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WINNIPEG - To be completely honest, the thought of an INXS without Michael Hutchence used to leave kind of a bad taste in our mouth.
But as drummer Jon Farriss rightly reminded us, they were a band without a singer -- what were they supposed to do, play instrumentals the rest of their lives?
After Hutchence's somewhat ignoble death in 1997, the band went public with their search for a new singer, launching a TV reality series (Rock Star: INXS) that eventually turned up former Elvis impersonator J.D. Fortune.
It was J.D., an Ontario native, who was the main focus at the MTS Centre last night; and, for the most part, fortune was smiling on the new recruit.
The band wisely stuck to a classic for the first song, giving their roughly 7,000 fans (many of whom looked like they'd been followers since the early 1980s) at least a few minutes to warm to the idea of an heir to Hutchence's cocky, Jagger-esque legacy.
Following an almost-perfect rendition of Suicide Blonde (strangely, there was no harmonica solo), Fortune and his new bandmates -- brothers Jon, Tim and Andrew Farriss, Gary Beers and Kirk Pengilly -- broke into Devil's Party, from their latest release Switch.
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Then it was on to Mystify (in our humble opinion, the best track off INXS's seminal album Kick), before returning to Switch for the ode-to-the-ladies.
Now Fortune may sound a lot like Hutchence, but on stage he's a bit of a different beast, getting all phallic with his microphone stand while writhing around on his knees and then resting a while in the shadow of the drum kit for the power-ballad By My Side.
He prompted a few cellphones to be raised with the radio-friendly Afterglow, indulged in a quick costume change prior to an overly-long version of Taste It and engaged the crowd with lots of sultry finger-pointing during Original Sin.
The big hits, it seemed, would be saved for later in the show.
Oh, and the rest of the band? They were great. Come on -- they've been doing this for almost 30 years now.
Beleaguered former Creed frontman Scott Stapp, meanwhile, opened the show with a sober (if not exactly stellar) set of mid-tempo alt-rock, some culled from his new solo album Great Divide, the rest from his old "Christian-rock" glory days.
Stapp -- who in the past has weathered a sex tape scandal, a barfight with the band 311 and struggles with alcoholism that came to a head with an embarrassing stage show in Chicago -- still managed to draw cheers from last night's crowd, mostly by hoisting one foot on his monitor a lot and delivering super-earnest platitudes about redemption in between songs.