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INXS guitarist Kirk Pengilly giggled as he looked at an advance "sell sheet" sent to Canadian retailers and the media prior to next week's release of the veteran Australian band's 10th studio album, Elegantly Wasted.
Pengilly, seated alongside keyboardist-songwriter-producer Andrew Farriss in a downtown hotel room yesterday, has been through the promotional rigmarole so many times in the last 17 years that mistakes just make him laugh now.
"It always astounds me how, within the same paragraph, they can spell one of our names differently. It's like Farriss -- just here it's got one `s' and -- (his voice gets louder) -- just down here it's got two!"
The sheet also incorrectly says INXS will launch Elegantly Wasted -- recorded last year in Vancouver with co-producer Bruce Fairbairn -- with a Toronto club show to be recorded for a nationally syndicated radio show.
"That's not true," said Farriss, 38. "We never said that we were going to do that. But we are planning at some point on coming to Canada. We don't know when. Possibly we might be doing a surprise appearance of acoustic things here."
In the meantime, the band's last-minute decision to perform three songs this afternoon on MuchMusic (between 3 and 4 p.m.) will have to suffice.
If any one thing indicates the push is on for INXS in 1997, it's the impressive, mega-sized promotional package containing advance copies of Elegantly Wasted.
The glossy color pictures -- shot in Palmdale, Calif., in the Mojave Desert -- feature the band members dressed up as everything from policemen to auto mechanics, and are also duplicated in the liner notes for the album.
In addition, all six group members -- including singer Michael Hutchence, bassist Garry Gary Beers, drummer Jon Farriss and guitarist Tim Farriss -- schmoozed the local media at a cocktail party on Thursday night.
"It's like they come up to you and start talking to you, and what can they say? -- `The album sucks!'" joked Pengilly, 38. "Of course they come up and say, `The album's great.'"
It's clear, as one of the major rock holdovers from the last decade, INXS has just been through a period of major transition.
They've sold 20 million albums worldwide (including two million in Canada) on the basis of such hits as What You Need, New Sensation and Need You Tonight, but their last two albums came out in 1994.
First, the critically and commercially disappointing studio album, Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, and then a greatest hits package featuring one new song, The Strangest Party.
Following that, the band members spent about two years apart, working on other projects.
"We had a management change, we had a record label change, we had a lot of things we needed to come to terms with," said Farriss. "We had many years of creating a snowball and it gathers and it gathers and it gathers. And one day you turn around and go, `My, God! Look at this thing that we've created.' And then we have to stop and assess, reassess `What is INXS?' So I think when we came back to make this record we felt much more refreshed, much more focused about what we wanted the music and ourselves to be."
Adds Pengilly: "With the album before this one, Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, there was a bit of a feeling that we had to make it because it was the last one with Atlantic. It's not really the right attitude."