the boys - photo supplied
The local band that started out in their early days as the Farriss Bros and then became INXS, with more than 70 million records sold worldwide and three Grammy nominations, who took their talents from Australian pubs to stadiums around the world, has been nominated for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, with the fans voting currently open.
Vote now at: vote.rockhall.com
Fan vote leaderboard as we went to press, 11pm February 28 2026
According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, previous Australian acts that have been inducted are AC/DC (inducted in 2003), the Bee Gees, who were born in the UK but raised and launched in Australia (inducted in 1997), Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, born in Melbourne, and Steve Smith from Journey, who was born in Sydney.
The INXS album Kick may be the one most of our American friends are familiar with, it generated four Top 10 U.S. singles and became one of the defining albums of the decade.
INXS is on a list of 17 nominees for 2026 including Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill, Phil Collins, P!NK, Shakira, Wu-Tang Clan and Luther Vandross. The announcement was made Thursday February 26 Australian time.
Chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation John Sykes said the diverse list of nominees recognised the ever-evolving faces and sounds of rock'n'roll.
"Induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is music's highest honour and we look forward to celebrating the Class of 2026 this fall," Sykes said.
About the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Born from the collision of rhythm & blues, country, and gospel, rock & roll is a spirit that is inclusive and ever-changing. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame celebrates the sound of youth culture and honors the artists whose music connects us all. We share stories of the people, events, and songs that shape our world through digital content, innovative exhibits, live music, engaging programs, and our annual Induction Ceremony. We intentionally foster an inclusive and welcoming non-profit Museum that encourages and embraces creativity and innovation. As a community leader, we value, empower, and respect all people. Join the millions who love rock & roll as much as you do. Visit them in Cleveland, Ohio or at rockhall.com and follow us @rockhall on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X, or @rockandrollhalloffame on Facebook.
Music artists or bands become eligible for nomination 25 years after releasing their first commercial recording.
The 10 artists and bands that are appearing on the ballot for the first time are INXS, Jeff Buckley, Phil Collins, Melissa Etheridge, Lauryn Hill, New Edition, P!NK, Shakira, Luther Vandross and Wu-Tang Clan.
More than 1,200 artists, historians, and music industry professionals who make up an international voting panel will have the nominee ballots distributed to them.
Things that will be considered in the selection criteria include the impact an artist or group has had on music culture and their influence on other musicians who have followed, as well as the scope and longevity of their career and body of work.
The 2026 performer inductees will be revealed in April as will the inductees entering the hall under three special committee categories: Musical Influence, Musical Excellence and the Ahmet Ertegun Non Performer Award.
The induction ceremony will take place in autumn in the United States, which is generally from September through to November, with exact dates to be announced.
The global influence of INXS
The origins of the band began with Andrew Farriss convincing Davidson High School classmate, Michael Hutchence, to join his band, Doctor Dolphin. The band contained two further classmates, Kent Kerny and Neil Sanders, as well as Garry Beers and Geoff Kennely, both from the nearby Forest High School.
In 1977, Tim Farriss, Andrew's older brother, invited Andrew, Michael and Gary to join him and his schoolmate Kirk Pengilly. Tim and Kirk had been playing together since 1971 as either an acoustic duo known as 'Kirk and Tim' or as a four-piece band called Guinness (named after their bass player's dog). Together with younger brother Jon Farriss, they formed "The Farriss Brothers", which consisted of Garry Beers on bass guitar, Andrew Farriss on keyboards, Jon Farriss on drums, Tim Farriss on lead guitar, Michael Hutchence on lead vocals and Kirk Pengilly on guitar and saxophone.
The band made their debut on August 16 1977 in a share house in Whale Beach road, Whale Beach, at a party to celebrate Tim Farriss’ 20th - Tim lived in a neighbouring sharehouse.
While the Farriss family home was in Belrose, the band's early rented residence was in Newport.
The parents of the Farriss boys relocated to Perth, Western Australia in 1978, taking Jon to continue his schooling and as soon as Michael and Andrew finished school, the rest of the band followed. They briefly performed as 'The Vegetables' before returning to Sydney ten months later and recording a set of demos. At a chance meeting in the car park of the Royal Antler, then in Narrabeen, Tim was approached by Midnight Oil manager Gary Morris.
The band began to regularly support Midnight Oil and other local bands. Morris advised that a member of the Oils crew had come up with a new name and suggested they change it to INXS. The name INXS was inspired by English band XTC and Australian jam makers IXL. The name is a phonetic play on the words "in excess" and was adopted by the band to reflect its high-energy, larger than life sound.
Kirk later explained that Morris was interested in turning the group into a Christian band, which the band briefly considered before rejecting the idea.
The band's first performance as INXS was on September 1 1979 at the Ocean Beach Hotel in Umina on the Central Coast and by the end of 1979, after passing on the Christian band image, they hired Chris "CM" Murphy as their manager and continued taking on the Australian pub circuit. Chris Murphy was an adept business manager and negotiator and by early 1980 the band had signed a five-album record deal with a Sydney independent label, Deluxe Records, run by Michael Browning, a former manager of AC/DC.
The founding line-up was Michael Hutchence (vocals), Kirk Pengilly (guitar/sax - although he didn;t take up the sax until aged 20), Garry Gary Beers (bass), Jon Farriss (drums), Tim Farriss (guitar) and Andrew Farriss (guitar, keyboard, percussion), and they make up the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees.
INXS performing at Barrenjoey High School in Avalon Beach, August 1st 1980. photos: Anthony J Rose
Their debut album, INXS, was recorded at Trafalgar Studios in Annandale, Sydney. It was co-produced by the band and Duncan McGuire (ex-Ayers Rock), with all songs attributed to the entire band, at the insistence of Murphy. Deluxe gave them a budget of $10,000 to record the album, so to keep within the budget they had to record from midnight to dawn, usually after doing one or more performances earlier that night. The album was released in October 1980. It featured "Just Keep Walking" which was their first Australian Top 40 single, with the album peaking in the Top 30 of the Kent Music Report for Australian albums. The album eventually went gold.
These early records demonstrated their new wave/ska/pop style, and were followed by near constant touring with almost 300 shows during 1981 as the band developed their status as a live act. In 1981, they signed Gary Grant as their tour manager, who then became co-manager a year later. Between touring commitments, the band released their third single in May 1981, "The Loved One", which was a cover of a 1966 song by Australian group the Loved Ones. The song was recorded at Studios 301 in Sydney; and produced by another Australian music legend, Richard Clapton, and peaked in the Top 20.
The success of the single led to Clapton and the band returning to Studios 301 between July and August 1981 to create an album. In October 1981, their second album Underneath the Colours was released and became a hit in Australia peaking at No. 15.
Soon after recording sessions had finished, band members started work on outside projects. Beers, Jon and Andrew Farriss played on Clapton's solo album, The Great Escape. Hutchence recorded "Speed Kills", written by Don Walker of Cold Chisel for the soundtrack of the film Freedom directed by Scott Hicks. It was Michael's first solo single and was released by WEA in early 1982.
Deluxe had been unable to attract international interest so the band decided to record a new song, "The One Thing" at their own expense with Mark Opitz at Paradise Studios. The song turned out so well that Murphy hired Opitz to produce three more songs. Murphy then approached WEA Australia with copies of the song, leading to INXS signing a recording deal in July 1982 with WEA for releases in Australia, South East Asia, Japan, New Zealand, Atco Records (a subsidiary of Atlantic Records) for North America, and PolyGram for Europe including the UK.
In mid-1982, INXS began recording at Rhinoceros Studios with Opitz. In October 1982, Shabooh Shoobah was released internationally on Atlantic/Atco Records, peaking at No. 52 on the US Billboard 200 and No. 46 on the Hot Pop Albums chart. In Australia it peaked at No. 5 and remained in the albums charts for 94 weeks. The single "The One Thing" brought them their first Top 30 hit in United States peaking at No. 30 on 28 May 1983. It was also a Top 20 hit in Canada, and peaked at No. 14 in Australia on 23 August 1982. "One Thing" was their first video to air on the fledgling MTV and significantly added to the ultimate success of the single.
After a performance in Toronto the band was approached by producer Nile Rodgers; by September 1983, the band had recorded "Original Sin" (originally entitled "Brand New Day") at New York's Power Station Studios. Three tracks from Shabooh Shoobah were featured in the soundtrack for the 1984 film Reckless. The band then travelled to the UK to begin sessions on their fourth album with Nick Launay at the Manor Studios in Oxford.
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INXS publicity photo- Distributed by ATCO Records - Worthpoint, 1983
The album The Swing, released in April 1984, received significant attention from around the world, as "Original Sin" became the band's first No. 1 single in Australia and was popular worldwide with fans and reviewers. During 1984, the single reached no. 1 in Australia (for two weeks in January), Argentina, and France; No. 6 in New Zealand; No. 11 in Canada; No. 23 in Switzerland; No. 31 in the Netherlands; and No. 58 in the U.S. However, "Original Sin" was largely ignored in the UK, and INXS would not have any Top 50 chart success in the United Kingdom until the 1985 album Listen Like Thieves.
During 1984, INXS toured non-stop, performing across Europe, the UK, the US and Australia. Thye became known as beng one of the hardest working groups, worldwide. By December 1984, The Swing had gone double platinum, making it one of the five biggest domestic albums in the history of Australian music at the time.
Listen Like Thieves was released in October 1985 to critical approval, reaching No. 3 on the Australian charts and No. 11 on the US charts. With the release of Listen Like Thieves, the band had developed a rock sound influenced by Led Zeppelin and XTC while remaining true to the band's original roots in Aussie pubs. It was also the first album to feature songs written by a combination of band members, with Andrew Farris and Michael Hutchence becoming the primary songwriters in the years to follow.
The band achieved international success in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s with the hit albums Listen Like Thieves, Kick, and X, and the singles "What You Need", "Need You Tonight" (a US number-one single), "Devil Inside", "Never Tear Us Apart", "Suicide Blonde" and "New Sensation".
Welcome to Wherever You Are was the eighth studio album by Australian rock band INXS, released on 3 August 1992. With grunge and alternative music breaking into the mainstream, INXS established a new direction for itself, incorporating sitars, a 60-piece orchestra, and a much more "raw" sound to their music.
In its four-star review of the album, Q called it "... a far more engaging and heartfelt collection than anything the group has put out in recent memory ... It rocks," and listed it as one of the 50 Best Albums of 1992. It was the first album by an Australian group to debut on the UK Albums Chart at number one since AC/DC's Back in Black, released in 1980.
The album lists the track "Beautiful Girl", released in February 1993 by Mercury, Atlantic and EastWest Records as the fifth international single from this album.
The song was written by Andrew Farriss, who was inspired by the birth of his daughter Grace. In a December 2001 interview with Debbie Kruger for the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA), Farriss explained: "I was writing lyrics like 'Baby Don't Cry' and 'Beautiful Girl' and lyrics just about how wonderful it is to have something else in your life besides yourself to worry about and think about."
The song was used for an American TV awareness campaign about the effects of anorexia, and this theme was chosen by the band for use in their official film clip for the song. The visuals message is pretty clear, and pushes back against the narrative imposed on endless generations of women - it also features Kirk's skills as a saxophonist.
We all Lost Michael
In August 1992, Michael Hutchence had gone out for pizza with then partner Helena Christensen was involved in a street altercation with a taxi driver in Copenhagen. The taxi driver punched Michael and he fell and hit his head on the pavement, knocking him unconscious.
The attack fractured his skull, permanently robbed him of smell and taste, and changed his nature.
Helena would later recount he insisted on leaving the hospital, and spent the next month in her apartment vomiting and refusing food. His manner also changed.
A month later, the couple travelled to Paris to meet a specialist, who concluded Michael had permanently lost his senses of taste and smell and sustained multiple brain contusions.
While he was public about no longer being able to smell and taste, he swore Helena to secrecy about the rest.
The documentary, Mystify: Michael Hutchence, directed by Melbourne filmmaker and long-time INXS collaborator Richard Lowenstein, and released in 2019, was the first time many found out about what had happened.
Michael continued to record and perform with INXS, but was also the subject of increasingly intense and intrusive media attention, in part due to the relationship he commenced with U.K. television presenter Paula Yates, the former wife of Bob Geldof.
Although there is a 'social contract' whereby media gain by access to popular figures in selling newspapers or directing eyes to their sites, and those people gain by the attention to sell products, this was an era where the media, especially the English press, allowed no privacy, no time out, and no 'heat off' moments, and that escalated to the point where the law should have stepped in. Many maintain that Princess Diana was literally 'press-hounded' to death.
The same occurred here when Michael returned home to rehearse with the boys for the upcoming tour and granted radio interviews - one in particular, heard by us, was incredibly inappropriate, disrespectful, simply intrusive, and dripped with jealousy. Even though you could hear Michael take in a breath, then laugh pleasantly, politely, banter is not banter when you cross the line.
There is also a lesson in this, in that everyone should treat everyone with kindness and respect as you never know what someone else is going through - what a brave kind smile may be hiding.
On the morning of November 22, 1997, before the Australian tour, Michael died tragically at the Ritz-Carlton in Double Bay, Sydney. He was just 37.
For many of us it was the equivalent of suddenly losing your older brother – the shock felt, and still feels, like having your heart ripped out. You just want to cry - there are no words - just pain, and then - deep anger - you have to stop yourself from throwing lightning into their hearts.
Kindness.... gentleness... respect.
Michael, asked about his favourite INXS albums he chose Kick, Welcome To Wherever You Are and Elegantly Wasted.
“They showed how unique we are as a band. We’re stubborn. We don’t jump on bandwagons. We do what we want to.” Mike said
"Listen Like Thieves" by INXS (1985) serves as a warning about the power of the media, urging listeners to be critical, sceptical, and to not believe everything they hear or read. Written by frontman Michael Hutchence as he was experiencing how the press shaped his own image, the song acts as a call to stop being "sheep" who passively accept media narratives, especially in politics and news.
INXS didn't perform publicly for almost a year after Michael's death.
Noiseworks lead singer Jon Stevens later fronted INXS followed by Canadian JD Fortune. He was replaced by Irish singer-songwriter Ciaran Gribbin. Although excellent musicians – they simply weren’t Michael.
The group hasn't performed live since November 2012 but members remain active with archival releases and other projects – most of them with community through music at their core, or caring about what others may be going through.
Local Tributes and Celebrations
So where is our 'INXS Avenue' or dedicated park bench with a view where you can go sit on, have a think about it all? Where can the current generation find out more, right here, right now, more about their local music heritage?
In 2017 the Manly Art Gallery and Museum staged ''Instrumental'' - Iconic Australian rock musicians from the 60s, 70s and 80s through to the present day. “Instrumental” featured vivid photographic studies of the instruments of some of Australia’s most influential and celebrated rock musicians, as well as stories that illuminate the connection between the musicians and their ‘tools of the trade’.
Exhibition curator Ross Heathcote said the exhibition was the work of acclaimed American-born and Scotland Island-based still life photographer Chuck Bradley.
“Outside his photography, Chuck is also a bit of a muso himself, playing drums in a blues band Sly Dogs. This promises to be a real treat for any music fans, plus people who just love compelling photography.
“Working with Chuck we’ve been able to get access to the very musical instruments used by the likes of Iva Davies, Jimmy Barnes, Col Joye, Archie Roach, Tim Farris and Kirk Pengilly from INXS and Amanda Brown from the 80s sensation the Go-Betweens.” Ross said
Chuck said people will have little trouble recognising the instruments.
“People know these iconic instruments and associate them with memorable sounds and events but never get to see them up close.. These are like revealing portraits of the instruments themselves.”
The exhibition ran from 26 May to 9 July with photographer Chuck Bradley in conversation with Ross Heathcote for extra insights.
In 2018 the MAG&M hosted ''The Octennial: Reg Mombassa & Peter O’Doherty'' - an extensive exhibition of the works of celebrated artists ‘Reg and Pete’ as a special feature of the Manly Arts Festival.
As Kirk Pengilly is considered the historian of INXS, keeping a daily diary and amassing a huge collection of rare band items, there's certainly enough materials to stage a celebration.
Kirk, who still lives here too, has said in the past, “At the beginning of our career, I tried to collect everything – magazine articles, posters, our record releases, etc. But then as we branched overseas and toured extensively, it became harder to maintain the ‘collection’ of everything.
“I have a bunch of boxes in a lock up full of tour merchandise including t-shirts, show/backstage passes, tour programmes, vinyl, cassettes – it will make an incredible exhibition one day.”
Still Dancing
INXS won Australian fans and then international acclaim, performing to millions of people including the band’s historic sell out performance at Wembley Stadium to 74,000 fans.
They worked and worked and worked - this was their job, their passion, and they enjoyed playing with their 'other brothers' from their music mother, for decades.
With a career spanning over 40 extraordinary years, INXS are one of the world’s greatest rock bands, countless awards from both their peers and fans, including 7 MTV Awards, 3 Grammy Nominations, Brit Awards and hundreds of platinum, gold and now (2) diamond Awards from Canada and Australia, INXS have cemented themselves in musical history.
Never Tear Us Apart being voted the #1 song on triple j's Hottest 100 of Australian songs in 2025 bears testament to their continued relevance to all here - and over there.
On hearing of the nomination Kirk said on his Instagram page:
‘’We are honoured to be included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame list of nominees for 2026. INXS family of fans and friends, we wouldn’t have been nominated without you... We are up against some incredible Artists, so now we need everyone to cast a ballot for us every day in the Fan Vote at https://vote.rockhall.com/. Spread the word and thank you for your love and support.’’
Andrew Farriss, who like his other band mates has continued his passion for music, releasing 'Mending Fences'; the first single from his forthcoming album, 'The Prospector', just days ago, Video here, said:
‘’INXS has always been about the songs… and the people behind them.’’
Speaking to Billboard, Andrew said he thought everybody in the band was thrilled and excited to be nominated.
"I never started writing songs and playing music to be in a hall of fame; that's not why I started doing it — but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate it," Farriss said.
With classic songs like Original Sin, New Sensation, Bitter Tears and Need You Tonight, INXS continues to be a mainstay on playlists the world over, including in their home town.
Now you kiddies know why grandma and grandpa can still run rhythmically up walls and leap gracefully from the ceiling…
'Nuff said – please vote for our boys, because they're also YOUR boys – aannnd - let’s dance!
See; vote.rockhall.com
Find out more about the band members in their own words at: www.inxs.com