— Richard Lowe
With absolutely no Top 40 hits to his name, the late Matt Fretton is likely the most obscure pop "star" to make the cover of an issue of Smash Hits. Then just eighteen-years-old, he was in an edition that also featured the second in a three part series called 'Who's Who' with the bios of people who all would've been better suited to the front page. The prominence didn't do much and single "It's So High" only put up a modest chart performance. Tellingly, then-editor Mark Ellen would later confess to some bad luck he had with choosing who to put on the cover, citing JoBoxers and Jimmy the Hoover but neglecting to mention Fretton. Imagine being so forgettable that you're not even remembered for your obscurity.
As Ellen has stated, there have been some curious choices — and not just under his watch. The magazine did a soft launch in the north of Britain with Belgian star Plastic Bertrand on the cover but at least he had been a big deal in much of la Francophonie. One hit wonders such as Secret Affair, Classix Nouveaux, Department S, Marie Brennan of Clannad (on the cover with Bono, who wasn't on all that many Hits covers) and Hollywood Beyond were all Hits cover stars. Barry McIlheney took some grief for putting Wayne Hussy of The Misson on the front in 1987 and they had a few hits!
So, what if I was to tell you that Michael Hutchence was another of these more unusual selections for the front page of Smash Hits? The sex god lead singer of INXS, one of the biggest bands in the world in the late-eighties? A man who had Mick Jagger's charisma with infinitely more attractive features? A man who was not unlike Jim Morrison without all the unsavory elements? This man was on the cover of Smash Hits and it was a strange decision?
But consider the circumstances. INXS had been slow to take off in Britain. The modest Top 30 performances of both "New Sensation" and "Never Tear Us Apart" weren't enough to get them on the cover in place of, say, Rick Astley or the Pet Shop Boys. The group would only ever have one UK Top 10 hit when "Need You Tonight", a flop from a year earlier, came just short of hitting number one in November of 1988. Cover stars during that month were Yazz, Wet Wet Wet and Kylie and Jason (which happened to be the first issue I ever bought, my sister and I having decided that we could no longer share). A swift re-issue of another single from the hit-packed Kick in the New Year might have put them on the cover but "Mystify", rather mystifyingly, didn't hit the shops until that April.
That fall, however, there was suddenly a dearth of potential cover stars. The number one spot had been taken up by Jive Bunny, a cartoon rabbit front for studio boffins no one cared about, and Black Box, a similarly faceless Italian outfit with lip synching models, so there wasn't much for the magazine racks. Luckily, the lead singer of INXS had a single and album to promote. The fact that it happened to be with a side project was likely neither here nor there to the Hits staff; they weren't going to be pining for photos of Garry Gary Beers or Ollie Olsen. Nevertheless, Hutchence was on the cover of Smash Hits not as lead singer of a world famous rock group but as the one guy people would know in an otherwise no-name Melbourne musical project.
Michael Hutchence never sought to be a tabloid superstar. His looks and talent made millions swoon — while making plenty more bitterly jealous — but he was keen to prove there was much more to him than being a pinup. Like fellow model-dating heartthrob superstar Simon Le Bon, he wanted to show a deeper side. Luckily, Hutchence had connections and not simply ace studio musicians, producers to the stars and record company moguls. Having starred in the 1986 cult film Dogs in Space, he became acquainted with Olsen, whose roots were in early electronica and experimental music. The very unlikeliness of the pairing was what made the team up so appealing ("We both took a perverse interest in what would happen", he told Lola Borg in Smash Hits).
With the rest of INXS busying themselves with other projects, Hutchence made a go of cutting records without being a pop star. Infamously, the first sign that something was amiss was that he had gone out to his barber and returned a good deal lighter. (Ver Hits would comment that he looked like a vicar but they didn't speculate that this new do had anything to do with his new musical direction) With the new haircut came a certain anonymity that he hadn't enjoyed in his day job. His beautiful features are barely visible in the "Way of the World" video and the Max Q collective had their faces collaged together for the cover of their self-titled album. He didn't make any secret of his involvement but he didn't use his looks to get them onto the charts. (That said, he only took this reduced role so far; he was at last a Smash Hits cover star after-all)
With a different Michael Hutchence showing up, it's only right that a different side of him would come out in the music. INXS had never been a particularly political group (though they did appear on the Greenpeace Rainbow Warriors compilation from around this time) which makes "Way of the World" a particularly impressive piece. He used his voice differently as well, the Max Q album being a showcase for his underrated range and vocal power. The excellent INXS: Access All Areas podcast argues that his singing here marked a turning point as he would begin to use his voice to better effect on INXS' 1990 album X. (Similarly, the musical mishmash of Max Q may have contributed to its more experimental follow-up Welcome to Wherever You Are in 1992) On "Way of the World" he sounds not unlike Matt Johnson of The The with a sort of angry defiance. If no one was going to be looking at him then they were damn well going to listen.
"Way of the World" came out in a time of radical change in the world. The Tianamen Square protests had taken place in China that June and the Berlin Wall was soon to come down. Pop music became a vehicle for these sentiments but not all of it resulted in stellar work. (A number of people despise Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" but I'd still take it over either Jesus Jones' "Right Here Right Now" or The Sporpions' "Wind of Change") While others seemed to buy into that "End of History" nonsense, Hutchence's contribution retains a skeptical eye. Naysayers of the Russian Revolution some seventy years earlier would eventually contend that nothing changed and that power just shifted to another group (which doesn't explain why they supported the other side in the first place but I digress); if true, then why should we expect anything to change now? This pessimism could've been taken as raining on the parade back then but it makes the song even more potent considering the current state of the world. Hutchence never lived to see 9/11, the second Gulf War, the return of supposed strongmen leaders, the climate crisis and the current situation in Ukraine but he had seen enough. Indeed, the then-eminent wars in the Balkans showed that yet again all this talk of change wasn't going to do a damn thing.
Max Q ended up being a valuable interlude for Hutchence. The album as a whole isn't really my kind of thing but the the two main singles ("Sometimes" would follow "Way of the World" later in the autumn and it ended up doing a bit better on the charts) are very good. More importantly, it was a bold creative statement from someone who had been for too long dismissed as just a sex symbol. (Guitarist Andy Gill would say much the same about working with the singer on his posthumously released solo album) While the popularity of INXS would gradually begin to fade over the course of the nineties, their output remained strong. Max Q helped give those later years a shot in the arm that they needed.
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Also of some cop
Belinda Carlisle: "Leave a Light On"
Richard Lowe admits to being a "sucker for thoroughly predictable American rock records with whistlable tunes, chugging guitars, big blustering choruses and words about nothing in particular except for general lovey-doveyness" and I'm right there with him — except, of course, when non-Americans try to do this sort of thing. With the nineties just weeks away, you'd think someone would've warned Belinda Carlisle about a sound that was soon to go out of fashion but it's something she stuck with for quite a while. (My aside above about post-Cold War political pop reminds me that the early nineties ended up being a useful time for everyone to fully excise the previous decade from their systems) "Leave a Light On" is one of those songs that you could easily forget all about for decades until it comes on and it all comes flooding back. I will probably forget all about it again tomorrow but I'm digging it today.
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