INXS – Need You Tonight

“Need You Tonight” – Single by INXS from the album Kick
B-side: “I’m Coming (Home)”
Released: September21, 1987
Label: WEA
Songwriters: Andrew Farriss, Michael Hutchence
Producer: Chris Thomas
Charted No.1 in US and No.2 in UK

This was the song that launched INXS to global stardom. They had released five albums and were huge in their native Australia, but were just starting to get noticed in most other countries. Many Americans knew the band from their MTV hit “What You Need,” but they had little draw in that country. Atlantic Records knew the Kick album was a chance to break them in America, but the label pushed back when they heard the album, deeming it out of touch. INXS’ manager, Chris Murphy, addressed their concerns by setting up a tour of American colleges to promote “Need You Tonight” as the first single. If this small-scale effort went well, Atlantic could put more promotional might behind the album knowing it had at least a niche audience.

So, when the single and album were released in October 1987, INXS was dispatched to places like Kalamazoo, Michigan and Poughkeepsie, New York, where they played colleges. As hoped, the tour got a great reaction and college radio stations jumped on “Need You Tonight.” Their fears assuaged, Atlantic pushed the song to commercial radio stations, which added it to their playlists. MTV put the video in hot rotation, and on January 30, 1988, “Need You Tonight” went to #1 in America. “Devil Inside,” “New Sensation” and “Never Tear Us Apart” were the next three singles, keeping INXS on the air throughout 1988, while Kick stayed in the upper end of the albums chart the entire year.

The music video combined live action and different kinds of animation. Directed by Richard Lowenstein, the video was actually “Need You Tonight / Mediate”, as it combined two songs from the album. Lowenstein claimed that the particular visual effects in “Need You Tonight” were created by cutting up 35mm film and photocopying the individual frames, before re-layering those images over the original footage.

For “Mediate”, it segues into a tribute to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. The members flip cue cards with words from the song; the last one displays the words “Sax Solo,” at which point Kirk Pengilly starts a saxophone solo. Beneath the lyric “a special date” in the “Mediate” portion of the video, the cue card shown reads “9-8-1945” which in Australian date format is 9 August 1945, the date which the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

The video won five MTV Video Music Awards including 1988 Video of The Year and was ranked at number twenty-one on MTV’s countdown of the 100 greatest videos of all time.