Matchbox 20 Tickets

INXS onstage Wednesday with The Original Sin Tour

From their first gig in 1977, INXS roared through Australia's rowdy pub scene and took their muscular mix of rock and funk and more to the world, playing Madison Square Garden and London's Wembley Stadium, the U.S. Festival and Live Aid. After the untimely death of vocalist-songwriter Michael Hutchence in 1997, the band regrouped and reunited, occasionally working with guest lead vocalists, including Terence Trent D'Arby and Jimmy Barnes.

In 2005 they published "INXS - Story To Story: The Official Autobiography." After winning the TV competition series Rock Star: INXS, Canadian vocalist J.D. Fortune recorded the CD Switch and toured with them. Fortune's on hand for the current tour, in support of the CD, "Original Sin," a re-working of their best-known songs. It sports a diverse group of artists, including Fortune, Tricky, Nikka Costa, Ben Harper, Mylene Farmer and Pat Monahan, who's been a surprise guest on the current tour.

From Toronto, keyboardist-guitarist and songwriter Andrew Farriss chatted amiably about the album and tour. According to Farriss, "The whole thing had a fairly organic beginning. We started off approaching certain people for certain songs. Train's Pat Monahan with "Beautiful Girl" - that was one he really wanted to have a go at. The same with Rob Thomas (of Matchbox 20) on "Original Sin," where he did a duet with DJ Yaleidys, a Cuban artist, who raps in Spanish. We didn't put restraints on language. We decided to be open-minded about that.

"These days the band has an easier time marketing our music that can go between rock and funk. That's been a really fortunate thing for us in this era, because of the DJ culture in the '90s and what's happened in the last 10 or 15 years. It's just commonplace for people to meld these forms of music into one. We've always tried to do that with our music. We don't stick to one formula very much. Probably drove our record companies nuts, but in the passage of time, it's been a good thing for INXS."

The band's earliest main musical influence was radio, Farriss recalls, "When we were young kids growing up in Australia, we didn't have segregated radio formats like you guys have in the U.S. It wasn't [evident] until we started traveling overseas, beginning to realize these separate radio formats. We all grew up [with an] eclectic range of different artists. You'd have anything from The Beatles to Ray Charles to popcorn classical music, then you'd have a silly song by Rolf Harris about a kangaroo. You'd have this incredibly diverse range of music. You'd even have "Hello, Dolly!" by Louis Armstrong. As kids we used to think 'Everybody hears this' - and they didn't. With the new album, what we wanted to do was to try and be really open-minded, not limited to just the English language or limited to even one style of music. There's a good combination of really super laid-back ambient dreamlike music and there's dance stuff and then it gets quite heavy and rocks out.

Matchbox Twenty Tickets - Buy Matchbox Twenty Tickets for 2011 and ...

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Billboard

Billboard

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