I play in an INXS Tribute Band

I play lead guitar in the North American INXS Tribute band “New Sensation”. Even though INXS was a very radio-friendly band from the 80’s and 90’s, it’s one of the trickiest bands to cover because no other band that I’ve come across has the quirky musical structure that INXS had. It was unique to them to make that big INXS sound.

Andrew Farriss was one of the main songwriters in the band (the main songwriter) and after we learned all the songs I came across a video of his where he explained that instead of just placing parts of song in sets of fours (as so often the case in pop music), he would deliberately place one section of a song to repeat five times, or maybe even once. This little shift sounds simple enough but it messes you up at first until you get used to it.

A perfect example of this is in the song Listen Like Thieves where the band has to play a run 5 times in a row in the middle of the song. The first time we did this song live I think we messed it up every time. The only thing you can do is memorize where it is. Now it feels natural in 5 but INXS music is littered with little quirks like this which makes it tricky to replicate well.

Playing in a tribute band is different however than playing in a cover band. Cover bands play all kinds of songs from all kinds of artists. You can see them at any bar in the corner just doing…