INXS - Kick - 12" Vinyl LP Album - 1980s New Wave

- A pulse of 80s pop rock energy with seductive vocals and timeless hits that shook global charts

INXS Band Description:

Felt like INXS didn’t just exist in the 80s — they basically hacked the decade’s operating system. Australian, sharp-edged, dripping swagger, and riding that rock-pop-funk fusion like it was custom-built for them. Everything orbited around Michael Hutchence, this magnetic frontman who could turn a room into static electricity just by walking through it.

The whole thing kicked off back in 1977 when the Farriss brothers teamed up with their crew — Hutchence, Garry Gary Beers, Kirk Pengilly — and started tearing through Sydney’s pub circuit. Raw stages, sticky floors, buzzing amps. Their first album in 1980 put them on the map; “Just Keep Walking” wasn’t a chart-destroyer, but it was that early spark where you feel a band quietly levelling up.

The follow-up albums — “Underneath the Colours,” “Shabooh Shoobah,” “The Swing” — showed them sharpening their identity. Bits of funk, flashes of reggae, a neon wash of new wave. You could hear them tinkering, experimenting, shaping a sound that didn’t slot neatly into anyone’s genre box.

Then came “Kick” in 1987, and everything went full supernova. “Need You Tonight,” “Devil Inside,” “New Sensation” — absolute monsters. The Richard Lowenstein videos blasted them into MTV hyperspace and suddenly INXS wasn’t just big, they were global-arena big. That era left scorch marks across pop culture.

The 90s were more complicated. “X” kept the momentum; “Welcome to Wherever You Are” got critic love even as the sales cooled; “Elegantly Wasted” had its moments. Then 1997 dropped like a brick — Hutchence’s death hit the band like a gut punch, the kind that rearranges everything in its path.

They pushed on afterward with different singers, including a one-off with Terence Trent D’Arby and eventually J.D. Fortune, who recorded “Switch” in 2005. It kept the name alive, but you always felt the shadow of what once was.

The Farriss Brothers and Their Role in INXS

The heartbeat of INXS was always the Farriss brothers — Tim, Andrew, and Jon. Bands talk about “chemistry,” but these three basically had it running through their DNA. From those sweaty Sydney pub gigs in the late 70s all the way to the band’s final bow in 2012, the brothers were the steady engine humming under every riff, groove, and razor-sharp hook.

They didn’t just hold things together; they shaped the whole identity. Andrew wrote the kind of songs that turned into instant earworms, Tim laid down those bright, melodic guitar lines that sliced right through the mix, and Jon hit the drums like someone who knew the groove was the secret weapon. With all that combined, the band’s sound stayed recognisable even as they mutated from scrappy new wave hopefuls into a global stadium machine.

• Tim Farriss – Lead Guitar
  1977 – 2012
  Founding member whose clean, melodic guitar work became part of INXS’s signature drive. Stayed from day one to the final curtain call.
• Andrew Farriss – Keyboards, Guitar, Songwriter
  1977 – 2012
  Principal songwriter and the band’s quiet architect. Co-created nearly every major hit and kept the melodic core sharp through every era.
• Jon Farriss – Drums, Percussion
  1977 – 2012
  The rhythmic engine with that tight, modern groove that pushed INXS into funkier territory. Held the pulse from the first rehearsal to the last encore.

Collector’s Note: INXS Vinyl in My Collection

The INXS section of my shelves isn’t the biggest — no sprawling wall of variants, no endless parade of foreign pressings — but the few records I do have hit harder than half the oversized stacks around them. Some albums don’t need quantity; they earn their space by sheer presence. These do.

Musically, the band always clicked with me in that clean, confident way only INXS could pull off. There’s this punchy sparkle in their sound — part funk, part rock, part swagger — that still feels razor-fresh when the needle hits. And the artwork? Tight, bold, stylish as hell. Their covers weren’t just packaging; they were attitude pressed into cardboard.

So even with a modest pile of their vinyl, these albums sit there like prized trophies. Smell my collection, strong favourites — the kind of records you pull out not because you have many, but because the few you do have land exactly right.