In the final installment of a two-part Icons interview, producer Mark Opitz discusses reinventing INXS, breaking The Divinyls and turning down Guns N’ Roses with DOUG WALLEN. Part one here.

INXS’ Shabooh Shoobah (1982)

INXS came back to me. They’d done two albums with Deluxe that had done hardly anything. Chris sent me these demos: ‘Johnson’s Aeroplane’, ‘Black and White’ and ‘The One Thing’. I played them on my reel-to-reel at home and rearranged ‘The One Thing’. I took out all these quirky bits where it’d just go off on tangents. We built the momentum of the song instead, so it just keeps peaking and peaking and peaking. They loved that idea. We did it and killed it. Then I was offered to do Shabooh Shoobah with them.

‘The One Thing’ was their first U.S. hit, but that album also has ‘Don’t Change’.
Which is very interesting. I like to get to know a band as much as possible, so I’d go to gigs all over NSW. I was at Wollongong Workers Club and they played ‘The One Thing’. I thought, “How fucking good is this song?” It’s unbelievable. But when we went in the studio, we could never quite capture the version I heard. Every other day I’d get them to do it again. In the end we got it.

As I was mixing it, towards the end of the song I heard this harmonic distortion come out. When you combined the keyboard and all the guitars and bass and drums together, another melody just popped its head up that wasn’t in the song. I grabbed [multi-instrumentalist] Kirk [Pengilly] to do some high backing vocals – “Don’t change … for me” – and whack that in.

Also during that song is Michael [Hutchence] being a very nervous singer. I’d have him doing bar chords, and I picked a song called ‘Jan’s Song’. I said, “Just warm up and get into the mood. All we’re going to do is five takes.” He did the five takes and I sent him home. That night I edited the best of the takes into one main vocal. Everyone does it these days. I played it to him the next morning as if it was one vocal take, and his confidence went through the roof. Not through the roof, but he felt, “I can do this.”

So ‘Jan’s Song’ was a very pivotal song, in terms of Michael’s singing career and his ability to believe in himself. Similarly, when we were doing ‘Don’t Change’, I dug out a Blondie album [Eat to the Beat] and played him ‘Union City Blue’. [Debbie Harry] doesn’t follow the beat, she sings across it. I gave him that brief to ‘Don’t Change’. He went off and I used the same method as ‘Jan’s Song’. That got him in the spirit.

On the day I finished Shabooh Shoobah, I heard Midnight Oil’s 10 to 1 album, which Nick Launay had produced. I thought, “Well, I know who the next producer of INXS is going to be.” And it was. But to the band’s credit, as soon as they finished The Swing [with Launay], they came back from England and grabbed me for three days’ studio time. They wanted me to listen to the album and dissect it. Which I did. And I said, “It’s great.”

Divinyls’ Monkey Grip EP (1982) and Desperate (1982)

When I was head of A&R at Warner Brothers, I knew Chrissy Amphlett because she sang in a friend of mine’s sort of jazz-rock band [Batonrouge]. In fact, I used to live next door to her. One day her publisher came in and played me a demo. It’s a pretty song, but the way it ended – the energy it had – was killer. The song was a really different version of ‘Boys in Town’ by Divinyls. So I brought the whole band in. I said I’d like to sign them and develop them.

I turned to the drummer and said, “What really sold me was the drum feel, how you pushed it.” He said, “Oh, I’m not that drummer. I’m the new drummer.” I grabbed [everyone else] and said, “Listen, I’m going to sign you guys, but I don’t want that drummer. The reason I really picked up on it was the energy and the feel of the rhythm section. I want you to get that drummer back.” Consequently, they sacked that drummer and got Richard Harvey back in the band.

I took the same method I did with The Angels, which was to put them in the studio as much as I could and keep recording songs until we had something that was more or less a sound. I took me nearly a year to get ‘Boys in Town’ right. I remember lying in bed one night … that’s when the best ideas come. Either that or when you’re on the toilet. Or having a shower. The arrangement came to me just as I was falling asleep, so I wrote it down. Which is the arrangement that ended up on the record.

After that we were well on the path. We hadn’t released ‘Boys in Town’, but I knew I had it. We needed a few more songs. Then the director of this [Helen Garner adaptation] Monkey Grip wanted me to produce the soundtrack. And they needed a band with a female singer [to appear in] the film. It was like a gift from God. The bassist was the only one they didn’t want in it, because the actor Don Miller-Robinson [playing the bassist] is a crucial part of the movie.

So I met with Pavilion Films: “You can use the band, you can use ‘Boys in Town’ as a song and pay everyone their royalties. In [exchange], you have to shoot the video when you’re doing the band scene.” Which they promptly did. So bang, all of the sudden I had a video and a vehicle for the Divinyls. And away we went.

That was around the time I left Warner Brothers. The Divinyls said, “Let’s go to New York to The Power Station to record the first album.” Which we did. I did that very successful album [Desperate], and the second album [What a Life!] we started work on. I did about four tracks before the band decided they wanted an American producer. Which happened a lot in those days: everything the Americans did was better.

It still feels that way.
Well … to a degree. I don’t agree. I don’t think the standard here is great … that’s why I do most of my work overseas anyway. Funnily enough, here in Australia I don’t get much work at all, but in America I get to work with people like Bob Dylan. Here you can’t get arrested, because I think Australians have, as Barry Humphries once famously said, “The uncanny ability to snatch failure from the jaws of success.” But that’s not putting shit on anyone.

Australian Crawl: Semantics EP (1983)

They signed to Geffen in America, and Geffen listened to all their old stuff and said, “It’s crap. Can you re-record it all?” I said, “I’ll produce the American version, as long as I’m allowed to do some new songs as well.” We recorded all the stuff but they didn’t have any new songs. Then James Reyne came to me [with] ‘Reckless’. I listened to that and said, “This song’s a fucking hit.” All I did was use my eights trick by getting [double bassist] Rosie Westbrook to play an eight feel in a cello style. Bingo, that was their first number one. The other song I did was ‘White Limbo’, which was in fact an old song of theirs called ‘Red Guitar’. We just fucked with it and rearranged it.

Hoodoo Gurus’ Blow Your Cool! (1985)

An unfortunate situation. They were just making it big on the college scene. They were signed to an Australian company called Big Time, a really shonky label which on-sold all their copyright to Elektra in America. Elektra rang me up: “These guys are great on the college circuit, but we want them to break into the stadium circuit. We want you to take them [there].” So from day one of rehearsals, the Gurus did not like me at all. Because I’d been foisted on them by their parent company, and there was not much they could do about it.

It seems like they would know your CV.
Even so, it’s more to do with pride and not being able to choose who they wanted. It was a tough record to make. Very tough. I was recording at Albert Studio – it had moved over to Elizabeth Bay. I remember the drummer [Mark Kingsmill] saying, “I don’t want to play with anyone. Just let me do the drum tracks by myself. I don’t want a click track: I know the songs.” For two days he sat there and just played drums. So I had 12 drum tracks and no music on them. I added piece by piece on top. The challenge, of course, was to make it sound like a band recording all at the same time.

Halfway through the album, I turned to my engineer and said, “What are we gonna do? This record’s gonna be shite. Have you got a cab license? ‘Cause we won’t get hired anymore.” But thank goodness the manager, Michael McMartin, would be over our shoulders going, “Sounds fucking great. Sounds fucking great.” He’s the person who really inspired me through that record. And consequently, Blow Your Cool! went really well. ‘What’s My Scene?’ was a massive hit.

INXS and Jimmy Barnes: ‘Good Times’ (1986)

I did ‘Good Times’ during that Hoodoos album. George Young burst into the room one night – slightly drunk I think – as I was doing guitar overdubs with Dave Faulkner and said, “Love the version of ‘Good Times.’” Because it’s a Vanda & Young Easybeats song. When I was working as their apprentice, I’d bring them cover versions of Vanda & Young songs by Bowie and Rod Stewart and all these other people. And they hated them all. When [The Easybeats] were recording ‘Good Times’, they had Steve Marriot [of The Small Faces] do the high vocals at the back. So I got, obviously, Jimmy to do that.

Models’ Out of Sight, Out of Mind (1985) and Models’ Media (1986)

You did some songs for Out of Sight, Out of Mind, including ‘Barbados’.
Well, they’d done a version with Reggie Lucas that didn’t work. Chris Murphy was managing them and asked me to get involved. I listened to the whole track and decided the only thing I could keep is the drum track and backing vocals. James Freud’s voice doesn’t have a high register, so you need someone with a high register to back up the chorus. And what better than girls? [Kate Ceberano and Zan Abeyratne of I’m Talking.] Because no one in the band could get up to the third or fifth harmony just above the main note. I thought that was pretty cool, so I kept that.

I stripped everything else out. To make up for it, I put a huge delay on James’s voice to fill the gaps. If you listen to the verses, there’s an answering delay. He’s answering himself all the time. We timed that to be exactly one beat or something. Then I grabbed [saxophonist] James Valentine and said, “I want you to do the solo. Stick to the theme for the first eight bars, and then for the second just break out into the blue sky. Pretend you’re a plane taking off through the clouds into blue sky.” Which he did really well. I was very proud of that.

Similarly, when we did ‘Out of Mind, Out of Sight’, I’d heard something with a great brass section. I’d always wanted to have a brass section in a song. I got James Valentine to just scat through the song: “Where there’s no vocal, do a scat line. Preferably off a snare beat. Get in there and just jam, but not over the vocals.” I got him to do that two or three times and then I edited together those scats until I found which ones fitted. Then I got him to do a third harmony on the saxophone on top. Do what he’d just improvised, but tight. I got Roger Mason, the keyboard player, to use his Juno 6 and Voyetra with a brass sound, playing exactly the same so it sounds like you’ve got this amazing brass section going off.

I knew the song was a hit when I first heard the demo: it was just how to go about pulling it together. We got the girls in again to do the backing vocals. It worked like a treat. We didn’t have a lot of songs for that album. There was a lot of filler on that, but again it was the order you put them in that made them work or not work.

‘Barbados’ is so strange. It’s so dark lyrically, but with this Caribbean island vibe.
That was very evident to me at the time. But it hadn’t worked with Reggie Lucas and Julian Mendelsohn, who later became a really good friend of mine. I used Julian on the next album I did with the Models [Models’ Media] in London. Him more the engineer and me the producer, even though we shared the credit. We had no songs [to start with] for that as well. But we were dead lucky with the Models every time. Again, it was all about finding songs that were going to work.

Steelheart’s Steelheart (1991)

Before I finish on the ’80s, after I’d signed on for the Noiseworks or Hoodoo Gurus album, Geffen sent me these tapes and said, “We really want you to do this band. These guys are the real thing. They trash hotel rooms.” They sent me all these clips of this band who were just like animals. I certainly wanted to produce in America, but I was intimidated by this.

The band was Guns N’ Roses. I didn’t know who they were: L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose mixed together. I still have the demos upstairs. I said, “Unfortunately I’m booked to do another album.” But my main reason was that I was shit scared of going to America and working with these animals. [Laughs]

So I missed out on doing the first Guns N’ Roses album [Appetite for Destruction]. They went through three or four producers until they found the guy: Mike Clink. But that was a weird one, missing out on that. Which happened later in my career with Hootie & The Blowfish as well, for a different reason.

In the ’90s you worked with some bands along the lines of Guns ‘N Roses, like Steelheart.
Steelheart were a great band. I couldn’t believe their demos. Could not believe how good they were. Well, not so much how good they were: how good the singer [Miljenko Matijevic] was. To me he was a bit like George Young: he had the ability to look at a still object long enough and it would move. I mean, it didn’t, but that sort of determination. I remember saying to him, “We need a hit” and he said, “Give me a weekend.” He came back with ‘I’ll Never Let You Go (Angel Eyes)’, a killer song.

I did a few unknowns at that time in America as well, because they’d send me off to do these records. Which were okay, but you could see they never had the internal promotion. It’s like the World Cup: you can be a great team, but if you don’t know how to play the referees, you won’t win. When Steelheart came along, I thought, “Fuck, these guys are amazing.” And they went really well for us in America, but unfortunately, then Nirvana hit the slopes and it was all over.

INXS’ Live Baby Live (1991), Welcome to Wherever You Are (1992), Full Moon, Dirty Hearts (1993)

You did two back-to-back INXS albums in the shadow of Nirvana.
Steelheart asked me to do their second album, and at the same time INXS asked me to come back after X. They’d done their time with [producer] Chris Thomas and needed to reinvent themselves. I went with INXS and did Welcome to Wherever You Are.

The brief for myself was “reinvention”. That album was mainly done by myself, [engineer] Niven Garland, [keyboardist] Andrew Farriss and Michael Hutchence. [Guitarist] Tim [Farriss] had really bad arthritis, [drummer] Jon Farriss was about to get married, [bassist] Garry Beers was having a baby and Kirk was splitting up with his de facto at the time. So it was a bit all over the place.

But [the rest of us] were working every day, building songs from absolutely nothing. Michael would be partying most of the day and then sleeping out in the green room. We’d build up a track and I’d get Michael in front of a microphone to just scat. “Any word that comes to your head.” Then I’d go through it all and pick certain things. I’d keep odd melody lines, not even lyrics, so I could build it into a song. Then he’d go away and write lyrics. That happened on a lot of songs.

But again, it was about reinvention. Two things happened to that album. One, they didn’t tour on it, which they should have done because they could have had amazing sets. And two, U2 released Achtung Baby and toured the fuck out of that. At that stage U2 and INXS were pretty much neck and neck, but when X came out it was like a dive. They didn’t tour on Welcome to Wherever You Are, which is sad, but it did go number one in England and [many] different European countries. We were all quite happy about that.

But by the time it came to do the next one [Full Moon, Dirty Hearts], Michael didn’t really want to be in the band anymore. There was all sorts of fractious stuff going on. They were doing new management contracts. That was a very, very difficult record, due to lack of material, songs and interest by certain people.

The other thing was, I did a running order that took days and days and days putting together, to give more of a Welcome to Wherever You Are feel. Nirvana had hit big of course, and a couple members of the band said, “Let’s put all the rock songs up front. We’ve got to be more like Nirvana.” And I’m saying, “No, you’ve got to be more like INXS.” But management decided to go against my wishes with the running order and turned it into this quasi-album where songs didn’t fit with each other. Which I thought was quite sad.

Jimmy Barnes’ Bodyswerve (1984), Love and Fear (2000)

You worked with Jimmy Barnes several times post-Chisel. You did his first solo album, and then later Love and Fear.
That’s right. At that stage [around 2000], Jimmy was at a very low ebb emotionally and physically. He was right in the middle of his drug phase. I’d been appointed head of A&R at Mushroom. Michael Gudinski rang me up and wanted me to be head of A&R because he was about to sell 51 percent to Rupert Murdoch [in 1998]. He needed somebody to A) get rid of a lot of the acts, and B) come up with some hits. News Inc. already owned 49 percent and already gave money to Michael for budgets, but they stopped because they wanted to buy the whole company.

So I chopped 30 or 40 acts. Which is fucking hard to do, because you’re dealing with peoples’ lives and dreams. I found that extremely difficult. But I did it.

I had to come up with a couple hits at the same time. I remember Kate Ceberano coming in with a record she’d done in America. There was sort of half a single, but nothing else. She said she wanted to call the album Pash. I said, “I love that name. Why don’t you write a song called ‘Pash’?” She went off with a producer and did. I said, “Nah, that’s not it. Make it more like that song I said is half a hit.” They came back. I cut the instrumental solo in half and we got a hit out of it.

We did the same thing with The Mavis’s and ‘Cry’. Their label manager, Ellie Mackay, brought it to me and said, “It sounds like a hit to me, but it doesn’t sound like it’s ready to be a hit.” So I got the band in, and like INXS I said, “Great song. Take out all these quirky bits and do it over again.” Which they did. Luckily I had two hit songs pretty close together, which gave Michael more bargain power to sell Mushroom Records to Rupert Murdoch.

Is there a conflict, though, making the song the best it can be and making it commercially viable? What if they’re at odds?
That’s a constant battle. Because what you’re trying to do is preserve the integrity of the act without making them too pop. And we’ve got to remember, you can’t listen to music that’s a hit now and copy that into what you want to be a hit later. Because a song that’s a hit now from some overseas band was recorded six months ago, and in six months things will be different. So you wipe all that from your memory and make the song the best it can be, in itself. [Then] you do as much as you can to make it commercially successful.

Some of these songs you really picked apart. It’s amazing how much of a hand you had in the arrangements.
Well, sometimes you have to and other times you don’t.

I don’t know how much that’s done these days.
I’ll say on that score that Vanda & Young were the first producers I ever worked with, so they were my guideline. I’ve never worked with another producer since I worked with them in the ’70s. So I don’t know how other people make records. I’ve got no concept. I only know the way I make records. So the battle for me was always that, as you pointed out: getting that balance right.

Mark Opitz will appear at next week’s Face The Music conference in Melbourne. He’ll be speaking at the “More Cowbell” panel on November 19, 3pm. For more information click here.

A full discography can be viewed here.

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PART ONE: Working with AC/DC, re-branding the Angels and a tragic session with The Reels.