It’s about the music
Former INXS lead singer becomes Elvis tribute artist
JD Fortune has a fantasy about creating 50s-ville, a “Back-to-the-Future”-type town stuck in the 1950s era, with all the drive-in movie theatres and burger joints and lack of social media that would entail.
Music would simply be about music, he says. Artists would earn their spots on the Top 40 charts, and not by having the most YouTube subscribers or Twitter followers.
Like Elvis did.
“When he sang, he didn’t need a band behind him, because it was all about his voice and the music, and it was beautiful,” Fortune says. “He earned the right to be on that stage.”
Fortune’s musical career started off in that organic way: he remembers, as a child in Nova Scotia, his mom playing Elvis records.
The first time he sang in public, it was Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel” in a talent show.
Fortune left Nova Scotia at 13 and moved to Toronto, joining a band with guys in their 30s and lying about his age to get gigs in bars.
“I cut my teeth playing every nasty bar in Ontario,” he says.
Fortune was living in his car with his pet pug when he heard an ad on the radio saying Australian rockers INXS were looking for a new lead singer, and they were going to find one through a CBS reality TV show, “Rock Star: INXS.”
Singers would audition and be eliminated in weekly rounds “American Idol” style, and the winner would join the band.
“I was in the car with my pug and I looked at him and said, ‘Dude, I’m going to win that,’” Fortune says. “He said, ‘Yeah, I hope so, because this car is freezing.’”
Fortune made his way down to the States, where he stood in line with thousands of other singers and auditioned for the show. After an 11-week process — which saw a total of 52,000 applicants, including Susie McNeil, who later launched a successful solo career, and Jordis Unga, who later appeared on “The Voice” — Fortune was named winner and replacement for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, who died in 1997.
“Oh fu--,” is what Fortune says, laughing, when asked what it felt like to replace Hutchence. “I felt like I couldn’t let these guys down.”
Fortune went to Australia and prepared to tour with INXS, learning 31 songs in just over two weeks, he says. He toured the world, making at stop at Mile One Centre in St. John’s in November 2006. Together, Fortune and INXS wrote “Pretty Vegas,” hitting the No. 7 spot on the Billboard Hot Adult chart, and recorded “Switch,” INXS’ 11th studio album, making No. 17 on the Billboard 200.
Fortune and the band continued working together until 2011 and eventually parted ways, and INXS announced their split in 2012.
“I was never fired from that band,” Fortune says, disputing what he says was false information published in an article a few years ago that he has spent “years and a lot of money” trying to get removed from the web. “Even though my career didn’t go the way I wanted it to — I thought I’d be in INXS forever, but they had other plans from the start — I talk to those guys every month. I’m not playing with them anymore, but I will any time they ask me to play with them. I’m still a huge INXS fan and a huge Michael Hutchence fan.”
He’s also still a huge Elvis Presley fan, and has turned his attention to Presley’s music, immersing himself in it “almost to the point of obsession,” the way he did with INXS. The idea to perform Presley’s songs came after a jam night, when Fortune and a group of friends played a few Elvis songs because they were tunes they all knew. They were impressed with how it sounded, and things went from there.
Fortune sees parallels between his life and Presley’s. They both drove a truck. Both spent time in the military. Both had an interest in martial arts... “and fried peanut butter sandwiches,” Fortune says, chuckling.