(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

INXS, fronted by singer, heartthrob, and sex symbol Michael Hutchence (heir to the tradition of Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, and Jim Morrison) and guitarist/keyboardist Andrew Farriss (composer of most of the music), began their run of successes in 1980 with Simple Simon.

The first album, INXS (Deluxe, 1980), featuring Just Keep Walking, immediately followed by the single The Loved One, and the second album, Underneath The Colors (Deluxe, 1981), with Stay Young and Night Of Rebellion, were collections of unpretentious songs made both for humming along and for dancing.

In 1983, with Shabooh Shoobah (Atco, 1982), a more personal style began to take shape. Although it was still essentially synthpop, that of The One Thing was above all a rhythm, over which Hutchence embroidered in a rough and provocative manner. The ballads Don’t Change and To Look At You completed the band’s appeal. Black And White and Here Comes were popular in discos.

The rhythm section takes center stage on The Swing (Atco, 1984), with David Bowie–style funk in Original Sin, I Send A Message, Burn For You, and Dancing On The Jetty; and on Listen Like Thieves (1985), whose What You Need is obsessively paced like a rhythm-and-blues track. The pacifist song Guns In The Sky, the lukewarm Listen Like Thieves, and the ballads Shine Like It Does, Kiss The Dirt, and This Time aim unabashedly at chart-oriented AOR.

After the single Lost Boys, the group found the right formula in 1987 with Kick, an album that would sell ten million copies. Driven by the unrestrained and lascivious funk of Need You Tonight, the desolate ballad Never Tear Us Apart, the insistent and raucous New Sensation, and the jittery Mediate and Mystify, the record culminates in the funky/melodic arrangement and the sinister/demonic bearing of Devil Inside. Strong in irresistible cadences, their sound is one of ambiguity, poised between sly whisper and frenetic dance, heir to Bowie’s brazen melodicism.

Sometimes and Way Of The World were the singles from Max Q, a much less exciting record.

In 1990, X instead repeated the miracle with Disappear, a track led by a casual rhythm that suddenly becomes compelling and launches a catchy refrain, and above all with Suicide Blonde, the most explosive song of their career, which doubles the overwhelming effect of their funky cadences with a blues harmonica. The other singles taken from the album, Bitter Tears, By My Side, and The Stairs, pale in comparison to these wild excesses.

It is ironic that the decline began with Welcome To Wherever You Are (Atlantic, 1992), moreover the most complex and experimental album of their career, which set the frivolous choruses of Heaven Sent and Beautiful Girl alongside the erotic scandal of Taste It, the ballad Not Enough Time, and the orchestration of Baby Don’t Cry.

The only significant fact about Full Moon Dirty Hearts (Atlantic, 1993) was that the group recorded a video for each of the twelve songs (the band had always stood out for its revolutionary video clips). The various Gift and Please are not up to par, however. The nods to their ska, punk, and rhythm-and-blues roots are half-hearted. All in all, however, the band’s artistic integrity is better preserved by these late works than by the “hits” of the golden period.

The group drifted for a few years, then resurfaced with Elegantly Wasted (Mercury, 1997). In a desperate search for a reason to continue existing, Farriss and Hutchence reconnected both with the past (Show Me is a poor copy of Need You Tonight) and with gospel (Shake The Tree), and again with arrangements that were experimental for them (We Are Thrown Together, for sitar and guitar).

Michael Hutchence hanged himself in November 1997 in a Sydney hotel room while he was recording a solo album.

Michael Hutchence's posthumous solo album, Michael Hutchence (V2, 1999), was only half finished when he died and it shows. A few minor-key ballads (Possibilities, All I'm Saying) hint at a different future but the pop bombast of Get on the Inside, Baby It's Alright and Flesh and Blood gets in the way.

Inxs vendettero oltre 20 milioni di dischi nell'arco di vent'anni.

They returned with Switch (2005) and Original Sin (2010).