Six months now of 30-year-old albums that, I think at least, are still worth listening to--and that I still do: U2's The Joshua Tree; Prince's Sign o' the Times; Suzanne Vega's Solitude Standing; Level 42's Running in the Family; The Grateful Dead's In The Dark; Def Leppard's Animal. And for September? Another great rocker that stands the test of time: INXS's Kick.The half-dozen people or so who still read this blog probably already know the story, but just in case, here it is one more time. In the fall of 1987 I was a freshman at BYU, and one of the many things I found I loved about college life (yes, even in Provo, UT), was the music. Specifically I loved college radio stations, and even more specifically the groups of people who listened to them, and who thus were able, through their enthusiasm, to inculcate into newbies like myself the ways of a wider world of music. I've detailed this at greater length elsewhere, but suffice to say, the only problem with my musical horizons opening was that, having grown up with a passion for pop music but without any real knowledge of where its various 1980s currents--whether New Wave or synthpop or post-punk--began or ended, lots of this new stuff I was hearing at dances and from roommates, even the stuff that was cracking Top 40 radio (as Kick definitely did!), kind of left me confused. Who played that? They're from where? I was drinking from a fire hose, and there was no internet in those days to help me straighten out the streams. So, to cut to the chase: I knew about this terrific Australian band called "In Excess," and I also knew about--because I'd seen their albums on sale at the BYU Bookstore--another Australian band, that was apparently doing really well, called "Inks," which the weirdly spelled "I-N-X-S." Cool, huh?
I'm pretty sure it wasn't until months after Kick was released, maybe not even until the summer of 1988, when someone finally took pity on me and explained my mistake.
Oh well. It was, and is, an awesome album, one that induces in me no embarrassing flashbacks whatsoever besides this one, and considering that most of my freshman year was just one long embarrassment, that's saying something. Enjoy this live performance; these guys were certainly something, back in the day.
