‘Mystify’ Draws Back The Curtains On The Heartbreaking Legacy Of Michael Hutchence

Footage of Kylie Minogue and Michael Hutchence on holiday together sat in filmmaker Richard Lowenstein’s attic for 30 years.

— Warning: This article discusses mental health and suicide — 

In Lowenstein’s documentary Mystify, the couple record each other away from the spotlight aboard a boat on Hong Kong harbour. Hutchence is at ease posing for his girlfriend in his speedos. When Hutchence grabs the camera, he can’t keep it off Minogue; it’s clear they are smitten with each other. As the home movies play, Minogue is heard in voiceover reflecting on her time with Hutchence. You can hear the lump in her throat.

Hutchence passed away in 1997, age 37, and people who were closest to the singer still search for closure.

“I don’t think I’ve got closure but I definitely felt I owed him something,” Lowenstein — who directed Hutchence in the 1986 cult classic Dogs In Space — tells me over the phone.

“He changed my life with the [INXS] music videos, which then allowed me to make films. I certainly owed him something a bit more than just…,” Lowenstein takes a moment and lets out a breath, the kind of exhale where you can tell the memories are flooding back, and he then finds composure: “When he passed away, I knew one day I’d have to do something that gave him the respect and credit that he was craving along the way.”

Mystify pieces together Hutchence’s life using home movies, and behind-the-scenes footage from concerts and music videos. Over a decade’s worth of interviews with family, friends, ex-lovers, bandmates and managers accompany the footage.

“There were lots of interviews out there where Michael is talking about his current album or he’s out there on the publicity tour…but very few people are asking him about himself,” Lowenstein says. “I knew from the very start that the answer to making this film wasn’t going to be in all those MTV interviews…sometimes when the cameras went off or when the music stopped you’d get these moments where Michael relaxes; they’re like a moving portrait.”

“When he passed away, I knew one day I’d have to do something that gave him the respect and credit that he was craving along the way.”

Hutchence is presented in Mystify as a figure within the INXS phenomenon, but the film doesn’t get distracted with only charting the band’s career; it doesn’t focus on eureka moments in the studio or the accumulation of gold records. There’s a scene where a manager reads a report out loud about the band’s chart dominance and Hutchence casually says ‘wow’ like he’s reacting to a mate’s good news, not his own.

INXS are one of the great Australia bands, but our appreciation comes in waves. Sometimes it feels like we forget INXS were once the biggest band in the world, but they’re nonetheless embedded in our culture. You can’t go far in Australia without hearing an INXS riff in a pub or TV commercial.

Host of Double J mornings and ABC News national music correspondent, Zan Rowe, says we get complacent with successful Australian bands: “We get used to bands like INXS; they’re part of the furniture, they’ve never dropped away from high rotation on radio stations across the country. I grew up with INXS as a little kid, they were always there. And then Michael wasn’t, and it became about the tabloid downfall of his personal life. It consumed their legacy.

“But a film like Mystify is such a beautiful document to remind us of their magic.”

The INXS Connection

A lot of music history is grounded in legendary performances, but that wasn’t a case with the collaboration between Lowenstein and INXS. “With the first music video for INXS all I had was a cassette of a song — I’d never seen them live at all,” says Lowenstein.

Lowenstein played a pivotal role in INXS and the music video revolution of the 1980s with his work on ‘Burn for You’, ‘Dancing on the Jetty’, ‘What You Need’, ‘Listen Like Thieves’, ‘Need You Tonight’, ‘Never Tear Us Apart’, ‘New Sensation’ and more. He became INXS’ go-to videographer, and it led him to work with other musical acts like Pete Townsend, The Models, Crowded House and U2.

“We had a very charismatic person to film [Michael] as well as five very attractive guys in the band, but the centrepiece was Michael, and you can see from the early videos he had this ability to look at a camera and he had a strong screen presence,” says Lowenstein.

Rowe says he was the ultimate sex symbol. “He made you feel like you were the only person in the room, as he gazed down the barrel of a camera,” says Rowe. “His voice was iconic, strong and beautiful. And he looked as though he lived the dream, all slinky struts, flowing locks and an abandon that made you believe in the freeing power of rock n roll.”

Lowenstein felt something magical was happening when they were working on piecing the music videos together at the time.

“In an edit room you’d get people together to show the footage and we’d realise that tape of just Michael could be the video,” says Lowenstein. “But then management would say, ‘yes, but other band members need their grandmas to see them’. I’d often ask, ‘Are you sure?’ Cause with most of these music videos you’ve got to cut to the guitar, and I love Tim Farris, but if you do that it means there’s less Michael [laughs].”

INXS were a big entry point for a lot of Australian into popular music, including Rowe.

“INXS’ Kick was the first album I ever bought with my own money,” Rowe recalls. “I was nine years old, and I saved eight weeks pocket money, then went to the local Brash’s to buy it on gatefold vinyl. I remember how exciting it was to open that sleeve and see the back of Hutchence pointing that finger with such confidence. The songs were seared into my memory, played over and over, flipping from side A to side B and then starting again. It’ll always have a special place in my heart.”

“The songs were seared into my memory, played over and over, flipping from side A to side B and then starting again. It’ll always have a special place in my heart.”

Throughout our chat, Lowenstein keeps crediting his collaborators on these music videos, often giving a costume designer, assistant or co-director a shout out. In a selfless way, Lowenstein highlights the uncharted territory they were in at the time and how everyone brought ideas to these iconic music videos. You can’t put together a compilation of music video from the ’80s without including INXS.

“When you look at all the music videos from the ’80s, so many of them are dated with all the cliched imagery, and smoke, but a lot of the INXS videos seem to have stood the test of time quite well,” says Lowenstein. “You dream about it as a filmmaker, that something is going to have a timeless quality. What has been amazing in the process of making this the doco is uncovering the original film of some of these videos, and some of the key ones are able to be restored if anyone wants to do it.”

The preservation element of Mystify is a huge part of its relevance. Most of the footage in the doco looks stunning on the big screen, thanks to the hard work of Lowenstein and his team to take old 16mm and 35mm film and convert it to high definition.

Lowenstein says it’s now commercially viable to buy digital scanners and do it yourself as opposed to a decade ago when the cost of conversion would have sucked up an entire film’s budget. A threat that faces artist of this era whose history is tied up in physical media decaying in storage.

The importance of preservation and legacy matters with INXS because the band’s decline is tied up in scandal, and Mystify hopes for a course correction in the narrative.

Life After Michael Hutchence

Following the passing of Hutchence, INXS tried to find a new lead singer, with Terence Trent D’Arby and Jon Stevens stepping in for short tenures with the band. In 2005, it was heartbreaking to see the band turn to reality TV to audition 15 singers on Rock Star: INXS. J.D. Fortune got the gig, but it was a short-lived revival for the band.

“INXS without Michael is a bit of headless beast,” says Lowenstein. “Even though they tried other singers, they know — they’re not pretending it’s going to be the same — they know it’s a headless beast and it’s a loss none of them are probably ever going to be able to overcome.”

Showing Mystify to people close to Hutchence has been an emotional experience for Lowenstein.

“I don’t know if they’ll ever be closure for certain people. I screened the film for the band and we began discussing how Michael keeps appearing in our dreams,” says Lowenstein. “In my case it’s him asking me to make another concert film. In the Farris brothers’ case they dream that they’re about to go on stage again and Michael is saying ‘come on, let’s do this’ and then they’ll wake up and burst into tears.”

There’s a special thanks in the credits to Tiger Lily Hutchence Geldof, the daughter of Hutchence and Paula Yates. “Tiger saw it once and said, ‘I never want to do that again’,” Lowenstein says. “She loved it but felt that’s enough for now.”

Lowenstein adds: “It does take a psychological toll on me watching the film, too, seeing my friend grow up and then pass away multiple times a day.”

One of the most difficult parts of the film is the reveal that Hutchence suffered from brain damage, a secret kept for a long time, as the result of an assault that occurred in 1992. Hutchence began to experience mood swings and began to clash with members of INXS over the band’s direction; the arrival of grunge made it difficult for bands from the ’80s to transition to the ’90s and remain relevant.

“If the assault hadn’t happened, I honestly think the band would have traversed the problems of the ’90s and sustained into having a longevity like U2,” says Lowenstein. “Maybe not playing stadiums, who knows, I don’t think that was ever important to Michael, he just wanted to keep performing, that’s all.”

The ’90s were challenging for Hutchence, with a narrative built by the media around INXS as burnouts, his failed solo project Max Q, and around his relationship with Paula Yates, which drove the UK press wild. Lowenstein says INXS never had it easy in England.

“The Brits had their knives out for INXS from the very beginning,” says Lowenstein. “I went to London with them in ’84 and it was a big concert, but it was predominantly Australians because NME and the cynical British music press were just laying into them and a large part of it was a colonial verses convict mentality.

“When the Paula stuff happened…the press and that British mentality, they got their knives out again and got stuck into him as a renegade rockstar; it was just pathetic. And the tabloid press should be absolutely ashamed of themselves, but they never are, they just keep pushing this crap.”

Lowenstein feels the media in Australia followed along in a similar way and we’re still feeling that now. “There’s an element of cultural cringe going on,” Lowenstein says. “I think what was unique about INXS was they had this international-ism about them, they weren’t waving their Australian flag; they certainly weren’t like Men At Work singing ‘Down Under’!

Whatever factor Hutchence’s music plays in your life, it’s clear we’re still working out the legacy and the loss.

“But people’s consciousness moves on and people like to package things in decades. There’s a lot of record industry acknowledgement that they weren’t just a pretty boy band of the ’80s. Even though Michael loved bands like Duran Duran, he was very scared of becoming like a haircut band…fashion and pop does everything in its power to say, ‘no! you stay back in the ’80s’.”

Rowe says the band has endured beyond the trappings of the decade they were dominant. “The music is so good and so timeless,” says Rowe. “INXS were a party band who could craft a perfect ballad, and with Andrew [Farris] and Michael’s writing, and the intuition and energy of the Farris brothers, it was and still is a winning formula. They just have so many hits.

“And their influence endures; not just in the swagger of their performance but in the sonics of music still to this day. You only have to flick on The Preset’s ‘Downtown Shutdown’ to hear them tip a cap to ‘Just Keep Walking’.”

By the end of Mystify you get a sense of who Hutchence was in the culmination of hundreds of tiny moments captured when the superstar act drops. What makes the film go beyond a stock-standard music documentary is the way it reflects on mystery of why people leave us, whether it be a break-up or death. The music of INXS lives on, but we’ll always be perplexed by Hutchence’s untimely death.

Whatever factor Hutchence’s music plays in your life, it’s clear we’re still working out his legacy, and our loss.

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Cameron Williams is a writer and film critic based in Melbourne who occasionally blabs about movies on ABC radio. He has a slight Twitter addiction: @MrCamW.

Mystify is in cinemas 4 July 2019 and will air later in the year on the ABC as part of Ausmusic Month in November.