WELCOME TO WHEREVER YOU ARE IS UNDOUBTEDLY THE SEXTET’S MOST EXPERIMENTAL AFFAIR

A60-piece orchestra, some Middle Eastern instrumentation, layers of distortion and backing vocals from Pengilly’s future wife Deni Hines. Even with the return of Shabooh Shoobah producer Mark Opitz, INXS’s eighth studio effort could never be accused of simply retreading over old ground.

Indeed, Welcome To Wherever You Are is undoubtedly the sextet’s most experimental affair, veering from the baggy-adjacent pop of Taste It to the Velvet Underground-inspired melancholy of Beautiful Girl with a maturity befitting of a band now all well into their mid-thirties.

Exemplifying the fact the Aussies were no longer the new kids in town, Welcome... was essentially a two-man job, with most members forced to take a backseat due to very grown-up issues: brothers Jon and Tim were busy dealing with an impending wedding and bone condition exostosis, respectively, Pengilly had just split up with his girlfriend of 10 years, while Beers was gearing up to become a father once again.

Perhaps this lack of interference emboldened

Michael Hutchence and the only Farriss sibling not in the midst of a life-changing development to cast the musical net a little wider. Recruiting the Australian Concert Orchestra for two tracks was certainly an inspired move, their symphonic arrangements further enhancing the anthemic nature of second single Baby Don’t Cry and giving the brooding, beatless closer Men And Women a touch of John Barry classiness.

But even when the band aren’t pushing their boundaries, as on the Iggy Pop-esque garage rock of Heaven Sent and the stadiumfriendly tech satire Communication (“Spinning metal blue satellite/ Your dish responds/ Communication disinformation/ So entertaining”), they sound highly re-energised. Welcome To Wherever You Are might be where America checked out – it charted no higher than No.16 on the Billboard 200. But fans across the other side of the pond rewarded the group’s new-found dynamism with their sole UK

No.1 album: even the typically sniffy music press got on board, with Q magazine declaring it as “a far more engaging and heartfelt collection than anything the group has put out in recent memory.” More than 30 years on, it’s stood the test of time, too.