Rarely had the band INXS played around with as much electronic music as it did with a song before. Then again, no song by the Australian band ever climbed higher on the charts than "Need You Tonight" in this country did.
And the band can thank an unidentified cab driver for it ... even if he was a little ticked off over it.
INXS, which had formed in 1977, was coming off a sensational 1986 album, "Listen Like Thieves," which featured the band's breakthrough Top 10 hit in the United States, "What You Need." But the band felt the pressure of having to make a follow-up album, their fourth, that was bigger than "Listen Like Thieves."
So keyboardist Andrew Farriss and lead singer Michael Hutchence went to work on the next project, which would simply be called "Kick," in late 1986. They found inspiration in one form or another to craft together 10 tracks for the album. But the one intriguing song they put together started when Farriss was waiting on a cab to pick him up to take him to the airport in his native Sydney and on a plane heading to Hong Kong.
While waiting, Farriss suddenly heard a riff in his head and he needed to get it down somehow. And just when he thought he could complete his musical thought, the taxi driver arrived. Farriss reportedly made up an excuse to head back into his house and record the riff, saying he "forgot something." So he ran inside and the taxi driver patiently waited.
And waited. And waited. And continued to wait.
While the waiting went on, Farriss grabbed his guitar and a tape recorder he placed on a table next to his bed. From there, he sat down and began to play out the riff he heard in his head -- three stiff, quick notes, followed by a jumbled downslide, repeated twice. Total time to put the right track in his mind down: 55 minutes.
By the time he zipped his guitar up in its case and headed back out with tape in hand, there was one awfully upset taxi driver still waiting for him. Farriss knew it -- he gave the driver a good tip after getting to the airport and headed on the flight to Hong Kong to join up with the rest of the band. Once in Hong Kong, Farriss hooked up with Hutchence to finish the track, which the band would record in Sydney when they got back.
When recording the song with producer Chris Thomas, the band went more to the electronic side than it had ever done with any composition. They combine sequencers with drum tracks and numerous layered guitar riffs. They then combined that with click tracks for a frequent synthesizer chord and made sure the song was accentuated by rim shots by drummer/percussionist Jon Farriss, Andrew's brother.
By the time everything was put together, "Need You Tonight" was done. Well, almost done.
For the album, the band decided to segue "Need You Tonight" into another track that was almost finished, but needed a mutual compromise to get done, a song called "Mediate." Farriss had written the music, but had no words to it. So he asked Hutchence to write the "rap" words to it in exchange for Farriss finishing up Hutchence's musical piece with no words called "Guns To The Sky," which would be the first track on the album and cassette of "Kick." In the end, Hutchence took the full writing credit for "Mediate," while Farriss took the credit for "Guns To The Sky."
The two tracks together were five minutes and 37 seconds long, but it would be solely "Need You Tonight" that would be the leadoff single from the album. However, there was one more problem: When the band and manager Chris Murphy handed the finished product to Atlantic Records, they were not at all pleased.
"They hated it, absolutely hated it," Murphy told writers Jeff Jenkins and Ian Meldrum in 2007. "They said there was no way they could get this music on rock radio. They said it was suited for black radio, but they didn't want to promote it that way. The president of the label told me that he'd give us $1 million to go back to Australia and make another album."
Problem was neither Murphy nor the band were going back Down Under to re-record the album. It was a simple game of "take it or leave it." In a game of musical chicken, Atlantic blinked. They agreed that "Need You Tonight" would be the lead song for the album. Now it was time to do the music video and the band and Murphy called in Australian director Richard Lowenstein to shoot the video. Lowenstein had successfully captured the band in 5,000 still slides in split-second speed that made them famous for the music video of "What You Need," so he was quite confident he could pull another rabbit out of his hat with the band.
For the music video, he combined the band performing the song with different styles of animation for "Need You Tonight." To do that, Lowenstein said he cut up individual frames off of 35 mm film and photocopied the original frames, re-laying the frames on top of the original footage.
With that part of the video done, Lowenstein began work on the "other" part of the single, the unreleased "Mediate." For that, Lowenstein had a fresh approach from an idea of the past. He copied the 1966 music video of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," highlighted by Dylan showing cue cards with words form his song on them without lip-syncing in the video. The band wrote the key phrases of "Mediate" based off Hutchence's rapping rhymes on cue cards, all that end in the suffix -ate. Though all the band members did their best to keep up with Hutchence's flow, they managed to pull it off, finished by saxophone player Kirk Pengilly's playing to the coda as the last sign reads "Sax Solo."
The video for the song hit MTV for continual play in early October 1987 and soon after that, "Need You Tonight" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 93 on October 24, 1987. The single, which featured Hutchence's sly, sexy, teasing voice, the jarring guitar work of the third Farriss brother, Tim, and the bass work of Garry Gary Beers, would leap 22 notches to No. 71, then leap another 17 places to No. 54. After getting to No. 44 the next week, "Need You Tonight" made its Top 40 debut on November 21, 1987, at No. 38, the band's third Top 40 hit after "What You Need" and their 1983 debut hit, "The One Thing," which peaked at No. 30.
"Need You Tonight" would bound up nine places to No. 29, then another four to No. 25 on December 5, 1987. A week later, it was in the Top 20 at No. 18. Two weeks after that on December 26, 1987, "Need You Tonight" scampered six places from No. 16 to No. 10, giving the band a second Top 10 hit.
After the one week break from the chart, "Need You Tonight" leaped up to No. 6 and one week later on January 16, 1988, it was at No. 4, uprooting the band's biggest hit "What You Need." The next week, it jumped up another two places to No. 2 before landing at No. 1 the week of January 30, 1988, displacing Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel" from the top spot. The sweet success of their first No. 1 hit was short-lived for INXS, though. By the following week, they would be displaced from the top by Tiffany's hot smash and second chart-topper, "Could've Been." But "Need You Tonight" would end up spending eight weeks in the Top 10 and 16 weeks total in the Top 40.
In the end, "Need You Tonight," one of the many songs on an album that Atlantic Records wanted to scrap and demand a new album from the band, would finish 1988 as the No. 2 song of the year behind George Michael's No. 1 smash "Faith."
That album, by the way, would peak at No. 3 on the album chart in the U.S., and would score the band four Top 10 hits from it -- "Need You Tonight," "Devil Inside," "New Sensation" and "Never Tear Us Apart." Along with album tracks like "Guns To The Sky," "Mystify," "The Loved One" and the title track, "Kick" would be considered one of the greatest albums in college radio history. The album, which sold 6 million copies in the U.S., was the springboard to better things from the band as the 1980s became the 1990s.
However, the next two albums/CDs/cassettes, "X" and "Welcome To Wherever You Are," never had the "kick" to match "Kick," selling double platinum and platinum, respectively. Then "Full Moon, Dirty Hearts," released in 1993, did not sell well at all as the band was caught in the transitional period between rock and grunge music. They took off for the next four years, then came back in 1997 with "Elegantly Wasted." The CD, at times, sounded a lot like "Kick" did with its dance-like sound and funky style, but not quite the energy of the album that made the band famous. It did well on the American album chart, peaking at No. 14, giving the band some hope for future releases.
But the world of INXS changed tragically on the morning of Saturday, November 22, 1997 when Hutchence's lifeless body was found hanging from a belt he tied himself to in a Ritz-Carlton hotel room in Sydney, reportedly upset that he was not able to see his daughter, Tiger Lily, and girlfriend Paula Yates due to issues Yates was having in traveling from England to Australia while still haggling over the custody of her other two kids with British superstar and former husband Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Live Aid fame. Five days after his death, Hutchence was memorialized at St. Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney and was ultimately cremated. A February 1998 autopsy concluded that Hutchence, who was two months away from his 38th birthday, had committed suicide and was depressed and under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
When Hutchence died, INXS pretty much died, too, that day. In 2005, the band held a contest on American television titled Rock Star: INXS to find the new lead singer. That honor went to Canadian J.D. Fortune, who immediatley joined the band in the studio to record the CD "Switch," and while the CD was successful in Canada, going triple platinum, and Australia, where it was double platinum, it did not sell well in the U.S., selling less than 400,000 copies. Drug problems dogged Fortune and in September 2011, he was released from the band. Tired of finding another singer, and tired of the whole music scene -- and never being able to find a replacement for the charismatic Hutchence -- INXS called it a day on November 11, 2012, ending a 35-year run as a group. Ciarin Gribbin, a Northern Ireland native, was called in to be the band's lead vocalist until the end.
Who knows how much bigger the band would have been if Hutchence had lived. But while they were hot, they made some amazing music. And that Lowenstein-directed video for "Need You Tonight/Mediate" would be a memory maker, too -- it would win five MTV Awards at the 1988 show, including the highlight Video of the Year.
All because a cab was late for one of the two main songwriters so he could have time to expand on a riff that was stuck in his head and all because the late cab driver patiently waited for the songwriter to put down that riff on tape.
It proves the point that in the end, some things are worth waiting for.
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