← Behind The Song: Classic Rock Chronicles
Loading summary
Transcript2 lines
- [00:00]
A
97.1Fm the drive presents the behind the Song podcast, taking you deeper into classic rock's most timeless tunes. Here's your host, Janda One of the.
- [00:12]
B
Biggest albums of 1987 turned out to be album number six from NXS Kick. It was the biggest seller of their career and it made the Australian band international superstars. The late Michael Hutchins seemed born for this moment, a frontman who appeared to be sent down from Planet Rockstar and the singles crafted by Hutchence and inxs Andrew Farris romped their way up the charts, proving that there was a desire for music that was sometimes hard to define. Rock, soul, funk, new wave, dance pop, symphonic alternative. With Kick, NXS seemed to cover it all. What if I told you that the album was at first rejected by their American label, who said they didn't hear a single among Need U Tonight, New sensation Never Tear Us Apart or the delightfully naughty Devil Inside, A Song that I'll get into more in this episode. Kick Back and dig into the story and if you like it hit subscribe to go back a bit. The Kick album came after the band first tasted real hit, making euphoria with the release of their previous album, the 1985's Listen Like Thieves, when what yout need went to number five in the U.S. this band, which included three brothers, songwriter Andrew Faris, Tim Ferriss and John Faris, along with Kirk Pengilly and Gary Gary Beers and of course Michael Hutchins, had been playing together since 1977. They all went to high school together in Sydney and began playing pubs, and for a time they called themselves the Vegetables. But after a stint opening for fellow Aussies Midnight Oil, they changed their name to NXS in 1979. They released their first album in 1980. By the mid-80s, Andrew Farris, who played both keyboards and guitar, and Michael Hutchence, who played no instrument that contributed all the lyrics, gelled as the band's songwriters, and the two of them largely wrote all of the material from the Kick album onward. After touring behind Listen Like Thieves, Faris and Hutchins took off to Hong Kong with the specific purpose of shutting out any distractions back home and writing songs for their next album. They knew they had to deliver if they were going to build on the interest they had just piqued with a charting US Hit. The rest of the band agreed and the two took off to China to get away and write. Two weeks later they returned with a batch of songs that would become Kick. Amazingly, once the album was done, the band's manager, Chris Murphy, flew to New York to play it for the executives at their US label, Atlantic Records. They rejected it, said it was too dancey funky, and suggested re recording it to the tune of about a million dollars. But Murphy had an idea. He secretly got together with the radio promotion department and played them Need U Tonight. They in turn came up with a strategy to focus on getting the song on college radio and it charted in September of 1987. Only after this did Atlantic agree to add the album to the release schedule and it hit stores a month later in Octo. Had it not been for Murphy's handling of the top down rejection with a surreptitious plan, Kick would likely never have been released at all. At least not as we know it. When the second single, Devil Inside was released, it found an audience on rock playlists. It went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and kick really High stepped it up the charts. Then it ended up selling over 66 million copies in the US alone. The somewhat sinister and very catchy guitar riff for Devil Inside actually came to Andrew Farris during some downtime on tour a couple of years earlier and morphed into the song Once Hutchins wrote lyrics based around, in his words, the chaos of everything, and chaotic it surely must have been for this band of friends and brothers to go from Australian pub band Darlings to touring the world in the span of just a few years. Hutchence said that as a result of all this chaos, he was in what he called a real God and the Devil phase, where the devil historically represents all the confusion and, yes, excess that he specifically was living through at the time. It was a song meant to be about the fight between good and evil that he thought existed in himself and everyone else. Devil Inside goes like this Here come the woman with the look in her eye Raised on leather with flesh on her mind Words as weapons sharper than knives Makes you wonder how the other half die in just a few verses, the lyrics touch on several of the seven deadly sins Pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. And it's in this next verse that we also have the album title contained in a lyric Here come the man with the look in his eye Fed on nothing but full of pride look at them go, look at them Kick makes you wonder how the other half live, and the chorus is almost like a sing song chant. It would be eerie if it weren't embedded in such an upbeat tune. The Devil Inside the Devil Inside Every single one of us the devil Inside. And the last verse takes this internal struggle between good and bad to the world. Just as in excess were perched on the edge of worldwide potential. Something that wasn't lost on Michael Hutchins. Here come the world with the look in its eye. Future uncertainty but certainly slight look at the faces. Listen to the bells. It's hard to believe we need a place called hell. The poet John Milton wrote in his epic poem Paradise Lost. The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. He wrote that in the 1600s, putting into words a profound human struggle. And as we all well know, Michael Hutchins struggled mightily with his own internal demons. He was no stranger to excess. The highs and lows of the high life. And it was all in public. High profile love affairs with Kylie Minogue as well as the supermodel Helena Christensen who he was with in the mid-90s when he was attacked by a cab driver while visiting her native Denmark. The cab driver knocked Hutchins out, causing damage to his brain that was kept secret from the public. His older sister Tina said years later that this injury not only caused him to lose his sense of taste and smell, but it changed his personality, causing his moods to swing wildly. Hutchence left Christensen for British TV presenter Paula Yates shortly after the incident, even though Yates was at the time married to Bob Geldof and a mother to their three kids, which put Hutchence at odds with the British press and their view of him as the bad guy against the widely admired Geldof. He and Yates had a chaotic relationship that was well documented in the tabloids, yet had a daughter in 1996 who they named Heavenly Harani Tiger Lily. Sixteen tumultuous months later, Hutchence was found alone and unresponsive in his hotel room in Australia. His hanging death ruled a suicide. The hours leading up to his discovery had included an argument by phone with Geldof over visitation with his daughter due to Hutchins lifestyle. It was a sad ending to the incredible and seemingly charmed life of one of music's most charismatic lead singers and lyricists. Bob Geldof became Tiger Lily's legal guardian after her mother, Paula Yates, also sadly died of an overdose in 2000. In excess continued on after Hutchins death, although no one could ever truly replace him as the band stated, they toured with various lead singers until 2012 with a final show taking place in Perth, Australia. There was a time when NXS was the biggest band in the world and there was no rock star that burned brighter for that time than Michael Hutchins, a man who, in the end, couldn't outrun his own devils. We remember their music as vibrant and alive, different in a way that could only have been created by this band of brothers and longtime friends from down under striking a chord around the world with the songs on Kick, an album that almost wasn't released at all. I'm Janda, and this has been behind the song. Special thanks, as always, to Christian Lane for the music you hear on these podcast episodes. Check us out on TikTok and you can find me on the air weekdays from 9 to 2 Central at 97.1fm the drive in Chicago and at wdrv.com on the way. Much more classic rock and roll.