An extended Q&A with INXS

Last Friday, INXS were presented with a plaque for Quadruple Platinum sales of INXS: The Very Best. While the year isn’t over yet, the record is the #1 selling artist album in Australia for 2014 right now. Its release in February marked the first ARIA #1 album for the band in 24 years (since 1990’s X) and put the band down in the history books as the Australian act with the longest gap between #1 albums. During the month of its release, INXS had six albums, includingKickandThe Swing in the ARIA Top 100 Albums and nine tracks in the ARIA Top 100 Singles chart.

The second coming of INXS was single-handedly spearheaded by the promotion and screening of TV mini-series INXS: Never Tear Us Apart; it was screened in Australia, New Zealand, US and in Latin America. In Australia, where it screened as a two-part series, the first part had a total audience of 2.243 million metro viewers and the second had 2.579 million, including regional viewers.

TMN caught up with Kirk Pengilly and brothers Tim, Andrew and Jon Farriss (Garry GaryBeers is currently overseas) to chat about the AACTA Award-nominated mini-series, the band's writing dynamic changes, their favourite year of INXS, and the nudist colony Jon performed at.

2014 has been somewhat of a second coming for INXS, does it feel that way?

Tim: We were away for most of our success here. In fact, the early days, when we were a pub band, were the only times we got to enjoy much of our success here in Australia because we spent most of our lives overseas or on tour buses and we came home to not tour and get away from it all.

Jon: We had actors [enjoy our success here] for us.

Kirk: We’ve hired people to be us.

Kirk: It’s been a great year for INXS cover bands as well, they’ve been selling out everywhere.

The mini-series has triggered so many ARIA chart re-entries and sales records, what was the biggest thing it triggered for you during its filming and screening?

Tim: a lot of painful memories, a lot of great memories. Some memories that I’d forgotten (laughs).

Jon: It became so obvious and clear, and in a sad way, because of how much we miss Michael, how much fun we made it. Even when it was sort of shitty and we were tired and it was a crap day or we were just fully exhausted, whatever, we made sure we had a good time. We tried to hold on as much as we could to the memories of everything because in one day, there could be so much happening.

Andrew: It’s so bewildering. Interesting enough, I can remember clearly when we stepped out of Australia to go overseas, and we never had like some instant massive success, we had our own rollercoaster ride with that too. And then the payoffs wouldn’t always come nice and easy or when you want them to, so the fact that this has rolled around like this is amazing really.

Kirk: And then we spent a couple years in the US and started to go to South America and Europe and starting at the bottom again in Europe. It all came together in the Kick album, all the places caught up on one level.

Jon: there was a time on the Kick period when we probably could have kept touring indefinitely for years and years and years until we sort of said ‘Stop!’ because every night there’d be an 18,000 area in some town I’d never heard of. It was like ‘Where are all these people coming from?’.

Tim: You start to understand how big some of the countries are, how vast they are and how much time it takes to cover them.

Kirk: And then by the time the X album came around we were doing stadiums all around the world, so then it was just a massive machine. You’d have one place being set up while we were another – that kind of stuff.

Tim: you had to remember not to be blasé and not take it for granted.

Well you’ve had moments where your head could get so big you wouldn’t fit out the door.

Kirk: We kept each other in line for the most part. It was definitely a crazy career for a while there but for the most part that was the beauty of being Australian and growing up together.

Andrew: And we used to have a carpenter that would change the door size so your head could fit through.

Jon: Just to keep ourselves in line we had a door shaped like a number one.

Kirk: Mental As Anything used to call us The Sexys.

Andrew: We used to have cooking competitions with them to see who could cook the most stuff in a hotel room, with a kettle.

Kirk: Imagine checking into a hotel where someone had been cooking fish in the kettle. You go to make a cup of tea y’know… I remember those days and hanging out with The Angels and Cold Chisel, all the guys. It was really good fun. While there was a little bit of a sense of competition in a way, it was healthy. Some took it more seriously than others.

Who are you talking about?

Jon: I think the ones that took it most seriously didn’t make it.

Tim: A lot of Australian artists were happy to be successful in Australia and really the whole concept of becoming huge overseas is daunting when you fully realise the gravity of what it would take, a lot of people would rather just not. (laughs) And for good reason.

Andrew: Around that time in the late ’80s and early ‘90s, a lot of that time I was in England. For five years. My kids were born there. It used to hit home for me in the dead on winter and in Australia everyone would be at the beaches and enjoying the fruits of their labour. And as much as it was a great experience, at times I used to think – exactly what Tim just said – I think honestly to take on the world, if you really want to do that you’re going to have to be consistent; once you start, you have to be committed and you will suffer in some way, but the pay off will be extraordinary if you get there. For some, maybe solo artists, it’s instant and they’re calling the shots, they’re in control. But when you’re in a band I think it’s very much you have to be conscious of each other as you’re going through the journey. You can’t just be ‘It’s all about me’, it doesn’t work that way. So you have to give the whole time. You give something away to get there.

Kirk: Or you write a song. What About Me?

Jon: I’m just looking out the window and there’s a naked person.

Where?

Jon: It’s a blow-up doll and they’ve moved.

I noticed Orignal Sin has Don’t Change, which was written by all of you and your record Switch has all of you listed as co-writers on most of the tracks. How has the writing process changed over the years?

Kirk: Drastically when Michael died, because Michael and Andrew were the main songwriters and Jon as well with Michael. Michael and Andrew specifically had a writing team like Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards.

I remember before we went in to do the Switch album, we sort of discussed it and we decided the best way to go would be to allow the writers to write withother people outside of the band, as long as one of us was involved then that was acceptable. But you know, we’ve had to adapt since Michael died obviously.

Andrew: Also we all still write and play. I was just overseas writing with a couple of country writers and I love writing music still. Back here, I’m going to be working with a lot of younger people in Canberra next year.

Jon: And I’m releasing some solo stuff next year. For the past few years I’ve been ‘under cover’.

Have any of you heard Jon's solo stuff?

Kirk, Andrew: No.

Kirk: I don’t like to hear things until they’re finished; how they’re supposed to be heard.

Tim: I’ve heard one song. I mean, everyone’s been learning to have a life outside of things and it’s been good. Everything happens for a reason and there’s no other way we could have done anything than what we’ve been doing these last couple of years anyway.

INXS is still a machine, it always will be. When we said that this is probably the last INXS show ever, it didn’t mean the band had broken up or anything like that, as was reported on television. It just simply meant that we’ve stopped touring for the foreseeable future. Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you.

What’s each of your favourite year for the band so far?

Andrew: This year was pretty good (laughs). To me the best years were 1977 when we first started and somewhere around the mid-‘80s. I can’t remember much of 1986.

Did the mini-series help you with that?

Andrew: Not really (laughs).

Kirk: When we read the scripts – all the various scripts before the mini-series came out – after the second script I sort of said to the producer, ‘Look, we had a lot more fun. We were laughing ourselves silly 90% of the time, and that’s got to come across.’ That’s the truth of it.

But when you asked that question I’d have to say probably 1983 was a really great year because we’d started touring internationally and while that was tough, it was also very exciting. We ended up playing at the US Festival in front of 250,000 people, we made Shabooh Shoobah with Mark Opitz at Rhinoceros Studios which we ended up owning. I mean, it was just a really significant year in so many ways and I think Shabooh Shoobah was our first proper record. For me it was just a very significant year.

Jon: Well we got one [year].

Kirk: We did our first naked shot.

There’s lots of talk of nudity in this interview actually.

Kirk: Jon used to play in nudist colonies.

Jon: It wasn’t nudist colonies.

Kirk: It was a tour!

Jon: I was 14-years-old and it was a nudist colony.

Kirk: did you have to take your clothes off?

Jon: Well, no but what happened was is that they were all so excited.

Kirk: That’s not good.

Jon: If there was an event they all got dressed but in the middle of the gig all started taking their clothes off. So I’m just playing along and..

Kirk: That’s always happened though.

Jon: Not much has changed actually… At the end of the night there’s just this big auditorium full of naked people. And there was this young girl I was interested in, and her mum was there and I was introduced to her: ‘Hello how are you, lovely tit-to see you.’

Image:INXS and their manager CM Murphy with Universal's George Ash, Liam Dennis, Darren Aboud andMichael Taylor.