INXS – Need You Tonight | Live at Wembley Stadium, 1991

The film cans went missing for years — the manager spent a decade hunting them across two continents.

Somewhere in Australia sat a stack of 35mm film cans holding the best night of INXS’s life, and for years nobody could find them. Chris M. Murphy, the band’s longtime manager, spent roughly ten years looking. What he was chasing was the original negative of a concert shot at Wembley Stadium on July 13, 1991 — seventeen cameras, one of them in a helicopter, 72,000 people, and a band closing out a year of touring at the exact top of their powers. The film had been released, seen, and then effectively lost.

Keep watching: INXS – Need You Tonight (studio version) · INXS – Original Sin

The song had already done its work by then. Need You Tonight came out on September 21, 1987 as the first single from Kick, written by Andrew Farriss and Michael Hutchence, produced by Chris Thomas, and it became the only INXS record to reach No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Britain took longer to agree — the single stalled at No.58 on its first run in October 1987 and only climbed to No.2 after WEA re-released it in November 1988. The full story of how it was written and what nearly happened to it sits on its own page here.

What you are watching on this page is a different thing entirely: not the Richard Lowenstein studio video with the cut-up film effects, but four minutes of a stadium. By July 1991 INXS had spent twelve months on the road behind X, and Wembley was the last date. They headlined over a bill that included Jesus Jones, Hothouse Flowers, Jellyfish, Roachford and Deborah Harry. David Mallet, who had shot concert films for AC/DC, U2 and Madonna, directed. Jon Farriss started the show with the drum figure from “Guns in the Sky” and by every account the band did not let up for the next ninety minutes.

The album that wasn’t the concert

Here is where it gets tangled, and the tangle is the reason this page exists. The Live Baby Live album, released November 11, 1991, is not the Wembley show. It carries the title and it carries several Wembley performances, but the record drew from multiple stops across the Summer XS tour. The concert film released alongside it was the Wembley set — but that version was cut down, missing material, and shaped for the running time of a home video release rather than the shape of the night.

So for close to thirty years, the thing millions of people owned was an edited account of a show, sitting next to an album that was partly a different show. Anyone who wanted the actual concert as performed had no way to get it. Then Murphy found the cans.

Twelve months of restoration

Eagle Rock spent a year on the negative, producing a widescreen 4K restoration, while Giles Martin and Sam Okell remixed the audio at Abbey Road. The restored film ran in cinemas from November 14, 2019, opening in Australia and New Zealand before reaching the Americas, and arrived for home release on June 26, 2020. The expanded edition carries twenty-two tracks and restores “Lately,” a performance from that night that had never been released in any form.

Michael Hutchence died in November 1997, six years after Wembley. That fact sits underneath the whole restoration project and explains why a manager would spend a decade looking for film cans. There was no possibility of a better document arriving later. What was shot on July 13, 1991 was all there was ever going to be, and for most of the time since, the version available was a compromise. The footage on this page is the recovered one.