First published in The Age on November 24, 1997
MICHAEL HUTCHENCE 1960 - 1997: End of a rock'n'roll adventure
Australia has only ever had one real international rock star. Since Saturday morning, when Michael Hutchence looped a belt around his neck and attached it to a door in a Sydney hotel room, it has had none.
Hutchence, who died at the ridiculously early age of 37, lived the life of the rock star according to a script written in the mind of almost every teenage boy. He scored international fame as the singer of INXS by the age of 25 and was a millionaire before he was 30. He squired a range of women, including his partner, Paula Yates, Kylie Minogue and Helena Christensen. He lived the rock'n'roll adventure.
In a 1993 interview with The Age, Hutchence said: "I live an exploratory lifestyle, I suppose." Hutchence the Explorer opened up several new territories for his countrymen.
He refused to see limits to the places he and his five fellow members of INXS could go. Having become a staple top 10 act in Australia by 1983, INXS performed a similar feat in the United States in 1986. By the early '90s, the band became one of the biggest acts in Britain, playing massive shows at Wembley Stadium.
Although Hutchence was only one-sixth of the group, he was its voice and its image. His louche, Byron-meets-the-Lizard-King stage and video persona became the INXS trademark. The nomadic Citizen of the World lifestyle and celebrated liaisons with famous women, culminating with a full-on battle with the paparazzi due to his relationship with Yates, formerly the wife of Bob Geldof, served only to enhance Hutchence's exotic star status.
The pop singers Jimmy Barnes and John Farnham have made bigger impressions on the public on their home turf. But neither has broken through in the big overseas markets. Similarly, local acts such as Crowded House, Men At Work and The Little River Band, have garnered platinum success in the United States or Britain, or both, but they were strictly musical acts. Only INXS had the magnetic presence of Hutchence.
INXS was a peculiar rock group. The line-up that recorded the hit Just Keep Walking in 1980 was the same group - Hutchence, Kirk Pengilly, Garry Beers and the Farriss brothers, Andrew, Jon and Tim - that was about to begin the Lose Your Head tour in Wollongong tomorrow night. Such constancy is a rarity.
What made INXS even more unique was the nature of its amalgam of rock and white funk. While it had many hit singles - Kiss the Dirt, Never Tear Us Apart, New Sensation, Need You Tonight, What You Need - its albums were rarely more than collections of potential hits and filler.
Lyrically, too - and the words were Hutchence's responsibility - they were rarely anything other than workmanlike. But they spoke to a legion of mostly female fans. INXS sold more than 20 million albums.
This year's release, Elegantly Wasted, was a slow seller and met tepid reviews, which suggested that INXS were going through the motions.
There must have been a strong sense of been-there, done-that for Hutchence in recent weeks, as the group rehearsed its hits for yet another tour of provincial and metropolitan Australia. It was unlikely that INXS would ever be a platinum act again, and he was becoming more famous for his personal life, and the enmity between him and Geldof.
For a larger-than-life figure, Michael Hutchence was, up close, surprisingly small. Although he had made his millions by flouncing around stages, adding his robust voice to the INXS sound, in person he was delicate, almost fragile.
There was another thing you couldn't help noticing: he seemed a decent man. I met Hutchence in April 1993 as the band toured smaller venues to pre-publicise an album, Full Moon, Dirty Hearts. As I was ushered into a room at the Hotel Como in South Yarra, he rose from an armchair to greet me. The handshake was strong, the hand tiny.
I remarked on the opulence of the double-storey suite. "Oh yeah," he said and bounded up a little spiral staircase on one side of the room. "Come up and look at this. It's amazing!" He pointed to a large white spa bath and shook his head with a sense of amused disdain. "Can you believe it? It's a bit like my place in London, actually, but without the f . . .in' jacuzzi."
Like home, but not really like home, and not home at all. I felt sad for him. But I was envious, too. He told me how he'd been spending a lot of time recently in his Paris place, on the Left Bank, mostly because it suited the work requirements of his then-girlfriend, the model Helena Christensen. The feeling in his arrondissement was cozy, like a village, he said.
I asked him why he was going back to small venues: "It's not for money," he said. "Don't need any more money. Don't need things. Don't need that shit. There's a lot of childishness to our ambitions in the first place . . . I've lived this, so it's difficult for me to say 'Do I want this?' Obviously, I must be - and I have to admit this to myself, and I've been trying to do this recently - a very ambitious person.
"I must have an extraordinary amount of willpower, ambition, and ego somewhere in me - although I do find I have to go to the ego shop occasionally - and I'm emotionally worked into all this on all kinds of levels."
Such honesty revealed an incredible innocence. If he talked this way to a stranger, imagine how he talked to his friends. Imagine what he might have said to himself.
By Shaun Carney for the Syndey Morning Herald, first published at The Age on November 24th, 1997: http://bit.ly/Hutch20RIP
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