From unlikely, far-flung beginnings,INXSrose to conquer the world, enamouring Springsteen, the Stones and Chrissie Hynde before singer Michael Hutchence’s tragic demise. A reissue of their watershedListen Like Thievesreveals a Swiss Army band, joined at the hip, but MOJO fifinds some wounds still raw. “We flfloundered for years,” they tellJOHN AIZLEWOOD.

Electric mainline: INXS, outside Newcastle, England, January 17, 1986 (from left) Tim Farriss, Andrew Farriss, Jon Farriss, Michael Hutchence, Garry Gary Beers, Kirk Pengilly.

Photograph by ANDREW CATLIN .

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I T IS THE EVENING OF MARCH 30, 1983. LOS ANGELES is at its most balmy. Ray Manzarek, once a Door but still a connoisseur, is slumped on his couch watching the new-ish in-concert programme, Rock’n’Roll Tonite.

British newcomers Simple Minds pass him by and he’s been down the Eric Clapton road before, but when he sees INXS, the little-known Australians promoting their third album, the Number 46 US hit Shabooh Shoobah, Manzarek is galvanised. He swaps his armchair for his car and drives to the Pasadena studio where the show is filmed.

Shining star: Hutchence on-stage at The Hague’s Statenhal, March 7, 1991; (opposite, top) INXS, 1984 (clockwise from left) Garry, Andrew, Kirk, Jon, Michael, Tim; (below) Hutchence on-stage at US Festival’s ‘New Wave Day’, May 28, 1983.

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“MICHAEL WAS DRINKING HEAVILY. HE WAS SO UNHAPPY AND WE COULDN’T WORK OUT WHY.”

TIM FARRISS

Accidentally blocking the studio’s green room is Andrew Farriss, soon to become INXS’s chief songwriter, but always the middle of the band’s three Farriss brothers.

“He said, ‘I had to come.’ Then he asked if I would mind moving, so he could talk to Michael.”

That’s Michael Hutchence, INXS’s sweet-natured, Herman Hesse-reading singer, who, having partly grown up in Hollywood and Hong Kong, is more worldly than his Sydney bandmates. He’s blessed and ultimately cursed with a near feral sexuality.

“I listened in. Ray said he’d never seen anyone else with Jim Morrison’s charisma. Never. That’s when I truly realised there was something happening.”

Before the end of the decade, INXS’s rare mélange of pop catchiness, rock power, funk funkiness, ska jerkiness, new wave drive and Hutchence would make them the biggest band in the world.

IT BEGAN – NOT REALLY BEGAN, MORE STARTED OUT – in 1971 when schoolfriends Kirk Pengilly and Tim, the oldest Farriss, made acoustic music as Guinness. Pengilly graduated to saxophone (“I thought I’d pick up more girls, but it seems quite a few could resist a saxman”), plus guitar, backing vocals and tending of the INXS archive.

Meanwhile Hutchence, Andrew Farriss and Garry Gary Beers were part of Doctor Dolphin.

Beers would have been an electrician but for colour-blindness. He began to play bass for a bet: “I lost the bet, but won the lottery.”

The two factions merged and by 1977 they had added Jon, the youngest Farriss, to become The Farriss Brothers, all self-taught bar Tim Farriss’s classical guitar lessons. Fiercely ambitious, Tim Farriss would become INXS’s most energetic promoter. “Tim told us we’d be the biggest band in the world: you’d buy three left shoes off him,” chuckles Pengilly.

Inconveniently, the Farriss parents, Dennis and Jill, promptly relocated to Perth, Australia’s most isolated city. Schoolboy Jon went too. The rest of the band left jobs and partners to follow. It really began in 1978 as the sun set over a beach in Perth’s northern suburbs.