‘MICHAEL WAS THE FAVOURITE’
The late rock legend’s brother talks about living in his shadow
Rhett Hutchence has opened up about the intense sibling rivalry that plagued his relationship with his late brother Michael, revealing that their late mother always favoured the INXS rocker.
Michael died by suicide in 1997 at the age of 37, but Rhett, 59, admits he’s still battling lifelong “abandonment and rejection issues” over their mother Patricia Glassop playing favourites.
“When you’ve got a child who’s a bit more of a rebel and a bit more, you know, causing more problems and things like that, I guess you have one because they’re liked a bit more and will be easier to handle,” he told current affairs show Insight.
LEFT BEHIND
Rhett, who was two years younger than Michael, also recalled the hurtful moment he returned home from school to be met by his mother holding two plane tickets – one for her and one for Michael.
They moved to the US for 18 months for Patricia to pursue a career as a makeup artist, leaving Rhett, who was just 12 at the time, behind in Australia with nannies.
“She tried to compensate with me by, you know, every month I’d get a big bag of candy and chewing gum and a couple of T-shirts and stuff like that,” Rhett says of Patricia, who died in 2010. “But I think in some ways that damage was already done. I mean, I took it fairly hard, I took another path. My life took another path due to that. I think due to abandonment and rejection.”
Rhett claims one of the caretakers introduced him to marijuana, and by 16 he was a heavy drug user and later battled a severe heroin addiction. In 1992, he headed to rehab where he “dealt with those matters of abandonment and rejection for the first time”.
“So up until then it was causing me grief or it was a reason I got to where I got, and then after that, being able to talk to them and having some clarity in my life, being able to speak with both parents about the issues, coming to terms with that, I slowly grew out of things,” say Rhett.
“I was searching for clarity for a long time and I finally got it and quite happy with it now.”
But he admits he felt further betrayed after watching the 2019 documentary Mystify: Michael Hutchence that his
brother and mother’s US move wasn’t actually a surprise trip, but one that had been in the works for months – and that Michael knew all about it.
“I only found out through watching the film that Michael had known about [the trip to America] for a few months before going, and it was a secret between him and mum that I never knew about,” he says.
“I’m glad I wasn’t aware of that while Michael was alive.”
‘CHOSEN ONE’
‘That damage was already done... I took another path’
The siblings’ older sister, Tina Hutchence, has backed her brother’s story.
She said Michael was always “the chosen one” while Rhett was the black sheep or the “angry kid”.