True Romance

Me and Michael Hutchence. A happy day talking in 1994, both of us feeling older and wiser at the ripe old age of 34! I was Editor of Australian Style at the time, which was really going off as a publication. He was a major rock star searching around for his next moves. I don’t think either of us knew how good we were really doing. Maybe we never do when we are inside our own experience? Three years later he was gone.

He was very friendly and generous with his time, easy to talk to. It was actually three different phone conversations sown together. We kept getting interrupted (once by a hotel fire alarm drill!), and he called back each time because he felt bad about it. The last of the three calls was him getting back to me a day later to apologise.

A genuinely cool guy in the true sense of the term ‘cool’, which can mean sweet and true as much as anything else…. probably nothing that deep here, we were just having fun shooting the breeze. He gave off the feeling I somehow knew him. Which, I guess, connected to the inner city community we were a part of, and a whole musical wave we all rode in on, each in our own way… I wish I had done a better interview actually. He was wanting to give me more than I think I could even begin to a understand at the time..

Interview with Michael Hutchence by Mark Mordue

Photography by Hugh Stewart

First published in Australia Style, 1994