‘Listen Like Thieves’: Revisiting INXS’s Breakthrough Album

After releasing four big-selling albums during the first half of the 1980s, INXS ranked among Australia’s biggest rock acts. The band wanted something bigger, though. And it finally arrived with the release of 1985’s confident and accomplished Listen Like Thieves.

With hindsight, the signs that a major breakthrough was imminent were all too visible. INXS’ third album Shabooh Shoobaah (1982) had gone gold in the U.S. while its successor The Swing (1984) featured a minor U.S. hit (the Nile Rodgers-produced “Original Sin”) and only narrowly missed the Top 50 of the Billboard 200.

Order the 40th anniversary edition of INXS’s Listen Like Thieves now.

Aware their next album could take them to the next level, INXS hired a pedigree producer, Chris Thomas, to oversee Listen Like Thieves. Renowned for his work with Roxy Music, Sex Pistols, and The Pretenders, Thomas was impressed by INXS’ live performances and liked most of the material readied for the new record. But he also knew it didn’t include the big hit song the band needed.

“Chris pulled Michael [Hutchence] and I aside and said we were making a really, really good record, but it wasn’t good enough,” keyboardist/co-songwriter Andrew Farriss told American Songwriter in 2021. “[He said] we needed a song that’s going to kick everyone in the ass, something special.”

To increase the pressure further, Thomas offered Farriss and Hutchence merely 48 hours to write this elusive hit. Fortunately, the band was sitting on a promising demo that seemed to fit the bill. “My brother Tim [Farriss, guitarist] said ‘Andrew’s got this groove thing, I really like it, why don’t you work on that?’” Farriss told American Songwriter. “Michael heard it and liked it too. We messed around with that – and ‘What You Need’ was born.” A wonderfully brash pop song riding a monster groove, “What You Need” soared into the U.S. Top 5, significantly raising the band’s profile in the process.

To the band’s credit, Listen Like Thieves also proved INXS had plenty more in reserve. “Kiss The Dirt (Falling Down The Mountain)” and the anthemic “This Time” also charted highly on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, while excellent deeper cuts such as “Good And Bad Times” and “Biting Bullets” found the band fusing sinewy funk with hard-edged rock seamlessly.

Fans and critics alike agreed that INXS had struck on something unique by melding these two supposedly incompatible genres on Listen Like Thieves. A suitably impressed Rolling Stone declared the album “rocks with passion and seals the deal with a backbeat that’ll blackmail your feet.” Driven on by the success of “What You Need,” Listen Like Thieves duly rose to No. 11 on the Billboard 200, yielding multi-platinum sales and establishing the international profile of the band for years to come.

“For us, Listen Like Thieves was a major shift in how we did everything,” Andrew Farriss told American Songwriter. “By the time we had come to the end of recording the album, we felt we had a record we could be really proud of and take out to the world. It was one of the defining moments of our career.”

Order the 40th anniversary edition of INXS’s Listen Like Thieves now.