see “No Guilt”) in that first and foremost they come off like a ska band, but with new wave inflections. “Doctor” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Jumping” (Apple Music, Spotify), and—Hey-o!—“Roller Skating” (Apple Music, Spotify) are prime examples of this. “Learn To Smile” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “In Vain” (Apple Music, Spotify) bring that warming Don’t Change/Melt synth sound I was talking about earlier. The lone single was “Just Keep Walking” (Apple Music, Spotify), and I think it’s terrific, too. Here’s Hutchence fending off a car dealer’s sales pitch:
Clever words on smooth tongue talking. Shove it, Brother. Just keep walking.
AllMusic gives this record a measly two stars, and while I agree it’s not as strong as the Waitresses LP, this could be my favorite INXS long player. You just have to get past waiting to hear 1987 INXS in any of it.
Special mention is due here to “On a Bus” (Apple Music, Spotify), the very first song on this very first record. It’s pluggy and upbeat and carries a bit of Joe Jackson in its opening chord structure. In this one Michael’s just another bloke shambling along on public transit, describing what he sees through the bus window:
Liquor market, lots of flats, another 24-hour chemist and self-serve gas. I said, “All these things—they serve me well.”
Ultimately the experience is deadening for the riders. Or put differently: It’s hypnotising. It sends me to sleep. No one talks to anyone else. It’s frightening—everybody’s minds are blank. Oh-oh: HYPNOTISING.
If “On a Bus” shows us INXS at the starting line, they most certainly found themselves light-years away a decade later. Kick had exploded them internationally, turning all the band into stars and Hutchence into enough of a sex god to be considered for the role of Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s Doors movie. (N.B.: that’s Michael’s backside in the .jpeg at the top of this post.) By 1997 Hutchence had died by suicide or autoerotic asphyxiation, depending on your source. Whatever transpired at the very-end, no one can dispute that meteoric fame, abuse of substances, and his relationship with let’s-call-her problematic UK TV presenter Paula Yates had brought him to a desperate and untenable state.
By the time Michael died I had all but completely unplugged from INXS. I had liked the singles on the album after Kick well enough, and I saw them in Cleveland when they toured on that record in 1991, with the Soup Dragons opening. This would be the only INXS concert I ever attended: great fun, but it was clear to me they were on the downslope. But none of this meant that I didn’t still hold these Aussies close in my heart, or that said heart didn’t crack a little when I heard the tragic news, or that then and now I don’t wish I could travel back in time to 1979, find that glazed-over and vulnerable-to-suggestion young Michael Hutchence riding the crosstown bus in Sydney, and whisper just these two words of advice into his ear:
Don’t change.
I should say that Side B opener “Johnson’s Aeroplane” (Apple Music, Spotify) not only holds up but is pretty terrific. Probably Michael Hutchence’s best lyrical work this side of DA-DA-DA! I love your big house! (Apple Music, Spotify), and the musical accompaniment is warm, open-hearted, and plaintive—in certain ways, a more sophisticated “Don’t Change.”
Every time I hear this song I think of The Februarys. They always did a great cover of it. I also saw that '88 show in Cleveland and the '91 show in Lexington, KY. At the latter, I remember thinking the Soup Dragons were the better band that night. But that early Cleveland show was a blast. I wish I still had that "Devil Inside" concert tee.