INXS – Suicide Blonde

A wig joke, then the first single from X

INXS released Suicide Blonde on 22 August 1990 in the United States and on 3 September in Australia. Andrew Farriss and Michael Hutchence wrote it. Chris Thomas produced it, his third INXS album in a row after Listen Like Thieves and Kick. The song opens X, out on 25 September 1990 on WEA in Australia, Mercury in Europe and Atlantic in North America. Sessions ran through 1989 and 1990 at Rhinoceros 2 in Sydney and at AIR in London, with David Nicholas engineering. The album title is the Roman numeral for 10, counting ten years since the 1980 debut.

The title came from Kylie Minogue, Hutchence’s girlfriend. For the 1989 film The Delinquents she wore a blonde wig, and her hairdresser called the colour suicide blonde, an old joke meaning dyed by your own hand. She later confirmed that the phrase came from that conversation about the character Lola Lovell. Farriss was not worried about Kylie. He was worried about the word suicide in a song title. Hutchence told him it was not a song about suicide. The band had spent 1988 and much of 1989 on the road behind Kick, and Hutchence had stepped out for the side project Max Q. X was the record that brought the six of them back: Hutchence, the three Farriss brothers, Garry Gary Beers and Kirk Pengilly.

The harmonica is Charlie Musselwhite, a blues player who had been touring Australia. On this track the band did not record him live in the room. They sampled his playing, and Andrew Farriss ran those pieces from a keyboard. Musselwhite did play ordinary harmonica on two other X songs, Who Pays the Price and On My Way. Richard Lowenstein directed the video. The single is the one that opens the campaign, before Disappear, Bitter Tears and By My Side.