"We always thought it strange that nobody was up on that stage playing soul stuff. Maybe people were playing it in their garages, like us, but they always reverted to pure rock when they got on stage"
About this Quote
There is a quiet accusation hiding inside Hutchence's shrug: the stage turns people into cowards. He’s talking about a specific gap he and INXS felt in the live circuit - not a lack of talent, but a lack of nerve. “Soul stuff” here isn’t just a genre tag; it’s a whole set of instincts: looseness, sensuality, rhythmic patience, emotional risk. The irony is that he assumes it was already happening in private. In the garage, you can chase groove, copy your heroes, fail loudly, be unhip. Under lights, with an audience and a scene to satisfy, musicians “reverted” - a damning word that frames rock not as an advance but as a retreat to safety, volume, and poses everyone already understands.
The line also captures a cultural moment: late-70s/early-80s rock still policing its borders after punk’s purge and amid disco’s backlash. “Pure rock” reads like a badge people wore to avoid being seen as soft, Black-adjacent, or danceable - all the things soul implies in a white rock economy that often wanted the thrill of Black music without the vulnerability of admitting it. Hutchence is staking a claim for performance as confession rather than armor. He’s describing why INXS mattered: they treated groove as the point, not the guilty pleasure, and they made the “garage” self - the messy, earnest, bodily self - presentable onstage.
The line also captures a cultural moment: late-70s/early-80s rock still policing its borders after punk’s purge and amid disco’s backlash. “Pure rock” reads like a badge people wore to avoid being seen as soft, Black-adjacent, or danceable - all the things soul implies in a white rock economy that often wanted the thrill of Black music without the vulnerability of admitting it. Hutchence is staking a claim for performance as confession rather than armor. He’s describing why INXS mattered: they treated groove as the point, not the guilty pleasure, and they made the “garage” self - the messy, earnest, bodily self - presentable onstage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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