The annals of rock are peppered with instances of bands who took an inordinate amount of time to make it.
Pulp and Flaming Lips are two outfits who honed their craft for over 15 years before scoring major success, while Goo Dolls and REO Speedwagon took a rather more sprightly 10.
And then there’s INXS, the Australian six-piece that formed in Sydney in 1977 but didn’t achieve major recognition until a decade later with their whopping album Kick.
This was the band’s sixth studio album and went top 10 in the UK and the US.
But it was the lead single Need You Tonight that really blazed a trail and helped propel Kick’s upwards trajectory.
Need You Tonight became INXS’s first and only US No.1 and reached No.2 in the UK.
It remains one of their strongest and most memorable songs.
For a band that became synonymous with stadiums, INXS’s early choices of names were decidedly offbeat and indie. Doctor Dolphin and The Vegetables were two options chosen for the early line-up of the band formed by keyboardist/guitarist Andrew Farriss and his Davidson High School classmate, singer Michael Hutchence.
Farriss recruited his brothers Jon and Tim on drums and lead guitar respectively and the line-up was completed by Garry Gary Beers on bass and Kirk Pengilly on guitar and saxophone. By the end of the year they were called The Farriss Brothers.
By 1980 they were being managed by Midnight Oil manager Gary Morris, had changed their name to INXS and signed a five-album deal with an Australian indie label Deluxe Records.
From the outset, the band fused the raw energy of new wave with the danceability and groove of funk.
Andrew Farriss’s synth work was a key part of the sound as was his brother Jon’s complex and danceable rhythms. Tim Farriss and Kirk Pengilly’s guitar sounds, meanwhile, were clean, crisp and enhanced by chorus and delay.
Then of course there was Michael Hutchence, a vocalist and frontman who had everything – the soulful voice, the captivating stage presence and, of course, the looks.
The band toured relentlessly, notching up 300 shows in 1981 alone.
In October 1982, they launched their third album Shabooh Shoobah, their first international release, which yielded four singles.
In March 1983, they played their first US show, in San Diego, to 24 people. But in May that year, the single The One Thing gave them their first Top 30 US hit.
They supported artists such as Adam & The Ants and Stray Cats and by mid-1983, were headlining venues such as The Ritz club in New York.
In September that year, Nile Rodgers produced the single Original Sin, another Andrew Farriss/Michael Hutchence composition.
Original Sin went to No.1 in Australia and performed well internationally, but UK interest eluded them.
Their 1985 album Listen Like Thieves did chart at No.48 in the UK but the British music press did not take to the band, with NME dubbing them “INX-cusable” and labelling Listen Like Thieves “a complete and utter turkey”.
America felt differently. In early 1986, the album’s lead single What You Need became a top five hit in the US.
INXS’s non-stop touring reaped dividends, particularly in the US, but it took their sixth album Kick to bring them true global success.
On this album, the band chose British producer Chris Thomas, who had worked on Listen Like Thieves.
Thomas had started out as an assistant at AIR studios. His first major roles included programming and playing Moog synth on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and mixing on the final stages of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon.
Thomas went on to work with Elton John, Leonard Cohen, Roxy Music and – to the horror of some of his colleagues – the Sex Pistols. He also played a significant role in shaping the sound of The Pretenders. His work on their third album Learning To Crawl earned him the title of “the fifth Pretender”.
Thomas would prove equally pivotal for INXS, as they began work on the album that would become Kick.
He had been an INXS fan for some time. “Oh, they were a great band,” he recalled in an interview with Mix magazine in 1998. “I remember before I worked with them seeing them at the Hollywood Palladium in 1984. That gig was incredible. It was one of the best gigs I ever saw by any band. God, they were good. Michael was absolutely brilliant. And the style of their music – it was funk but it was white and rock – a great mixture.”
Rhinoceros Studios in Sydney was the location for the recording of Need You Tonight, which was produced by Thomas and mixed by Bob Clearmountain.
The initial idea for the song first came to Andrew Farriss as he was climbing into a cab to take him to an airport. It was early 1987 and Farriss was flying to Hong Kong, where Michael Hutchence lived at the time. They were about to embark on writing sessions for the new album.
As Farriss got into the cab the idea for a guitar riff suddenly came to him. “Just before the guy could pull away, I heard the guitar line in my head, told the guy I'd forgotten something and ran upstairs,” Farriss told Ultimate Classic Rock.
Farris went back into his house where he immediately started laying down tracks on his Fostex 8-track.
“I used a Roland 707 drum machine to programme the groove for what became Need You Tonight,” he told Mix magazine. “What’s on the record is pretty much exactly what I put into the drum machine.
“What I also tracked from memory was the guitar riff, the bass part – which I played on a keyboard bass – and there was a rhythm guitar part that never actually ended up on the record.
"There was something about it that sounded right in my head, so that’s why I made the cassette recording of it: ‘I don’t know what this thing is, but there’s something in it’.”
Farriss grabbed the cassette, rushed back out to the waiting cab and its disgruntled driver and managed to catch his flight. After landing in Hong Kong, he headed straight to Hutchence’s property.
As Farriss recalled on the Australian TV show The Project in 2024: “I got out the other end in Hong Kong… and Michael said, ‘What have you got?’ I said, ‘Well I’ve got this’.
“I gave it to him, he put it on and he said fantastic and he wrote that lyric you know, Need You Tonight, just in one stream of consciousness. I would say that song was probably written in about ten minutes.”
Farriss and Hutchence spent the next two weeks laying down tracks for the Kick album in a demo studio at the property.
“The engineer there, whose name I don’t remember, had a good little set-up with 2-inch 24-track, and besides the cassettes I had taken my 707 drum machine with me,” Farriss told Mix magazine in 2012. “So we came up with the idea of re-creating what I had done and that turned into Need You Tonight.”
When the rest of the band heard the 2-inch tape that Farriss and Hutchence brought back from Hong Kong, they were similarly enthused about Need You Tonight. Like most of the Kick album, the songs were tracked live at Rhinoceros studio, with the band positioned in the main room.
David Nicholas, the engineer on the album, told Mix magazine that the drums, bass and main guitar parts were all captured from the live take. He recalls that in the wood-walled live-sounding drum room at Rhinoceros, two large Yamaha speakers were placed behind the kit so that drummer Jon Farriss could hear samples of kick drum and hand claps to play along to. “That way, the samples wouldn’t sound so different from the drum kit,” said Nicholas. “They’d come out sounding like they were in the room.”
Farriss recalled that the guitars used were “Fenders through some old Marshall amps” while the rhythm track consisted of a beat created on Roland 707 as well as an Emulator 2 sample of a bass sound he created using a MIDI keyboard.
“Garry added a bass part with a Fender Precision bass, and some of the guitar was overdubbed,” said Farris. “It was important that the guitar work had the push-pull of people really playing – trying to get that aggression, that edginess, to come out.”
Much of the allure of Hutchence’s vocals is due to its close-to-the-mic quality. Nicholas recalled that Hutchence’s vocal ended up being across four tracks. “So when it was mixed it sort of wrapped around your head,” he said. “It sounded amazing.”
The sessions were helped by the fact that INXS came into the recording on the back of a hugely successful tour promoting the album Listen Like Thieves.
“They were on fire,” NIcholas told Mix. “They were in great form and all the planets were aligned.
“Chris and I were working well together, the band was happy and it was fun. When you make a record and you have a great time in the studio every day, it comes out on the record.”
Need You Tonight marked a distinct sonic shift for INXS. It was tight, crisp, minimal and utterly funky. The prominent synths, spiky guitar riffs, digital rhythms and studio sheen all felt far more vital and contemporary than their earlier sound.
On paper, Hutchence’s lyrics seemed inane. “So slide over here/And give me a moment/Your moves are so raw”.
But set within the context of the song it completely works.
Hutchence’s vocals are sensual and assured with breathy close-to-the-mic gasps and yelps, and he is clearly revelling in stretching the flexibility of his rich baritone voice.
It’s a compelling groove. But for all its dancefloor prowess, this is a song with real grit and drive.
Need You Tonight was released on 21 September 1987.
It was one of the last tracks recorded on the Kick album but it would become the band’s signature song.
In addition to reaching No. 1 in the US and No. 2 in the UK, the song went multi-platinum and was followed by a 16-month global tour in which the band played arenas and stadiums in major cities across the US, Europe, Japan and Australia.
Like the album from which it came, Need You Tonight resonated with audiences across the globe because it crystallised the band’s strengths in a defiantly original and stylish whole.
Need You Tonight showcased a lean and stridently new sound for the band and after a decade of hard graft and non-stop touring, it earned them a rightful place as one of the biggest bands on the planet.
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