The Last (and only) Time I saw Michael Hutchence

Glutter's Hong Kong

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I am really sick. I find it so hard to breathe at night. It's really quiet and I just woke up. 3:55am. I walked out to the balcony. Hong Kong is never so quiet. I looked down at the street and looked at a triangular "round-a-bout," where I last saw him, it is underneath my feet just a little further on eight floors down, and my mind casts back to the days when I was a teenager, and Michael Hutchence was alive, and "Kick" was on repeat in all our collective walkmans.

Those were the days when Hong Kong was glamourous in the way it is not now. That money was easy and business was booming. It was the late 80s and excess was norm, parties never ended, and our parents were too busy with their lives to pay that much attention to us. And Micheal was alive and he was the biggest baddest boy in the neighbourhood. We would know when he was in town. We would know when he was out. We would all gossip about which glamour girl he was seeing, and wonder if he would bring her back to town.

I don't really know how to say it. Haven't thought it through, but there really isn't a more mythical figure in my growing up than the former frontman of InXs. He seemed so close. He went to one of our schools not that many years before us. He was living in the mid-levels... somewhere...

I was wondering about my compulsion to write about the search for a lead singer of a band I hadn't thought of for years, and then I realized that's not the case. I think of Michael Hutchence always, nearly every day, (since I moved back to the street I grew up on not long ago). I think of him whenever I cross that street, it's like a habit. i see his curly brown hair flying out of his helmet, him roaring pass me on his Bike and that beautiful model on the back of it.

at 14 that instant just called.

"Have an interesting Life." I think it might have said.

Those 5 seconds were just about the most exciting and enticing thing to have happenned to me up until that date in my comfortable, middle-class (practically suburbian) mid-levels teenage years. I think probably lots of girls get that when they are growing up, that one boy who you had a crush on, passing you by in the most unintimate of ways while leaving the grandest of impressions that fueled every bit of your imagination, mine just happened to be Michael Hutchence (see what I mean he made that life seem so real?).

I think of how my friend Paul gets misty eyed when he talks of the time he met Michael at a bar and the lead singer bought him a drink when he was a teenager and how to this day, Paul still wants to work on his music. How Paul still hopes he can make it. I think of how the boys played in bands. You have to understand, InXs was one of the biggest band in the world at the time, and Michael was the lead singer of that band, and he was from the same little world as the bunch of us and we would see him around.

I know Michael made am impression in the most crazy of ways. I hope this makes him pleased to be remembered this way. He always talked of growing up in Hong Kong in his interviews and everytime he did, it felt like a nod to us.

I guess this is my nod back to him. From my little Hong Kong Blog. In my little apartment back in his old neighbourhood.

Goodnight Everyone, Goodnight Michael, Thanks for everything.