TheSundayTelegraph (Express Entertainment) Page 167
Sunday 10 May, 1998
Written by: Kathy McCabe
Michael Hutchence was an all-too-real protagonist in the modern fable of fame. The INXS singer and his five fellow band members endured 13 years of hard slog before they achieved phenomenal international success.
While it was their music which made them famous, it was Hutchence and his rock star lifestyle who attracted attention as the bands fortunes waned. The nature of his celebrity and it's consequences have become painfully evident since the singers death last November in Sydney.
The first of an inevitable slew of unauthorised biographies chronicling the bands road to stardom and it's lead singers love of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, hits the book stores this month. Burn - The Life And Times of Michael Hutchence And INXS by Ed St John, a former music writer who first interviewed the band in 1980. St John spoke to the six band members over two weeks in November for the INXS 1997 Australian Lose Your Head tour program.
"They were being retrospective but also most of them were being very positive about the future. They've always had that ability to sell themselves - it is not in their nature to sit there and go 'Well things aren't going so well'," he said.
"I rang Michael in London. He had Tiger on the bed with him and during the hour we spoke, he sounded incredibly distracted. I came away thinking I wasn't too sure about where his head was at by then, as the years went by it had been increasingly difficult to work out where his head was at."
"All of that was ringing in my ears when he died."
Hutchence and the band were rewarded with the spoils of success after more than a decade of paying their dues, travelling hundreds of thousands of kilometres in Australia, America and Europe, sleeping in cramped and dilapidated buses and performing six nights a week for months on end. But the frontman was always a law unto himself. His drug use was legendary and his penchant for women well documented.
Burn retells one incident witnessed witnessed by Richard Clapton, during which Hutchence took a handful of ecstasy tablets as he walked on stage to perform in front of 25,000 Parisians.
"I think that's probably who he was really but fame allowed him to get away with it and exacerbated any behavioural tendencies he might have had," St John said.
"He once made this weird observation to me about drugs is they're only fun if you don't use them - you gotta be straight to get stoned. He was a complex, interesting guy."
While the media at large had painted Hutchence as a one-dimensional figure, particularly when he renewed his relationship with the contraversial Paula Yates. St John took great pains to portray other aspects of the singer's personality.
© The Sunday Telegraph 1998