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It happened 40 years ago, but Andrew Farriss, keyboard player and founding member of INXS, can still remember the moment when he and singer Michael Hutchence began working together on the most emotive hit song the band ever recorded.
Farriss tells MusicRadar: “I wrote the music for it on a piano at home, and some time later Michael heard me playing on it on someone else’s piano at a friend’s house. He said, ‘I like that. When we get home to Sydney let’s finish that.’
“So originally it was just a piano song with a vocal. A very simple song, really, in that sense. And Michael came up with a lyric and called it Never Tear Us Apart.”
There is, however, a third person whom Farriss acknowledges as a key collaborator on this song.
English producer Chris Thomas had begun working with INXS on the 1985 album Listen Like Thieves.
That album gave the band a major international profile outside of Australia, so Thomas was retained for the follow-up, Kick, which would yield five hit singles – Need You Tonight, New Sensation, Mystify, Devil Inside and Never Tear Us Apart.
Farriss recalls: “Chris Thomas and I had a conversation. We had a lot of them, actually, because we made three studio albums with Chris as a producer.
“But with that song in particular, Never Tear Us Apart, I’ll give a lot of credit to Chris Thomas, because we had recorded it first in a traditional rock style with mainly guitars. But Chris said to me, ‘Can you play what you’re playing on the keyboard with a string sound?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So I experimented a bit with different sounds and things, and the sound that I came up with is what you can hear on the record.
“So it was really Chris’s suggestion as a record producer, and it was absolutely genius. Very clever.”
Farriss admits that he wasn’t entirely sure of this new arrangement of the song when they had finished the recording.
“It sounded like it was from outer space compared to what most bands were doing around that time,” he says. “I told Chris, ‘This song sounds nothing like the rest of our album.’ The rest of Kick was quite funky, which I really liked. We all liked all that.
“I said, ‘Never Tear Us Apart sounds like an old 1950s ballad with strings in the background. It really doesn’t sound contemporary.’ And Chris said, ‘Yeah, but that’s what makes it sound so great, mate!’”
The drama in this arrangement was matched by the emotional depth in Hutchence’s lyrics and lead vocal.
In 2019 – 22 years after Hutchence’s suicide – the documentary Mystify: Michael Hutchence included an audio interview, the date unspecified, in which the singer discussed the words he sang in Never Tear Us Apart and confirmed the identity of the song’s subject.
“It’s kinda personal,” Hutchence said. “I don’t make up love songs, so… That’s definitely a song for a girl called Michele.”
Referring to the title of the song, he added with a laugh: “She knows, but we’re not together anymore, so it doesn’t work, does it?”
The woman in question was Michele Bennett, an Australian film producer, with whom Hutchence was in a relationship from 1982 to 1987.
It was reported after Hutchence’s death on 22 November 1997 that his last phone call had been to Bennett. Hutchence’s sister Tina believed that had her brother lived, he and Bennett would eventually have married.
Reflecting on all of this, Andrew Farriss tells MusicRadar: “I think it was a very important lyric for Michael.”
He recalls: “When we first met as school kids, Michael was much more interested in lyrics and poetry than in singing. I don’t think he was that interested at all in singing, but he was very interested in writing lyrics and poetry.
“At that time I was already in school bands. I was writing songs, I was writing lyrics. But I began to recognise with Michael that he really was passionate about writing lyrics. And he got so good at it as he went along.”
Never Tear Us Apart was released as a single on 13 June 1988. Surprisingly it only reached No 24 in the UK, but it was a top 10 hit in Canada, Netherlands, Belgium and the US. The song has been streamed more than half a billion times on Spotify alone.
On 27 November 1997, Hutchence’s funeral at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney ended with Never Tear Us Apart playing as the coffin was carried away by Farriss and the other members of INXS along with the singer’s brother Rhett.
Farriss says now: “One thing about Michael’s lyric writing, one of the things I think that really stood the test of time with a lot of INXS songs, is that his lyrics were very poignant. He didn’t have to say very much, but you knew exactly what he was talking about.”
