Memories of Michael Hutchence: The rock star across the road
Michael Hutchence is again in the news with INXS’s ‘Never Tear Us Apart’ named the greatest Aussie song of all time – and it turns out he had rock star charisma even as a boy.
When I read that my childhood friend Michael Hutchence’s song ‘Never Tear Us Apart’ was named the best Australian song of all time, it made me happy. Then sad.
It sent me looking back over some childhood photos from our years in Hong Kong in 1967-68, and there is Michael and his brother Rhett, the two Aussie kids from across the road in leafy Kowloon Tong.
They lived with their mum, Pat, who was a make-up artist for film and television. When they got home from school each day their mum was often still at work and their ferocious amah (maid) wouldn’t let them into the kitchen, so they ended up at our house, 7 Devon Road.
Sometimes we would go over to their joint, when their mum was home but, mostly, we all played together in our vast front yard.
When I look at the photos I still have of Michael, he’s a happy kid. In one shot (main photo), in particular, taken at my brother’s birthday party, he’s smiling and looking straight at the camera, while my brother, Steve, blows out the candles on his cake.
I keep this photo on my phone as a memento. When that number by INXS was named the best Australian song of all time in Triple J’s poll of the country’s favourite homegrown hits, I looked at it and felt that mixture of emotions. (The 1987 song Never Tear Us Apart had just topped the Hottest 100 of Australian Songs, a spin-off of Triple J’s annual poll of the year’s most popular tracks).
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And I looked at that photo again as they were playing clips of Michael on ABC-TV. He was one of those real rock‘n’roll frontmen, along with Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison. He had incredible charisma. I never noticed that as a boy but, funnily, there were plenty of others who did.
Like the girls in the neighbourhood. It was only when I wrote about him in my 2019 memoir, The Kowloon Kid: A Hong Kong Childhood, that my sister revealed she had had a crush on him and so did the other girls who gathered in our front yard, which was quite the social hub.
There’s a chapter in my book called Rock Star Across The Road. It begins: “When I knew Michael Hutchence, only one of us had ever fronted a band and it wasn’t him.”
Cheeky, I know, but true. I had fleetingly been co-lead singer in The Sidetracks, an outfit that debuted on stage at Kowloon Junior School. We (the band) were in Grade 6 at the time.
Hong Kong was pop mad in the latter half of the 1960s and was known by some as Carnaby Street East. There were lots of mini skirts and Dusty Springfield hairdos and Beatles boots and such.
I stretch the bow a bit in my book but, still, I do often wonder what affect me and my music might have had on the kid from across the road.
“Now, I’m not saying I’m the guy responsible for turning the frontman of INXS into pop music,” I write, rather cheekily. “Let me just add, I’m not saying I wasn’t, either. Because I might well have been.
“The fact of the matter is that I was the cool guy with the record player, the collection of Beatles records and the Jimi Hendrix poster on my bedroom wall. And Michael was the younger kid from across the road who may – or may not – have looked up to me as a rock god.”
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All this was, as they say, long ago and far away. Both families, the Browns and the Hutchences eventually moved back to Australia. I went to school on the Gold Coast and Michael on Sydney’s Northern beaches. I heard about him fleetingly from my cousins, who were at school with him there.
Then, when one of those cousins was visiting us on the Gold Coast in the early 1980s, we sat around watching Countdown when INXS came on singing The Loved One.
“You know that’s Michael Hutchence,” my cousin said. (He had lived in Hong Kong too and had met Michael originally at our house at Devon Road and then ended up at high school with him in Sydney.)
I was blown away. Michael was terrific. And I watched his star rise with admiration. In the 1980s Michael’s mum Pat lived and worked on the Gold Coast and he occasionally visited. I ran into them one day while I was having coffee at Marina Mirage.
They were walking past and I ducked out of the café and had a catch up. Michael was happy to see me and to relive some boyhood memories about Kowloon Tong. He had a lifelong love of Hong Kong.
We chatted away, undisturbed until some of the passers-by twigged that it was Michael Hutchence and a small crowd began to gather. I bid him and his mum adieu as they attempted to flee the small scrum of fans.
Michael was a huge rock star, but also a really nice person. As a kid he was an engaging pal and his brother Rhett was an energetic tear-away.
When he died in November 1997 at the age of 37, we were shocked, as everyone was. Whenever I see clips of INXS or rewatch the movie about him, Mystify (which is excellent), I feel this strange mixture of happiness and sadness. I see him at my brother’s birthday party. There he is wearing a red V-neck jumper, a white turtle neck, clutching a bottle of soft drink and beaming as he gets snapped by my dad, who always had a camera handy.
“Michael is looking straight at the camera and beaming as if he is the birthday boy,” I write in the final passage of that chapter about him in The Kowloon Kid.
“It’s a smile etched in my memory and preserved in my photo album, like the fading evidence of some lost civilisation.”
The Kowloon Kid was published by Transit Lounge in 2019. Phil Brown’s Confessions of a Minor Poet will be published by Transit Lounge in October.