Off Campus and Michael Hutchence
Prime Video's delightful college hockey romance is providing an unexpected path to 80s & 90s rock icons INXS
Greetings, Darlings of Dames Nation!
A few weeks ago, my sister Charlotte hit up the group chat with some questions about Michael Hutchence, thanks to Off Campus. TikTok had noticed that the male lead in Prime Video’s popular new hockey romance series, Belmont Cameli, bears a not-insignificant resemblance to the late INXS lead singer. They were not wrong! Curly hair, pouty mouths, dimpled chins, easy yet unthreatening swagger out the wazoo: check, check, check, check plus.
Charlotte wanted some context and listening recommendations. Friends, the speed with which my fingers hit the keyboard can scarcely be measured by current science. INXS were unstoppable from about 1987-1995 or so, flooding my young teenaged brain with a brawny, hooky, soul-inflected rock vibe that I still love to this day. I think they may be one of those 80s-90s bands that isn’t on the radar for Gens Z and Alpha, or at least, has not been on their radar until now.
I’m hopeful that we’re on the cusp of a Hutchence-aissance, thanks to the Off Campus boost, Hutchence’s presence in the new Kylie Minogue docuseries on Netflix, and another boost that should be incoming from The Vampire Lestat, plus the many classic bangers in the band’s back catalogue. Here at the Bossy Aerie, I feel I must do my bit to help fan that spark into an eternal flame for a new generation.1
First up, a starter pack of some of INXS’s singles
Naturally, if you have favorites, please drop them in the comments!
“New Sensation”: Ok, but why hasn’t this guitar riff been sampled nearly to death? This song captures so much of what made INXS so much fun to listen to. It’s a three-minute party, easy to sing along with and dance to, and if you’re writing new episodes of Off Campus, a solid candidate for a Season Two karaoke scene.
“Need You Tonight”: in the lineage of songs by men who are all hot and bothered and in need of some company, who simply had to write a song about it right alongside Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” and Jason DeRulo’s “Want to Want Me”. That whispered come-on in the first 3 seconds? The chorus-concluding little gulps? The call-and-response bits? If he were still alive and she were still touring, I’d bet good money that Hutchence and Britney Spears would have torn a duet of this song directly to shreds. (As if that weren’t enough, anyone in need of another sample-ready guitar line should point their ears toward “Need You Tonight”. That lick verges on doing too much, in the best way.)
“Never Tear Us Apart”: A power ballad in the vein of “Purple Rain” and “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “Hysteria” and “Eternal Flame” and even a bit of “‘Heroes’”. The vulnerable pleading and unabashed bombast, leading into a wailing, peak-80s sax solo! “We could live for a thousand years / But if I hurt you, I’d make wine from your tears”! Come on! This is the soundtrack of approximately 4.3 million prom slow dances.
“Suicide Blonde”: Inspired by a blonde wig Kylie Minogue wore on the red carpet for the premiere of her film The Delinquents, this is a stomping dancefloor jam, complete with a blistering harmonica sample (which became legally required later in the 90s).
“Beautiful Girl”: This song is so sweet and plainspoken, and is about as close to wholesome as INXS ever got (complete with a very mid-90s video about beauty standards). Did Stephen Jones, aka Babybird, hear the melody and decide to twist its catchiness into a seedy little earworm (complimentary) with “You’re Gorgeous”? Maybe!
If you’re into Off Campus, and you’re into these here pixel pages, you’re probably also into Culture Study, where our very own Dame Margaret is on this month’s bonus episode talking with Anne and Melody about the show in-depth. They get into how vaguely 2000s-2010s it is; how deeply hot the hockey boys’ conversations about consent are; the lusciously frank T&A-ness of it all; the needle drops and impressive provenance of the original song and more.
Something the Culture Study-ers dig into in their conversation is how Off Campus goes one better than the formal coziness of Hallmark movies by creating characters and relationships that are substantive and genuinely warm and then combining that feel-good feeling with the melodrama of mid-tier UPN/WB/CW shows, and whipping that up in a blender with the music licensing budget and the freedom to cuss and depict sex of a streamer. The end result is something well made and enormously appealing — I happily burned my way through the first five episodes in a single morning — without aspiring to the prestige-iness that The Summer I Turned Pretty couldn’t fully deliver on.
I watched all three seasons of TSITP (or as I think of it, Taylor Swift’s “august”, in TV form) religiously, but however high its production values and fancy its aesthetic, it was never going to divorce itself from its fundamental soapiness. It makes perfect sense that fans might find a serendipitous connection between Off Campus and INXS, who were very good and very popular, and who — to my knowledge — never entertained pretensions of being mentioned in the same breath as, say, Radiohead.
As much as I love INXS, the music I’m drawn to most that comes from Australia and New Zealand leans more towards alternative and indie rock. The big touchstones from my teens and early 20s were bands like Midnight Oil, Split Enz & Crowded House, and The Go-Betweens, and as part of my ongoing attempts to find newer (or just new-to-me) artists, Instagram music recommender James David Elliott (aka Hey You Listen to This ) has pointed me towards genres like Aussie Jangle and Dole Wave. Elliott highlights five essential artists spanning those genres in this video: Dick Diver, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Royal Headache, The Slingers, and Courtney Barnett.
There’s some variation across these five artists—Royal Headache leans more garage rock, Courtney Barnett’s got the flat affect and emotionally devastating lyricism of Lou Reed—but I can feel my brain light up thanks to sunburned, woozy melodies that link them all. I’m especially loving The Slingers and their 2023 album Sentimentalism right now; it’ll fit right into my summer listening groove.
Other places you can find me lately on Ye Olde Internet, wheeeee:
Last week, I was the Valued Guest on Extra Hot Great, talking about For All Mankind’s spinoff, Star City, which is very, very good, and improves over the course of its season (I’ve seen 5 of its 8 episodes). Relatedly, it’s always a good time to remind everyone of the existence of this absolute banger about Yuri Gagarin.
My beloved Telly Visions has, thanks to a modest-but-healthy paid subscriber base, relaunched as an independent site, yay! The latest feature they’ve brought back is their eponymous podcast, this time in the form of a limited Downton Abbey rewatch series. Lacy Baugher Milas and I are at the helm of this ship, and the first two episodes, covering all of Season 1, are available for your listening pleasure. The first episode is free, with subsequent episodes available through the site’s podcast subscription tier ($48/year or $4.88/month)
Over at Vulture, I returned to recap For All Mankind, a series which frequently drives me around the bend, and about which I always find things to love. Next season will be its last and I’m hopeful for more space exploration drama and less Mars governance drama.
The good folks at More Than the Score, a BBC World Service sports podcast, invited me over for a fun chat about reality TV & sports! ’Twas a pleasure to talk about Welcome to Wrexham and F1: Drive to Survive, of course; I only wish I’d had the presence of mind to mention my being-tested-in-real-time hypothesis that using sports reality series as on-ramps to enduring fandom can only become more important as the landscape for watching games grows increasingly fragmented.
I didn’t get into this aspect of things in my 2017 piece about U2, but the context is interesting & relevant. They were good friends with Hutchence, and his death hit them hard, so much so that their song “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” about that loss. At the time of Hutchence’s death, his daughter with Paula Yates, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence, was just over a year old. When Yates died in 2000, HHTLH was four years old. In an act of supreme menschiness, Yates’s ex-husband, Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof, adopted that little girl so she could grow up with her three half-sisters from her mother’s relationship with Geldof, Fifi Trixiebelle, Peaches Honeyblossom, and Little Pixie. (The detail about the is more whimsical than anything else, but how am I to refrain from mentioning four of the most fanciful baby names I can recall?)
Big plug for “Listen Like Thieves”!
I see what you mean about Courtney Barnett sounding like Lou Reed, but a lot of her work reminds me of The Fall more. She has a similar lyrical density, and "Pedestrian at Best" would sound great on a playlist after The Fall's "Container Drivers."
Also! I know the focus was more on INXS's imperial era, but holy cats is "Don't Change" a great song. I used to play it in my busking set and even if no one knew it, I had a lot of fun playing it.