just keep

WALKING

He calls it "the year after Michael died" and INXS guitarist Tim Farriss says it has bought both hope and pain.

The memories come back suddenly for Tim Farriss. They can be set off by a name, a place, a piece of music. Even a fading picture, long since forgotten, framed and filed away next to the basement toilet of his suburban Sydney home can unleash the recollections of 20 years as a member of INXS.

In this case, it's a picture of Tim, his drummer brother Jon and bass player Garry Gary Beers standing with American rock legend Iggy Pop. It's your typical backstage picture, four men, united in that special brotherhood of the internationally famous rock musician, beaming jauntly at the camera.

Farriss went and found it the other night when a guest was visiting and talk, as it invariably does, had turned to the old days.

"We were talking about this person and that person and somehow we got onto Iggy Pop," he says smiling. "I was mentioning, 'Oh yeah we met Iggy a few times, I know him quite well, we've done a few shows together and hung out,' and he goes 'Iggy!?'. I said, 'In fact I've got a photo of me and Iggy somewhere', and he said, "Oh where, can I see it?' It was in the toilet out there, down in the bottom right hand corner, right in front of the bin and it had been there for so long it was stuck to the frame. I pulled out this photo and it was me and Garry and Jon and Iggy Pop and he goes, 'This is great'. He couldn't get it back into the frame so he just sort of put it in the bin and I thought, 'Maybe I should look after this'. It's all starting to happen now ... all the little things that you actually realise were big things."

Farriss, the oldest of the three siblings who form the backbone of Australia's - and once one of the world's - most celebrated rock bands, looks away. He's sitting in his impressive home studio, the headquarters of his production company, Montana, which is fast earning a name for itself as a creator of quality corporate music and film soundtracks.

Already Farriss and his growing list of collaborators have done some soundtrack work for short films and theme music for a new Channel 9 series called Our Century. A chance meeting with an advertising executive from Saatchi and Saatchi at a Mebourne pub now finds him composing and recording the music for the summer launch campaign of the National Basketball League. Then there's his new band, the Fun Tongues, featuring many of the same collaborators. There are already enough songs for an album, which has been provisionally titled: A Tongue of Fun.

Around him are banks of sleek black recording equipment, stacks of tapes and CD's, a computer, a number of guitars and other musical instruments, a giant tropical fish tank and a friendly dog called Rambo. But it's the ghosts you notice the most.

There's a minature model of London's Wembley Stadium, the site of INXS's sold out 1991 concert, when 72,000 people came to see the band pull off one of it's greatest triumphs. There are awards and gold discs, photos and old backstage passes. Most prominent though, is the poster for the band's 1997 Lose Your Head tour of Australia, the tour that never happened. It's taped hard against a window, partly blocking out the light.

This is the first interview any member of INXS has given since the day they all spoke to TV reporter George Negus in a kind of electronic press release beamed out to the world in the weeks after the death of their charasmatic frontman Michael Hutchence last November.

Farriss is friendly, direct and keen to dismiss some of the misinformation that has been written and broadcast during the past eight months. He doesn't try to hide the fact it has been - and still is - a very difficult and sometimes traumatic time.

Ask him how he would describe this year and he basically says: "Basically, it's the year after Michael died. That's the way I can describe it. I'm still getting over it. I know we all are and it still hurts every day. My reaction to it is to immerse myself in some kind of intense activity - I can't go off to a beach and lie around for a month and just sort of dwell on it. I had to go down to my farm (at Kangaroo Valley in the Southern Highlands) and work my butt off, physically, out in the fresh air, which is the great thing when you're here (in the studio) five days a week.

The shock of Hutchence's lonely death in room 524 of Double Bay's Ritz Carlton Hotel last November 22 quickly reverberated around the world. It set off a chain reaction of media sensationalism, where those intimately involved in Hutchence's life suddenly found themselves as characters in a real life soap opera played out in newspapers and gossip magazines.

Sad Michael, Tragic Paula (lover Paula Yates), Poor Tiger Lily (their baby daughter), Bad Bob (Yates' ex-husband Bob Geldof) The Feuding Family, The Mystery Accountant (Colin Diamond). The cast seemed to grow and grow as the weeks went by. Many outsiders were quick to dismiss Hutchence's death - ruled a suicide by the NSW Coroner, despite rumours of an autoerotic act gone wrong - as just another result of a rick star excess taken to it's ultimate level. Fleet Street had a field day.

But lost somewhere amid the screaming headlines were the five remaining members of INXS who had lived like brothers from the time they first came together as The Farriss Brothers in 1977, before passing through the take-no-prisoners world of the Australian pub rock circuit and emerging as international superstars a decade later.

It has been assumed the death of Hutchence automatically meant the death of INXS but, according to Farriss, that is far from the truth. At the same time, he adamantly says the INXS name will not continue with a replacement singer in the band. There is, instead, a third option under discussion: same core band members, different name.

He says the band was planning to take 12 months off at the end of the Australian tour before regrouping and moving in a potentially exciting new musical direction that would have broken the restrictive writing partnership of Hutchence and Andrew Farriss and allowed al band members a chance at songwriting.

"We were all going to get together and write music as opposed to just Andrew and Michael. There was a lot of frustration within the band about that. Andrew was a bit sick of having to write all the songs and spend all of his time with Michael doing that and he was feeling a bit like, 'Well someone else do it now', and we all wanted to."

That 12 month break is not over yet, but already Farriss has the itch to perform with his brothers again, both literally, in the case of Jon and Andrew Farriss, and figuratively with Beers and multi instrumentalist Kirk Pengilly. A band meeting has been set down for September to decide the future strategy.

"The Farriss Brothers are all still here and I think we were a major driving force behind the whole thing," Tim says. "Jon and, in particular, I can't wait. Andrew's like 'I'm just not ready yet. We said we;d have this year off, we've got to have this year off, OK?'"

Then there's the question of who's going to be the singer in front of five-sixths of INXS.

"Half the problem we have with using other singers is that people would go, 'Oh that's the new replacement for Michael', when we know that it won't and there could never be a replacement for Michael," Farriss says.

"The big question's been: What is INXS going to do? And my big answer is just wait and see. I can't say anything at this point because the most important thing is to not rush into a decision, let's just let time pass and then we'll make our minds up."

Farriss predicts Pengilly will be the most difficult to talk back into the fold (indeed, word has already come from his camp that a reformation is not on).

"Having a year off is the main thing and I think that as long as he feels he's done that then we'll be ready to talk," says Farriss. "As soon as the rest of us start to do something, Kirk will be there in a flash. I think what he's worried about is that we're going to ask him to sing. He's such a reluctant singer, he really shits me. *laughs*. For the past how many albums we were always busting Kirk's butt to bloody sing a song on the record. Now that we don't have a lead singer, I think Kirk thinks, 'Oh no, they're going to ask me'. So he'll get over it. Don't worry we'll sort him out."

"It's my personal desire to do something as The Farriss Brothers. It started as The Farriss Brothers, it became INXS and I think it goes back to the Farriss Brothers - that's the way I see it. It's still essentially the same band, but it was different then and it will be different now."

One project that will definately bear the name of INXS is a planned tribute concert for Hutchence. Organisation is still in it's early stages, but Farriss reels off an impressive wish list of those who will be invited to take part: Bono from U2, David Bowie, Elton John, Aretha Franklin, Nick Cave, Iggy Pop, Tom Jones - each of them singing a favourite INXS song.

"We want to help set up something for Tiger out of that," Farriss says. "That's the main motivation for it. And there's a lot of people in the industry who would like to be involved. We're just trying to look at co-ordinating a whole bunch of people like that."

A question of where such a concert would be held is a touchy one. INXS copped a fair amount of critisism for allegedly deserting their Australian audience during the 1990's, but the sheer logistics make the possibility of such a show being staged locally pretty slim.

"We were looking at doing it somewhere in the southern hemisphere, but the big problem is just that - it's in the southern hemisphere and to get these people involved, come down to Australia to rehearse and stuff is just basically too hard," Farriss sighs.

"We might have to do an Australian one and a northern hemisphere one, because there are a lot of Australian acts too that we'd like to have involved, but won't be able to be in New York if that's where we do it."

Farriss also points out the band has a lot of unfinished material, which may be released one day as INXS - when the time is right.

"There's still tonnes of unreleased stuff we've recorded but no-one's particularly ready to go in the studio yet and play along to a track that Michael's singing on, without him actually being there," he says. "That'll take a little while for us to be able to do, emotionally, I think."

"People have asked us to do things recently, like would the remaining members like to appear here for this or appear here for that, mainly benefit type things, which are always sort of ... you want to do them but I don't think people quite grasp how difficult it would be to actually perform without Michael just yet. It would be, for me, still fairly traumatic and I don't really know how to deal with that yet. I mean, I can perform with other people without Michael, but to have the whole band performing without him, there are still a few wounds that havent healed yet. Until that happens, we're not ready for it."

During the Negus interview, Tim Farriss was outspoken about the people who had sold their stories about Hutchence to magazines and newspapers. "It makes me me furious and just sick," he said at the time. Since then, there have been two books about the late singer, with another three waiting in the wings. Farriss is less volatile now, but just as unimpressed.

"What's incredible in this book that came out - what's it called? - Burn? (The Life and Times of Michael Hutchence, by Ed St John) . I read in a magazine somewhere a thing about 'Burn - the book INXS wanted banned' and I'm like 'How would I know? I haven't even read it' No-one's bothered to send me a copy. I sort of feel a little bit like, 'Well, your not one of the band, you know, what are you?'."

He has found himself having to explain Hutchence and his actions to outsiders, people who approach him in public? "A little bit, yeah, I have very strong opinions of what I think happened and to be honest, they're sort of personal. Most people just sort of say, 'Gee I'm really sorry,it must be really tough on you guy's and that kind of thing, which is nice."

Does he feel anger towards Hutchence for leaving the way he did? "Not at first. That happens more now. I'll be standing there brushing my teeth or sometimes when I just see a picture of him I just go, 'Oh Michael you idiot', y'know, 'You bastard!' But it's really hard to be angry at Michael, I mean, ever. Sure, we used to get angry at him all the time, that's nothing new - especially when you were sitting there for an hour waiting to do an interview because Michael hadn't got there yet. But, you know, it was always that sort of relationship. I'm angry at him in a way because I miss him. It just seems like it didn't really have to happen., that's all. That's the only reason I'm angry at him, really. I don't really think he meant to do it."

A couple of days after this interview, word comes from London that Paula Yates, Hutchence's devoted partner in his final years and the mother of Tiger, has tried to hang herself in the same manner as her lover.

Farriss, who keeps in regular touch, had spoken of her with great concern. "I just with they (the press) had left him and Paula alone, that's all. Paula's really suffered, She hasn't handled Michael's loss at all. Can you imagine the poor woman? She's found out her father isn't her father, she's lost the father of her most recent child and then she's lost custody of her other three kids to Bob temporarily. She's going through hell, but hopefully she might move out to Australia."

"Time is the big healer, you know, and I think in time she'll come out of it, but she's still bleeding terribly. I try to talk to her and she just loses it. But she'll get over it eventually. She has to."

For the moment, it appears there's both hope and pain in The Year After Michael Died.