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“It was the first one we did with (producer) Chris Thomas. And it spawned our first top 5 North American hit with ‘What You Need’”
INXS circa 1985. Photo credit: Robert Mort
With Listen Like Thieves, INXS stole American hearts. And it paved the way for an era of rare domination on both sides of the Atlantic.
INXS’s fifth studio album followed Shabooh Shoobah (1982) and The Swing (1984), fan favourites that would establish the Australian act as top-shelf talent. What came next was 1987’s Kick, an LP that, as its name suggests, broke through the barricades and confirmed INXS as a stadium act in the US, UK and elsewhere.
Today, May 9th, Petrol Records and Universal Music Group mark the 40th anniversary of Listen Like Thieves with a “deluxe” release.
“It was a very important album,” notes Kirk Pengilly, INXS’ founding sax player, guitarist and backing vocalist. “It was the first one we did with (producer) Chris Thomas. And it spawned our first top 5 North American hit with ‘What You Need.’”
From today, Thieves is available as a 3CD/LP set packaged with a new 2025 mix by Giles Martin and Paul Hicks on CD and vinyl, plus extensive, previously unreleased outtakes and demos, a rare 1986 BBC recording from London’s Royal Albert Hall 1986 and a new interview with the surviving band members by celebrated UK-based journalist Paul Sexton.
The “Extended Edition” 2CD contains the new mix; the CD-2 splash has a selection of B-sides, remixes and live recordings; the 1LP “40th Anniversary Edition” vinyl contains the new 2025 mix.
Those 40 years have passed like both a blink of the eye, and a fully-lived lifetime. Pengilly remembers the excitement and nerves of working in the studio with Thomas, and new lessons learned. Thomas was INXS’ “first really big Magumba producer,” he quips, “a lot of the stuff that he produced were records that we used to listen to growing up, like early Roxy Music. We felt really like, well, this is gonna be good. It’ll get us to the next level.”
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It did.
Released October 1985, the LP was promoted with four singles: “What You Need,” “This Time,” “Kiss the Dirt (Falling Down the Mountain),” and the title track, which was accompanied with a memorable cinematic music video, shot by longtime collaborator Richard Lowenstein.
The album peaked at No. 1 in Australia and No. 11 on the Billboard 200, logging more than a year on the chart. By 1997, the year of frontman Michael Hutchence’s untimely passing, the album was certified double platinum.
Thomas, in reality, was “just an English bloke. Work was confined to Monday to Friday, weekends were off. “It was like Bundy on when we go in there,” Pengilly tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “But we made use of the weekend time,” recording b-sides and more, some of which appear on the anniversary release.
“The most memorable thing,” he continues, “it was the first time we’d ever really been made to choose the songs along with him, and then rehearse them outside of the studio, and then demo them, in this little rehearsal studio that we’d been in.
“We were like, why are we demoing them when we’ll just go into the studio and do it? We realised later that his whole premise with to get us to perform the songs live in the studio. He’d seen us live a whole lot of times, and he couldn’t understand because it was so powerful on stage, but it didn’t really come across that way on our records. He wanted to try and capture that live essence, in the studio. We had to learn all our parts so that we could actually play the songs together as a band in the studio. It was a different process.”
In the mid-80s, INXS were road warriors. “We opened for Queen through Europe for about two or three months,” remarks Pengilly.“We toured for a long time on this record.”
Formed in Perth in 1977, INXS climbed the highest mountain of rock with six U.K. top 10 albums (including a No. 1 with Welcome To Wherever You Are from 1992) and five U.S. top 20 albums, a BRIT Award (in 1991 for best international group) and, in 2001, elevation into the ARIA Hall of Fame.
“I’m surprised by the kind of response it’s been getting,” Pengilly says of the Listen Like Thieves reissue. “It was obviously a really important album for us.”
INXS – Listen Like Thieves – 40th Anniversary (DLX 1LP + 3CD)
LP + CD1: Listen Like Thieves (Giles Martin 2025 Mix)
CD2: Demos & Outtakes
CD3: Live From Royal Albert Hall
In This Article: INXS, Kirk Pengilly
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