New Sensation Suicide Blonde Devil Inside Inxs

New Sensation Album: Kick (1987)
Suicide Blonde Album: X (1990)
Devil Inside Album: Kick (1987)
by Inxs

Like all the original tracks on Kick, "New Sensation" was written by lead singer Michael Hutchence along with Andrew Farriss, who played a number of instruments in the group. Farriss came up with a guitar riff that carries the track musically; Hutchence added the "seize the day" lyric, encouraging us to live boldly, seeking out new sensations.

"I felt that a lot of the lyrics on the Kick album were very positive lyrics," Farriss said. "When I listen to that album, a lot of the lyrics are about celebrating life, and I find them particularly positive."

Listen carefully under the guitar and you'll hear a banjo line, which Andrew Farriss added using a sampler.
The video shows a different side of Michael Hutchence, putting him in a suit and ponytail (très chic in 1987) as the band performs the song at the Municipal House in Prague. INXS was fond of their visual effects, and this one used a combination of light waves mixed with a strobing look pioneered in the Wang Chung "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" video.

Like most of their early videos, New Sensation was directed by Richard Lowenstein, their good friend from Australia.
INXS guitarist/horn player Kirk Pengilly played the saxophone part, and yes, Michael Hutchence yells "trumpet!" just before it plays. This was an in-joke: The group's other guitarist, Tim Farriss, wanted to play trumpet on the track, but Pengilly overruled him and got his sax solo.

In the video version, Hutchence's call for trumpet is removed because it sounds really dumb when you actually see the saxophone.

This was the third single from the Kick album, which took the band to a new level. Outside their home country of Australia, they had just a modest following, but the first single from the album, "Need You Tonight," was a monster, going to #1 in America. "Devil Inside" followed, reaching #2, so by the time "New Sensation" was released, there was no question it would get airplay. It followed the sequence, peaking at #3 in July 1988 (the next single, "Never Tear Us Apart," stopped at #7).
INXS ruled MTV in 1988. At the Video Music Awards on September 7, they were the big winners, taking home five awards for the "Need You Tonight/Mediate" video. They closed the ceremony with a performance of "New Sensation."

With the promise of a "new sensation," this song is irresistible to ad agencies, who have placed it in commercials for Toyota, Sea World and McDonald's.

This plays in the Charmed episode Coyote Piper (2001), and in the Mr. Robot episode "eps3.1_undo.gz" (2017). It also shows up in these movies:

The Way Way Back (2013)
Towelhead (2007)
Shattered Glass (2003)
40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

The song title comes from a phrase describing a woman who colors her hair blonde as "dyeing" from her own hand, making her a "suicide blonde." It was written by Andrew Farriss and Michael Hutchence, who were the primary songwriters in the group.

The lyric was inspired by Kylie Minogue, who was INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence's girlfriend at the time. When she told him she was planning to dye her hair "suicide blonde," he used it as the title (this according to Lucy O'Brien's Michael Hutchence obit in Q magazine).

One of Hutchence's favorite hobbies was "corrupting Kylie" because of her wholesome image. When they attended the premiere of Kylie's film The Delinquents, she wore an extreme look with the "suicide blonde" hair that made her unrecognizable to many.
INXS hit it big with their sixth album, Kick, released in 1987. They spent all of 1988 and much of 1989 supporting the album, which was huge, bringing them to a U2 level of superstardom. Getting the band back in the studio was a challenge though, especially when Michael Hutchence started a side project with his old mates called Max Q. INXS' label, Atlantic, indulged Hutchence by releasing the Max Q album in 1989, but they buried it, eager to get him working again with their moneymaker.

Kick producer Chris Thomas returned to helm X, which was released in 1990. "Suicide Blonde" was the first single and a substantial hit, but X was a big drop off critically and commercially. To their credit, the band didn't use their existing hits as templates or bring in outside writers, choosing instead to push forward in new musical directions.

The song has nothing to do with suicide, and despite the uneasy title, the band continued to perform it when they toured with other lead singers following Michael Hutchence's death by suicide in 1997.

That's Charlie Musselwhite playing the harmonica on this track, although his part was played though a sampler programmed by Andrew Farriss. Musselwhite played directly on two other tracks from the album: "Who Pays The Price" and "On My Way."

Musselwhite, a Mississippi-born white bluesman, has released over 20 albums and guested on Bonnie Raitt's Grammy-winning Longing In Their Hearts. He was reportedly the inspiration for Dan Aykroyd's character in the Blues Brothers.

In America, Suicide Blonde hit the mark on Modern Rock radio, where edgy "alternative" acts were the focus. "Suicide Blonde" rose to #1 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart.

The band's good friend Richard Lowenstein directed the video of Suicide Blonde, which shows an array of composited images of the band members traveling across the screen, a look he often used in their visuals.

Dance remixes of Suicide Blonde by Paul Oakenfold (the "Milk Mix") and Nick Launay (the "Devastation Mix") were released in 1990 and proved popular in clubs.

Suicide Blonde was the last song Michael Hutchence performed live. It was the closing number at the last INXS show before his death, a concert in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, on September 27, 1997.

There is a devil inside all of us, but some wear it outward, like the woman in the song "raised on leather with flesh on her mind." We also meet a man "fed on nothing but full of pride," one of the seven deadly sins.

"I was on a God and the Devil phase there," INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence said of the Devil Inside lyric in the book Classic Albums. "I suppose it's to do with the chaos of everything, you know? And we can put it into religious terms, I suppose. The Devil is chaotic. So that every time you think something's right, he comes in and changes everything."

For the Kick album, Michael Hutchence and Andrew Farriss did all of the songwriting. Farriss, who played keyboards, guitar and other instruments in the group, got "Devil Inside" started with a sinister guitar riff he came up with in 1985 when he was cooped up in the Kenilworth Hotel in London. Hutchence added the lyrics to complete Devil Inside.

Devil Inside was the second single from Kick, the album that elevated the group to international stardom. Their previous five albums made them household names in their native Australia, but in the rest of the world they were mainly known for the song "What You Need" from their previous album, Listen Like Thieves. Kick was far from a sure thing - their record label, Atlantic, didn't like it at all. INXS manager Chris Murphy reported that executives complained there was "no way they could get this music on rock radio."

But with a push in America starting with a tour of colleges, the first single, "Need You Tonight," took off, climbing to #1 in January 1988, four months after the album was released. That song cleared a path for "Devil Inside," which was warmly welcomed on radio and MTV. It rose to #2 in April, behind "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car" by Billy Ocean. Kick stayed on the US albums chart for all of 1988 and much of 1989, with "New Sensation," and "Never Tear Us Apart" also charting as singles.

The video of Devil Inside was directed by Joel Schumacher, an A-list moviemaker whose films include St. Elmo's Fire and Falling Down. He also did a vampire movie called The Lost Boys that was released in 1987 and featured two INXS songs from 1986 they recorded with singer Jimmy Barnes: "Good Times" (a cover of an Easybeats song from 1968) and "Laying Down The Law." Returning the favor, Schumacher made the "Devil Inside" video in the same style, shooting it in Balboa, California, a ritzy part of Newport Beach. The band is seen performing at a club where lots of beautiful people come in and out of the shadows. It was a new look for the band, whose previous videos took place in studio settings with the camera trained on Hutchence.

It was Schumacher's first music video. He later shot Seal's "Kiss From A Rose" as a tie-in with his film Batman Forever.
It was only a matter of time before this song was used in a TV show about a demon. It finally happened in 2016 when it appeared on the "Pops" episode of Lucifer. "Devil Inside" also shows up in the 2001 movie Rock Star and the 2007 Samantha Who? episode "The Car."

Michael Hutchence used to love "Devil Inside," but Andrew Farriss wasn't so enthusiastic. "I used to struggle with the song a little bit, because I didn't write the lyric," he admitted to The Tennessean in 2022. "He wrote the lyric and I, you know, I have some beliefs about life and the afterlife."

Though Farriss questioned Hutchence's lyric, he took the view of "Well, that's art."