And if you grew up in the ’80s – or had siblings / relatives who did – there’s no way you could have missed Inxs. And even though I’m reluctant to speak collectively, I’m sure that for a lot of us outside of the UK they put Australia on the map. Oh we knew what it was and where (it was after all pretty easy to find), but we didn’t really have a concept of its people. Not that a celebrity can do this, but when we met Aussies we perked up pretty quickly. For me personally there was the added thrill of having some obscure, very distant, relative living there, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t too aware of that then on a conscious level.

INXS was a band that transcended boundaries. My freshman year in New Jersey I scored double points with the juniors and seniors, one for being from Europe (hey, it was high school, and as we know, all’s fair in love and war, so what if I had an American accent, I was French and I’d lived in Germany, in NJ where kids were proud of the Statue of Liberty back then that counted for a lot). And the other – which was really my coup de grace because I’d brought this about myself, it was something that was solely in my power) – by knowing who Michael Hutchence was. And – slightly more importantly as a freshman – knowing how to pronounce the band’s name when the cutest boy in the entire school slid his notebook over to me and asked me to say it, which apparently no one else knew how to do.

Superficialities aside, INXS was famous wherever I happened to be in my teens, America, Germany, France, among my English friends, so it was easy to fit in by bringing them up and comparing favorite songs. Even though they’d show up on my radar only to disappear so they could reappear all over again, they were always there. And it’s safe to say that they were one of the two bands that held my sanity together in all the teenage drama, confusion, and search for identity. And again, this was something I intuited long before I knew, because we always recognize each other, the singer was also a Cross-Cultural Kid. Michael Hutchence would have been 58 today, and while it would have been interesting to see what he would have looked like, we’ll have to leave this up to everyone’s imagination.

Pictures adapted from Never Tear Us Apart official video by INXS