Michael Hutchence Mystify film reveals how one punch changed INXS singer’s life forever

Hutchence was key to the Australian band’s huge success in the Nineties, notching up a string of hits and 60 million record sales. Strutting bare-chested in the videos for Need You Tonight and Suicide Blonde, he carried himself with an innate swagger. “He would make you feel like you were the only person in the room whether you were a male, female, kids or animals,” recalls INXS manager Martha Troup in a new documentary about the star’s life. But at one point, something changed. His behaviour became more aggressive, the drinking more out of control. Becoming involved with Paula Yates, the ex-wife of Bob Geldof, sparked a legal battle, tabloid headlines and a very public slanging match.

The couple were arrested over possession of drugs. Finally, on the morning of November 22, 1997, while on tour with his band, Hutchence was found dead at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Double Bay, Sydney. He was just 37 years old.

Now, 22 years on from his lonely death, later ruled suicide in Room 524, filmmaker Richard Lowenstein’s biopic, Mystify, has shone new light on the man whose legacy is mired in controversy.

Lowenstein’s film reveals new details of brain damage the star suffered in August 1992, the aftermath of which affected his personality.

The devastating injury happened as he and his then lover, the supermodel Helena Christensen, cycled home through her hometown of Copenhagen with pizza.

It was a carefree night that would have terrible consequences. A taxi driver drew up behind them and, unable to pass in a narrow street, started an argument. Angry words were exchanged.

The driver punched Hutchence, then 32, who fell backwards, hitting his head on the kerb as the cabbie fled.

Helena recalls: “This insane taxi driver punched him. He was unconscious and there was blood coming out of his mouth and ear. I thought he was dead.”

He wasn’t, but it soon transpired something terrible had occurred. In hospital, the singer woke up aggressive and confused.

“They were trying to make him stay but he was physically pushing them away, they thought he was drunk,” Helena recalls.

Hutchence insisted on leaving and the hospital relented. But he was a changed man.

“For a month he lay in bed in my apartment, throwing up most of the time,” Helena says. “He should have been in hospital but he was aggressively against it.”

She tried to feed him but most of it he pushed it away. “He got almost violent. This dark, very angry side of him came out,” she tells the documentary maker.

After a month, Michael finally sought medical help and a hospital scan revealed he had a fissure to his skull and vital nerves had been torn.

He would later tell a friend the blow had ruined his sense of smell and taste. Experts believed the impact of this would become worse over time. The singer barred Helena from telling anyone, even her parents, and Mystify is the first time she has spoken publicly about what happened.

The film, 10 years in the making, also shows the medical scans revealing the huge trauma Michael suffered to his brain.

It was a tragedy for a man who, before the assault, had moved with such effortless grace through life, entrancing women, men, everyone, and attracting a string of A-list girlfriends.

Singer Kylie Minogue, an ex-girlfriend, says he had an “insatiable curiosity for all the good things in life, and some of the bad things”.

Helena recalls his “alluring magnetic energy”, a person who was “joyful, sweet, deep, emotional, kind, profound and funny”.

Paula Yates, who would die of a drugs overdose in September 2000 aged 41, accepted a one-way ticket to “social Siberia” for choosing her louche rock star lover over national treasure Sir Bob Geldolf, according to her friend, novelist Kathy Letts.

Later, Hutchence admitted the injury, but played down its significance. In one interview, captured on film, he talked about being fine after two weeks of “speaking in tongues”, stressing it had even been useful as a means of valuing what was important in life.

Privately, with Helena, he would break down. “When I have a child, I will never be able to smell my baby,” he mourned.

Emotionally he became unpredictable, even among his INXS bandmates. One night, in a recording session for the band’s 1993 album Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, Hutchence smashed up songwriter Andrew Farriss’s treasured acoustic guitar “for fun”.

“It was like, wow what’s happened to Michael?” says one of his former bandmates. “It was quite clear he was suffering from some serious brain damage and Michael ordinarily was not an aggressive, confrontational, violent person.

“I just felt this incredible overwhelming sense of sadness, this is not the Michael I know.” INXS had met as teenagers in Sydney when Andrew saved Michael from a schoolyard beating after his arrival from Hong Kong, where the Hutchence family had been living. He was a dreamer with an overwhelming urge to belong.

Despite not playing an instrument, he soon made clear his desire to join Andrew and his brother Tim’s band, known in those early days as The Farriss Brothers.

Outwardly, Michael’s family were the picture of glamorous suburban charm.

His mother Patricia was a make-up artist and former model while his businessman father Kell was a David Niven lookalike who charmed women. Both of them loved to socialise and struggled with family life. According to Hutchence’s eldest half-sister Tina, by Patricia’s previous relationship, she would literally be left holding the baby while they would party.

“My mother was not really prepared for this little baby that would take up so much time and change her life so much and neither was Kell,” she recalls.

Their younger brother Rhett arrived two years later, but Michael was the favoured child and a sudden split when the brothers were 12 and 14 made this all too clear.

Kell and Patricia’s marriage had long been volatile but one day after coming home from school, she told Michael to pack a bag and join her on a flight to America. Rhett watched them go at the airport, screaming for his older brother not to leave.

Michael returned after 18 months but the psychological damage lasted for ever. Rhett was left with a feeling of being unloved by his mother whereas Michael would battle with a lifelong guilt.

Feelings of inadequacy grew despite frequent attempts to plug the pain with drugs and alcohol. As INXS grew bigger and toured harder, Michael sought to shake off his image as a sex god, longing for serious recognition.

It was an insecurity that, apparently, became worse following the head injury.

Helena eventually stepped away, unable to deal with his struggles now magnified by his brain injury.

After he got together with Paula Yates, his problems grew. The pair met in 1985 during an interview on her music programme The Tube. But she didn’t leave her husband Bob Geldolf for him until a decade later, after a famously flirty interview in which they entwined legs on The Big Breakfast TV show bed. The relationship appeared doomed from the start.

They proved to be a bad influence on one another and were drawn into a spiral of drug-addled drama.

On the night he took his own life, Michael was in Australia with INXS as part of the world tour promoting 1997 record Elegantly Wasted.

Paula had planned to visit with all her children, including her daughter with Hutchence, Tiger Lily, but had been prevented by legal action taken by Geldof.

He apparently turned to an old flame, Michele Bennett. She recalls him sounding “exhausted and totally depleted in the most extreme way”.

He begged her to come and see him but by the time she arrived 28 minutes later, his door was locked and he didn’t answer when she knocked. She left a note at the front desk.

In all likelihood, Michael was already dead. His body was discovered the next morning.

There were suggestions he accidentally strangled himself in a solitary sex game gone wrong. But a coroner later ruled the death as suicide.

Either way, it was a tragedy not just for Hutchence, his family and Paula Yates, but for millions of music fans. As the new documentary makes clear, Hutchence was a unique talent, a complex character whose brain injury changed his life unexpectedly overnight with devastating consequences.

Nationwide previews + Q&A in cinemas on October 16. General release October 18. Tickets on sale now – mystifyfilm.co.uk

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