40 Years Of INXS's 'Listen Like Thieves': 'This Band Had A Work Ethic Like No Other'

Philip Mortlock designed the cover art for the iconic INXS album, which just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Mortlock is now the owner of Origin Music.

I was fortunate enough to be in the role as Creative Services Manager at what was then called WEA Records (Warner Music Australia) back in the 1980s.

WEA had an embarrassment of riches with the US labels Warner Brothers Records, Atlantic Records and Elektra Asylum Records releasing milestone records from superstar artists including Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt, Talking Heads, Madonna, Prince, Devo, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young – the list goes on.

Locally, we had enormous success with great Australian artists such as Cold Chisel, Spy V Spy, Boom Crash Opera, Jenny Morris, Mondo Rock, Mental As Anything, Icehouse – the list goes on.

After two albums with the indie label Deluxe, INXS came to WEA for the territories of Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Southeast Asia. The band signed directly with Atlantic for North America and PolyGram for the rest of the world.

I quickly became involved in assisting the band and their management put together all the content for the releases of their albums Shabooh Shoobah, The Swing, and then Listen Like Thieves.

In the case of The Swing, Chris Murphy handed me a great image of the band taken in the UK by legendary photographer Mike Putland. “Can you do something with this?” he asked.

The results for the album cover of The Swing shows that image mixed in with a whole bunch of ephemera scattered on a light box. A mix of images from band members, some objects picked up from a recent promo trip to Japan, oh, and some dried fish from a Japanese supermarket in Sydney.

Me and my friend and photographer Paul Clarke, shot the light box images in a makeshift studio at our house.

We pushed the limits with the cut-out frames on the inside sleeve – Atlantic and PolyGram balked at doing all that with their versions of the album at the time.

That said, we satisfied their request to have an image of the band on the cover in a quirky kind of way.

Chris and the band asked me to come up with ideas for the next album. In particular, Chris felt we should just have INXS stamped on the cover big and bold. Well, that’s kind of what we did, but enhanced with a glowing live image of Michael.

I had another idea to take them to a remote location in the Highlands of the Kosciusko National Park to take images of the band scattered across the landscape. Paul and I even did a hike across windswept mountains to check out locations.

A budget and logistics were done, but with the band on a gruelling tour schedule, it was just going to be too much.

I ended up going on the road with the band for a week through dates in Victoria, taking lots of live and on-the-road images used across the album campaign as well as the cover.

The plans to go remote happened later with the trip out to Woomera and Coober Pedy in South Australia to shoot the iconic video for Kiss The Dirt.

For each single released from the album, we used images from each of the great videos created for each song. Images from the very graphic What You Need film created by Richard Lowenstein and Lyn Maree Milburn.

Still from the UK video shoot for This Time directed by Godley and Crème (formerly with 10CC).

In the case of Kiss The Dirt, there was no mountain to fall down. We flew out to a remote Salt Lake near Woomera and then the moon-like plains near Coober Pedy—the vision of Film Production Company, Meaningful Eye Contact, and its director, Alex Proyas. In this case, we did a tri-fold single cover resembling a leather duffle bag with the images and ephemera from the trip tumbling out of it.

In marketing terms, creating a single cover with added components was a method to drive sales at retail and help establish decent chart activity, especially after the album was out.

The band always had a non-album track as a B-side to add value along with the cover. They took turns to come up with a B-side song or instrumental.

In the case of the title track being released as a single, they had composed and recorded specifically for the feature film Crocodile Dundee, which was the B-side. Different World – an image of the canyons of a New York Street, a discreet reference on the back cover of the single.

Through it all – it has to be said - this band had a work ethic like no other I had or have had the pleasure to work with. Their commitment in the studio and on the road. As solid as.

Now, with the 40th Anniversary release of Listen Like Thieves, a refresh of the audio and the visual gives fans old and new great insight into what a milestone this album was as it stands the test of time.

Album #5 from a band that didn’t stop growing with each giant step.

Retrospectively, what is also important to consider is what came next. LLT was the entrée to the extraordinarily high bar set with KICK.

Listen Like Thieves (40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) is out now. You can listen to the album here.

Photo credit: Philip Mortlock