INXS, Kick [Picture Disc] (1987)
Fuck I loved this album! Loved it! It was one of the first tapes I bought, the first I knew of INXS too. I bought it because I loved New Sensation and Devil Inside and Need You Tonight and there they were, all in a row – and what’s more, Need You Tonight morphed in to Mediate which was sorta Joy Division-does-hip-hop (but also sorta not really). But fuck I loved this album. I had been to Australia, first overseas trip. And I had got a pair of basketball boots and some stone-wash jeans. Those were the big-ticket items. And I had got my first walkman; a Sony walkman – red. Was I fuckin cool or what?! Nowadays some jerk-off hipster would be impersonating me. Especially when he/she learned that I also had a fabric belt that had overhang. There’s a picture of me all dressed up for the primary school social: basketball boots, stone-wash jeans, Lacoste-copy shirt (with the crocodile facing the other way – and all for just a fraction of the cost. Yes, say it with me, what a croc!) Anyway, in that photo, as well as being an ad for celibacy, I was probably (in my head) listening to one of the INXS singles. I fuckin loved that band. And love for that band continued through to the X album. And from there I trekked back through the early years. But it all went pear-shaped from there (so did I, frankly). Never mind – I found a picture-disc vinyl of INXS’ Kick in my first year of university. For $1. I got my money’s worth. These days I take it down off the wall (its plastic cover/sleeve coated in an off-yellow from cigarette smoke) and I play it once a year or so. I marvel at how top-heavy the album was. At how, when it comes down to it, INXS knew how to write a version of jukebox rock; how they should never have carried on after Michael Hutchence strung himself up (and how we heard the news of that travelling back from Hawke’s Bay to Wellington after my friend Danny’s 21st). I marvel at how fuckin much I used to love that album (and the basketball boots, jeans and walkman). At how utterly immaculate the songwriting is on that album. And at how utterly fucking awful the production is – rendering it now as useless; obsolete. Some weirdo museum piece at best. A picture disc you can buy for $1 nearly 20 years on seems to best sum up this album’s worth after the fact. But for a while there it was unbelievable. The best pop-rock music I had – at one point – ever heard. I remember all of that when I give it the annual dust down. And I think about how good that joke was, after Michael Hutchence died, of how the INXS Greatest Hits album came with a free belt. Demand was huge. You had to get in quick. Black and blue had been the most popular colours.
Sample Track: Guns In The Sky
The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown