Are you ready for a new old sensation?

I've just been looking back at all the albums released in 1987... It was a pretty major year, wasn't it? Sign "O" The Times, Appetite For Destruction, The Joshua Tree, Bad, Paid In Full and, sneaking in during the last week of the year, Sinitta's debut album.

But the one that meant most to me at the time was INXS's Kick: A strutting colossus of leather-trussed rock hits. I was just 12 years old, so Michael Hutchence screaming "it's a load of shit" on the anti-war opener Guns In The Sky made me feel incredibly daring and rebellious (it was a more innocent time).

Kick spawned five hit singles in the UK - Need You Tonight, New Sensation, Devil Inside, Mystify and Never Tear Us Apart. Credit is partly due to the vibrant, spacious mixes by Bob Clearmountain, who stripped out all the clutter that makes Def Leppard's Hysteria (also released in 1987) sound so dated these days. Kick has more pop and crackle than a bowl of electric rice krispies.

So apologies if I get a little excited about the four-disc, 25th anniversary re-release, which has just been announced. It comes with an 80 page art book featuring Hutchence's handrwitten lyrics (I'm looking forward to seeing the drafts of Mediate).

There is also a DVD, which promises unseen footage of the band recording and touring in 1987. Amazon's product page spills a few extra secrets about the content.

I don't know about you, but I can't wait for the thrilling "chapter five". Unfortunately, the set isn't out until 17 September. Until then, here's a teaser video the band have put together (apparently using the free Windows DVD Maker programme - times must be hard).

INXS - Kick 25th Anniversary

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In honour of Lady Gaga: Top Five Sax Solos

Last night, Lady Gaga released the cheese-a-licious Edge Of Glory, the latest teaser track from her third LP, Born This Way. With one hand on the irony engine, she steers a course through the choppy waters of 1980s Hi-NRG disco, arriving triumphantly at an extended, two-minute saxophone solo.

It's brilliant. It's bollocks. It's brillocks.

Lady Gaga - Edge Of Glory


Sadly, the saxophone is a much-maligned instrument. Once a hallmark of sophisticated urban cool, it's image was sullied by schmaltzy guffmeisters like Kenny G and Curtis Stigers.

Nonetheless, recorded music gives us a few truly great sax scenes (sorry) to savour. Here are five of them. After sampling them, you too will live in the hope that Lady Gaga has resurrected the instrument forever.

1) Rolling Stones - Brown Sugar
Bobby Keys is responsible for this blistering solo on record. I've no idea whether it's actually him playing with the Stones on this vinage Top Of The Pops clip, because the director decided to focus on Mick Jagger mincing around in a pink suit.

A pink suit.



2) INXS - Never Tear Us Apart
They had shaggy hair. They wore women's jeans. They were the kings of cheddar.

They were INXS, and Never Tear Us Apart was the big ballad from their career-defining LP, Kick. The sax solo comes from the lavishly-named Kirk Pengilly. Wikipedia calls it "cathartic".



3) Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
FACT: The E Street Band's Clarence Clemens has been playing a sax solo continuously since 1983. His cheeks are held together by Band Aids and string. He eats through a special tube in his abdomen, and his lips have formed an unbreakable fleshy seal around the reed of his instrument.

Born To Run features one of his earlier, more compact, 16-bar solos. The brevity does nothing to lessen it's joyous, freewheeling ebullience. If you're impressed by it, you should also search YouTube for live versions of Springsteen's Jungleland. Clemens' solo changes every night, but it's always a masterpiece.



4) Guru Josh - Infinity
Only joking.

4) James Brown - Super Bad
Totally insane. Robert McCollough's solo is not so much music as an uncontrolled release of energy. Brown famously intones "Blow me some trane, brother" as the track fades. I think McCullough has actually blown his lungs inside out.



5) George Michael - Careless Whisper
Steve Gregory - a former musician with Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones - had his work cut out with this one: It starts with the very top note on an alto sax, so you need a hell of a lot of puff to get it right. Gregory nailed it, and the iconic opening of George Michael's first solo single overtook Baker Street as the sax riff of choice.

It is improved one hundred-fold when it's played repeatedly in a mall by a shirtless man with a mullet.



The End.

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Apropos of nothing: A song by INXS

We were recently driving back to London from Oxford, when mrsdiscopop put INXS's 1987 breakthrough album Kick on the iPod. Her random selection has triggered a ridiculous nostalgiafest / spending spree, culminating in an eBay hunt for the out-of-print DVD of the band's 1991 Wembley Stadium gig, Summer XS (check out this video of Suicide Blonde from that show and tell me that Michael Hutchence wasn't the most charismatic frontman of his generation).

Delving into the band's exhaustive Wikipedia page, I learned they were initially called The Vegetables, and owed a sizeable debt to the UK punk scene - particularly bands like The Clash, The Stranglers and The Buzzcocks.

Don't believe me? Listen to this early single, aptly titled We Are The Vegetables. Compared to the slick rock-funk they became famous for, it's raw and exciting stuff.

INXS - We Are The Vegetables

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Beck & friends cover INXS

Musical polymath Beck has an ongoing project called "Record Club" where he and various guest artists cover entire albums, just for kicks. And they're getting double kicks (ADVANCE APOLOGY FOR LAME PUN) with their latest effort - INXS' seminal 1987 album, Kick.

Ahem.

The results are being released in weekly installments and, so far, they're three tracks in - with a scuzzy Guns In The Sky; a spooky take on New Sensation and a not-very-good-at-all Devil Inside.

Next up is Need You Tonight.

Here are the videos, which feature Beck alongside Liars, Annie Clark and Daniel Hart from St Vincent, Sergio Dias from legendary Brazilian band Os Mutantes and Brian Lebarton. I'll keep an eye out for any further gems.

Record Club: INXS "Guns In The Sky"


Record Club: INXS "New Sensation"


Record Club: INXS "Devil Inside"

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Awful noise of the day: Professor Green

Sometimes, readers, listening to pop music is not good for you. Sometimes, a pop song will reach into the bathtub of your soul, pull out the plug, and let everything glug away. This is one of those songs.

Professor Green ft Ed Drewett - Need You Tonight


Now, I don't normally complain about music on this blog, but Professor Green's witless, moronic "tune" has angered me in a way that is normally the preserve of a gorilla who's had his favourite banana smushed by a mandrill and gone feral. I am seething, frothing, livid and generally quite a bit upset.

The song was on to a loser from the very beginning, because it samples Need You Tonight - INXS's signature song from 1987. Actually, "sample" is too generous a term. Professor Green has just flipped the single over to the b-side (ask your dad) and talked over the instrumental.

Then, to make matters worse, he deletes the chorus and gets Darren from EastEnders to sing over the top. And what he sings is so basic and rudimentary, it feels insulting to call it a hook.

The lyrics go: "She's everything I want, but all that I don't need" (writers - this is an entirely new and original linguistic juxtaposition, which you could also exploit in your songs to great effect) but they might as well be: "I sing this line quite high, and this one goes down low" for all the effort that's gone into writing them.

Professor Green - or Stephen Manderson, for that is in fact his name - jumps in for the verses, rapping about being given the run-around by a girl he likes. To be fair, the lyrical conceit of the player being played is quite clever but Stephen undermines the whole thing with his final pay-off: "It's just a song. In real life, this would never happen to me. I am a pimp."

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Now, it just so happens putting a rap over the top of INXS's Need You Tonight is neither a new nor an original idea. A man called DJ McSleazy had a go a couple of years ago, combining the track with Neneh Cherry's I Got You Under My Skin. It is no exaggeration to say the result is ten bajillion-gazkillion-manillion times better.

INXS vs Neneh Cherry - Got Your Cherry Tonight

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Fat dancers anonymous

Bloody nora - Take That are reforming! Only, they're not really. ITV is doing a retrospective on the band this December, and all five of them will take part. By which we mean ITV are broadcasting an extended advert for a re-released Take That hits CD this Christmas.

Forget your ipods, your wifi and your psp - THIS is what the cutting-edge of technology should be about.

It's official: "Tyra Banks has natural breasts; there are no implants". The former supermodel was groped by a doctor on her talk show this week just to prove it. In a previous programme, she showed the audience pictures of herself before and after they were airbrushed. But wait... aren't talk shows supposed to be about the guests?

While Tyra gets her ladybuns fondled on live TV, fellow supermodel Helena Christensen works out some althogether darker fetishes in her new photography portfolio.

INXS have chosen a new lead singer in the grand finalé of their not-really-very-widely-seen reality show competition effort. The band insisted they wanted someone new and fresh - not a Michael Hutchence impersonator. But in the end the singer they chose bears an uncanny vocal resemblance to the original frontman. He's not a bad choice - the song he wrote with INXS in the course of the competition was actually pretty catchy - but you can't help thinking he'd be better off playing with kids his own age.

...And with that, we're off to Bordeaux for a week. We'll bring you back some cheap plonk and a beret.

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