Kick is the sixth studio album by Australian rock band INXS, released on 12 October 1987 through WEA in Australia, Mercury Records in Europe, and Atlantic Records in the United States and Canada. The album was produced by British producer Chris Thomas, recorded by David Nicholas in Sydney and Paris and mixed by Bob Clearmountain at AIR Studios in London.
The band's most successful studio album, Kick has been certified six times platinum by the RIAA and peaked at number three on the Billboard 200. The album also spawned four US top 10 singles, "New Sensation", "Never Tear Us Apart", "Devil Inside" and "Need You Tonight", the last of which reached the top of the US Billboard singles charts.
Background Between 1980 and 1984, INXS released four studio albums and had toured their native country Australia extensively. The release of Listen Like Thieves and its second single "What You Need" in 1985 brought the group international acclaim, as well as a breakthrough in the United States. The album peaked at No.11 on the US Billboard 200, and featured the band's first top 5 single in the US, "What You Need". After that success, the band knew their next album would have to be better. According to guitarist and saxophonist Kirk Pengilly, "We wanted an album where all the songs were possible singles". Towards the end of 1986, the band members gathered at the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia to rehearse the songs that Michael Hutchence and Andrew Farriss had written. Retrieved 18 June 2017
Recording and production In January 1987, INXS entered Rhinoceros Studios in Sydney to begin recording their sixth studio album, and the second with producer Chris Thomas. At the band's request, fellow engineer David Nicholas was brought in to assist with the album's production. Retrieved 18 June 2017 Nicholas co-owned Rhinoceros recordings and had previously worked with the band on their 1982 album, Shabooh Shoobah. In the band's 2005 official autobiography, INXS: Story to Story, Nicholas recalled: "There was a really good feeling in the studio that this was going to be something big. The band had just come off a really successful tour of the US on the back of Listen Like Thieves, which really broke them there and they were on fire".
During production, management booked dates for the band's upcoming European tour, Retrieved 18 June 2017 which proved a problem for Thomas, as he felt the album needed more songs. "They had an incredible momentum building and were gaining fans all the time", Thomas recalls. "There was an audience waiting for the product, but I decided that they didn't have the right songs yet". Thomas persuaded primary songwriters Hutchence and Andrew Farriss to fly to Hong Kong (where Hutchence and drummer Jon Farriss owned an apartment) to write more material for the forthcoming album.
While waiting for a cab to go to the airport to fly to Hong Kong, Andrew thought up the guitar riff for "Need You Tonight". He told the cab driver to wait a couple of minutes while he went back to his motel room to grab something, when in fact, he went back to record the riff on a cassette. The cab driver was furious when Andrew returned to the cab forty-five minutes later. When Hutchence heard the demo in Hong Kong, he wrote the song's lyrics, writing most in just ten minutes.
At the end of their two-week seclusion in Hong Kong, Hutchence and Andrew returned to the recording sessions in Australia with a handful of demo tapes, including "Need You Tonight", "Kick" and "Calling All Nations". Thomas knew the album was done when he heard the recordings, and organised the last portion of the album's production to be carried out at the Studio De La Grande Armee in Paris.
While Kick had been considered as the album's name during the recording sessions in Australia, when the word appeared in a couple of tracks, a song of the same name was written in Hong Kong and it was chosen for certain. There was also the appeal that the word had four letters like the band's name.
Certain songs that were recorded early in production remained close to their demo counterparts, while others were changed drastically. Originally, "Never Tear Us Apart" was a piano ballad having no orchestral structure at all. The song's original arrangement was released on Kick 25, the 25th anniversary reissue. The demo of "Mediate" was also longer. When Andrew first played its demo in the studio, "Need You Tonight" was playing in the background. Upon hearing both tracks being played simultaneously, Nicholas labored to have the two tracks combined. Nicholas said in the band's official autobiography, "I rewound his tape and hit play just as "Need You Tonight" ended and synced up so perfectly that I actually thought something was wrong".
The members of INXS spent the final Kick sessions contributing their talents on Richard Clapton's Glory Road, which was being produced in the same studio.
Music and lyrics With Kick, Thomas fused the funk and soul of The Swing with the mainstream rock of Listen Like Thieves. Retrieved 18 June 2017 In an interview with MusicRadar, Andrew Farriss stated, "The melding of funk and rock was always in our heads. We were very excited about the idea of overlaying two types of songs and genres together."
The success of their single "What You Need" provided primary songwriters Hutchence and Andrew Farriss with the confidence and optimism to pen bigger material, and with the rest of the band's blessing, Kick became the first INXS album written by the duo without input from the other members. When it came time to write and record, the band set out to make an album that did not share any musical formula with other hits of the time. According to Andrew Farriss, "Anyone can write a song that sounds contemporary. We wanted our songs to sound like the future".
Andrew Farriss recalls, "Hutchence's instrument was his voice; he couldn't explain what he was thinking in musical terms. He would say things like, 'It needs to feel like this.' And I'd try to translate that into notes".
Upon its release, Kick was noted for being in sync with the visual media of the late 80's, which is instantly evident in the album's opening track "Guns in the Sky"; the song described the state of the world and its obsession with arms. The rest of the album focuses on themes of fun, love and excess; "New Sensation" and "Calling All Nations" are both about a party lifestyle, while "Never Tear Us Apart" describes an instant connection between two people who form an unending bond. The lyrics to "Devil Inside" are about a life of excess. The sequencing of "Need You Tonight" and "Mediate" provides a lyrical contrast, as the former exudes intimacy while the latter addresses social concerns like apartheid. The band also included a new version of "The Loved One", a song by Australian rock band the Loved Ones they had previously covered in their compilation INXSIVE (1982).
Release
In the band's 2005 official autobiography, the band's manager Chris Murphy stated that upon completion of Kick, he flew to New York to play the finished album for the top executives of Atlantic Records. The US record label first rejected the album, feeling that the funk and dance elements would alienate the band's traditional rock following. Murphy said that he resisted Atlantic's proposition of one million dollars to produce the album all over again. He then devised a strategy to get Kick released.
Unbeknownst to Atlantic, Murphy arranged a secret meeting with the staff of Atlantic's radio promotion division to play them "Need You Tonight". He found a market when the head of college radio promotion agreed to concentrate a strategy on campus radio. The song was a chart success on the radio network and received heavy replay. "Need You Tonight" was released in September 1987. Murphy stated that his strategy had worked. Atlantic added Kick to their release schedule for October.
The album's second single, "Devil Inside", crossed over onto album rock play lists. Over the course of four consecutive top five singles and the support of a short college tour, with INXS playing concerts in college bars and university auditoriums across North America, Kick became popular among American fans. Retrieved 18 June 2017
Tour Following the release of Kick, INXS embarked on a sixteen-month global tour playing arenas and stadiums in major cities across North America, Europe, Japan and Australia. The band started off their Kick tour on 14 August with a number of secret warm-up shows being played across south-eastern and north-eastern Australia, before setting off on a three leg tour of the US beginning in East Lansing on 16 September. The first American leg ran right through to November, followed by UK dates in December.
With the growing popularity of Kick, and the release of its first single, "Need You Tonight", all twelve songs from the album quickly became staples of the tour's setlists, with "Don't Change" being regularly played during a show's encore.
The tour resumed in March with the band playing three sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York City from 18 to 20 March. Fleets of trucks were hired to transport the band's equipment, lighting and wardrobe across thousands of miles of road over the next three months. During the band's time spent commuting across America, Andrew began writing and playing new material with a guitar. According to INXS: The Official Inside Story of a Band on the Road, Andrew said, "Prior to the Kick tour I'd never written on the road – mainly because I didn't have time I guess. But with Kick I started writing with a guitar, and I was kind of proud that I'd taught myself to do that". INXS finished up the second leg of the American tour with a handful of shows being played in key cities across the California state, including San Francisco, Fresno and San Diego.
In October, INXS made a brief stopover in Japan to play a small number of shows and festivals in Tokyo and Yokohama, before flying on to Australia to finish the last segment of the Calling All Nations tour. Since the culmination of the tour in November 1988, INXS agreed to a one-year respite. This one-year break allowed the members time off to spend with their families and to work on side projects.
Critical reception
AllMusic's Steve Huey retrospectively described the album as "an impeccably crafted pop tour de force, the band succeeding at everything they try". He added, "More to the point, every song is catchy and memorable, branded with indelible hooks". According to Huey, "Kick crystallized all of the band's influences – stones-y rock & roll, pop, funk, contemporary dance-pop – into a cool, stylish dance/rock hybrid."
Robert Christgau called INXS "silly middlebrow hacks", but acknowledged that Kick delivered "danceable rock and roll that sounds smart in the background". Australian rock music historian, Ian McFarlane, asserted that Kick "became the band's most enduring release by mixing the hard rock sound of Thieves with a looser approach to dance grooves". In a retrospective review, Q wrote, "Hutchence's knowing, Jaggeresque vocal swagger turned 'Devil Inside,' 'Never Tear Us Apart' and the mighty 'Mystify' into something beyond what INXS had done before and what they would do again".
BBC Music's Cormac Heron reviewed the 2004 deluxe edition, "superfluous second disc notwithstanding, this is a near flawless collection of songs" and felt that the "production still sounds fresh and the song-writing partnership of Hutchence/Farriss wins you over with an anthemic glory". In a 2012 special review celebrating the anniversary of albums released in 1987, Classic Album Review admired Kick, calling it a "Well crafted pop/rock/dance album" and stating that it "transformed the band from the status of an alternative niche to that of a mainstream pop headliner". "Robin Smith" of The Record Mirror gave the album a "Perfect" 5 out of 5 rating."