INXS bombshell
The punch that destroyed Michael’s life
On a summer night in 1992, rock star Michael Hutchence was on a bicycle weaving slowly down a Copenhagen back street with his Danish supermodel girlfriend Helena Christensen. They had just bought some pizza and were heading home.
A local taxi drew up behind him and, finding he was unable to pass, started an argument with the INXS singer. The row escalated quickly and the driver punched Michael, who fell to the ground, hitting his head on the curb. He was knocked unconscious, with blood coming from his mouth and ear. As the cabbie fled, Helena feared for her lover’s life. “I thought he was dead,” she admits. A new documentary,
Mystify, which is currently in cinemas, examines this previously unexplored episode in the charismatic star’s short life.
Michael had sustained significant brain damage when he fell, an impairment that would profoundly affect his personality.
“This insane taxi driver punched him,” Helena confirms, speaking on the record about the attack for the first time. “We got to the hospital and Michael woke up and was aggressive. They were trying to make him stay but he was physically pushing them away.”
The Aussie frontman went to convalesce in Helena’s apartment but, she recalls, he was “throwing up most of the time. I would bring him food and he would push it away – he almost got violent.”
The Victoria’s Secret beauty pleaded with him to return to hospital, but he was “aggressively against it”.
The head injury had irreparably changed Michael, who had always been a gentle, carefree character.
His former INXS bandmates also noted how his
behaviour altered. He became volatile, they say with typical Aussie candour.
As the group recorded their 1993 album FullMoon,
DirtyHearts, they looked on in amazement as Michael smashed songwriter Andrew Farriss’ treasured vintage acoustic guitar “for fun”.
It’s easy now to forget just how big INXS was at the time. The band headlined the Australian leg of Live Aid, played sold-out stadiums for a decade and their sixth album, Kick, sold more than 20 million copies and spawned d four f top t 10 singles i l in the US.
Their taut funk-rock bridged a gap between Duran Duran and U2, but it was Michael – like a feline Jim Morrison – who provided the band’s magnetic allure. He was sweet and mischievous, supernaturally relaxed, mildly pretentious on occasion, but instantly likeable.
He confessed, in confidence, that the punch he received in Copenhagen had ruined his sense of smell and taste. As
I’d bring him food and he would push it away – he almost got violent’
a card-carrying bonviveur, life without the ability to savour gourmet food and fine wine was hugely frustrating.
Michael was also a highly sensual being. “I can’t smell my woman,” he said. “Her hair, her beautiful skin, her scent.”
There was a rumour the incident had left him impotent. One in four people who suffer a similar head trauma can lose their sex drive. Not so Michael.
“I can assure you everything in that department is working fine,” he laughed. “Ask Helena.”
Much of the time, Michael appeared to be what he jokingly termed as “fit, trim and fabulous”.
One marked downturn in his behaviour was observed after the World Music Awards in Monaco in
1994, two years after the assault.
The rocker had always been a robust drinker and recreational drug user, but that evening, in a glitzy Monte Carlo disco, Michael was out of control. He tried to instigate an altercation with Prince – the reclusive superstar was attempting to enjoy a rare evening out in the wealthy principality. The squabble exposed many of Michael’s vulnerabilities.
The tousle-haired rocker had always complained that his art wasn’t taken seriously. Now he was confronted by the most revered artist in modern music.
“You little symbol, you!” Michael hissed across the dance floor at the “Purple Rain” hitmaker, who had recently changed his name to a baffling squiggle. “You leetle artiste!”
He stumbled up to the DJ booth, insisting they play a selection of Prince songs, to which the plastered Aussie danced appallingly in an uncharacteristically gauche display. “Put something on by that Michael Hutchence guy,” he yelled. “He’s better than this merde!”
Prince looked on pouting and, at one uncomfortable juncture, mouthing, “Who’s your friend?” to Helena. It all ended in tears, with the INXS star weepily proclaiming undying love for Helena as she poured him into a cab.
But she couldn’t cope with his increasingly erratic mood swings and reluctantly ended their relationship.
“Something drastic happened,” she explains. “I was deeply sad, confused and bewildered, but at the same time it couldn’t have continued that way.”
Kylie hook-up
Women didn’t usually leave Michael Hutchence. They adored him. Prior to dating Helena, he had embarked upon an unlikely love affair with Kylie Minogue, who was then seen as a featherweight pop star who embodied a smiley innocence.
It was widely believed that leather-trousered Michael was hell-bent on corrupting the former Neighbours actress, although he insisted that the reverse was often true.
“Listen, whose bag did they find the handcuffs in at the airport?” he would cackle, alluding to a customs discovery at Heathrow earlier that year. “Mine or hers?”
It was certainly a relationship that opened Kylie’s eyes. “Sex, love, food, drugs, music, travel, books, you name it, he wanted to experience it,” she explains in Mystify. “He had insatiable
He awakened my desire for other things. insatiable’ He was
curiosity. He awakened my desire for other things.”
She worshipped Michael but work schedules gradually drew the relationship to a close. Shortly after the affair ended, still full of sex-god swagger, Michael declared himself to be “a f****** great rock star”.
He fumed, “The others are all pretenders. They have choreographers and people to do their hair, make-up artists, managers who tell them what to wear. I’ve never done that. Ever.”
Later, he reflected, “Rock ’n’ roll is the perfect scenario for people who need a lot of attention, who were ignored as kids. It’s the most ridiculous situation. It used to be that as a rock star everyone was happy if you killed yourself.”
The following year, Michael would become embroiled in a tragic celebrity soap opera that would play out worldwide.
The trouble began when British TV presenter Paula Yates left her husband Bob Geldof for Michael in 1995.
Put simply, he was out of his depth with Paula. Having won Michael over, she flipped from doting mother and devoted wife to reckless rock chick, virtually overnight.
Michael had fallen for Paula’s looks, intelligence and powerful presence but, in reality, he didn’t know what he’d let himself in for. He was trying to accommodate a wildly unpredictable partner and win the acceptance of her three young children, while being relentlessly pursued by the paparazzi. It was all too much.
For a time, Michael sought solace in oblivion: opiates, tranquillisers, booze. And although she had been a lifelong teetotaller, and despite being mother to a one-year-old, Paula joined him on his hedonistic quest. The results were predictably messy. They were endlessly photographed tumbling pie-eyed and pathetic out of once-fashionable night spots.
Headline-hungry Paula bragged that Michael had “the
Taj Mahal of crotches” and claimed that they had all but rewritten the KamaSutra.
Inevitably, she fell pregnant. This, to her mind, cemented the relationship and proved the rock star’s love for her. But he was intensely unhappy, the disarming smirk and languid charm having long since departed. Michael became lost in a haze of hard drugs and despair.
At the 1996 BRIT Awards, he presented Oasis with an award for their “Wonderwall” video. Instead of giving an acceptance speech, Noel Gallagher took the opportunity to announce that “has-beens shouldn’t be presenting awards to gonna-bes”. Michael, who called Noel “a mate”, was crushed and never recovered.
Final curtain
More Class A drugs, dramas and depression followed before a chilling darkness descended. Eighteen months later, Michael Hutchence was dead.
Drunk, drugged and distraught in room 524 of the Ritz-Carlton in Double Bay, Sydney, he hanged himself from a door with his belt, aged 37. An autopsy showed that cocaine, alcohol and Prozac, along with other prescribed medication, were in his blood at the time of death.
Paula died of an accidental heroin overdose at her London home three years later.
Their daughter Tiger Lily is now 23 and has her father’s brooding brown eyes and innate elegance. She receives a “very special thank you” in the closing credits to
Mystify, which she has seen once and “loved” but won’t watch again.
Her father’s close friend Bono wrote U2’s heartwrenching song “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” about the turmoil Michael endured before his suicide. In Mystify, Bono recalls his fellow free-spirited frontman with deep affection.
The Irishman recounts emotionally, “I remember asking Michael what his definition of rock ’n’ roll was. He said, ‘Liberation’.”
Michael, who would have celebrated his 60th birthday this coming January, might still be relishing that freedom were it not for a dark turn in the road and a single, fateful blow.