NXS is celebrating the 40th anniversary of their fifth studio album, Listen Like Thieves, with a new deluxe box set that is out now, featuring plenty of bonus material.
Founding member and keyboardist Andrew Farriss tells ABC Audio that Listen Like Thieves “was a breakthrough album for us,” both commercially and artistically. He credits the album’s producer Chris Thomas with helping them reach that success.
“We’d had success before in other countries, including the United States,” he shares, “but meeting Chris Thomas was a whole other thing.” He adds that Chris was “really tough on us,” but he was also “good for us.”
“If we thought it was good enough, he’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s all right. You can do better than that,'” Andrew says. He notes they soon realized Chris was “going to play hardball with us to get the best out of us.”
And it was thanks to Chris that INXS wound up with their first major hit in the U.S. and other countries.
“Chris said, look, you’ve made a really good album, but you need just that one more song … that thing that you need, you know, that killer hit,” Andrew says. “And that became ‘What You Need,'” which was a top-five hit for INXS.
Andrew co-wrote several songs on Listen Like Thieves with INXS’ late frontman Michael Hutchence and says Michael was a unique songwriter because “he never played an instrument, his instrument was his voice.”
Andrew describes Hutchence as an “articulate lyric writer” and says he often deferred to whatever Hutchence felt was best.
“That was my attitude because he wrote the lyric and because he believed in the lyric, it helped him deliver it to the audience,”” Andrew says. “I think that is a really important part of our songwriting relationship.”
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