Something Really Spectacular

Six months later I was still with Absent Friends (luckily), supporting INXS on a 7-week, 5 star, toe curling tour of Europe. Holland, Germany, Sweden, France, Denmark, Spain and Italy, (deep breath) Belgium, Scotland, Ireland. It was really something..     This clip is INXS live at Wembley Stadium in 1991, a year after the INXS/Absent Friends tour. In 1990 the world still loved INXS. They were HUGE. Michael Hutchence was The Man. He was also Kylie Minougue's dangerous liaison. They made each other more famous than ever. Though bittest of the bit players, I felt famous just being around them. In London we played Wembley Arena… five times! It was a real eye-opener. I remember thinking, 'At last, something really spectacular has finally happened to me. I'll never take this for granted!' Never the less by the third Wembley I had. I found myself wondering about the night's desserts and which one I would choose. There was always a choice of three whipped up by chef using fresh local produce. In Zurich everything was covered in shaved chocolate. There were in fact three chefs on the tour and countless kitchen hands. Extra help was recruited in each city. (In Hamburg one of the local recruits was a woman called Eva who later moved to Sydney and quite by chance married my wife's brother, the sculptor John Ladyman.) Not with standing all that, the truth is that a "there by the skin of your teeth" kind of guy like me really needed to stay with the program. When you had the likes of Ronnie Francois bearing down on you with some insanely fat funky economical bass and Wendy Matthews singing anything and making it believable and with thousands of rather cynical Londoners looking on, there was a certain expectation that you would deliver. You didn't really have a whole lot of time to be dreaming about beer and skittles or wondering about whether or not you were taking it all for granted.