A BEAUX HOMMES review of the 1997 song and music video—and why Michael Hutchence’s late-career performance deserves another look.
By the BEAUX HOMMES Music & Culture Desk
There are songs that sound like youth, and there are songs that sound like someone who has already lived through youth and knows exactly what it cost.
“Elegantly Wasted” belongs to the second category.
Released in 1997 as the title track of INXS’s tenth studio album, it arrived during the final year of Michael Hutchence’s life. The album followed on April 15, 1997, and would become the last INXS studio record made with Hutchence as lead singer. Hutchence himself later named Elegantly Wasted among his favorite INXS albums.
Nearly three decades later, the song sounds less like an attempt to reclaim the band’s glory years than a sophisticated acknowledgment that the party had changed.
And perhaps so had the man singing it.
THE SONG: BEAUTIFUL, TIRED AND STILL DANGEROUS
The genius of the title is the contradiction.
Elegant. Wasted.
One word suggests refinement, taste, tailoring, expensive rooms and controlled behavior.
The other suggests excess, exhaustion, intoxication, squandered time and consequences.
Put them together and you have a surprisingly accurate description of a certain kind of late-20th-century rock-star glamour.
INXS had always understood sex appeal differently from many arena-rock bands. Their music rarely depended solely on brute-force guitars. Rhythm mattered. Space mattered. Funk mattered. The body mattered.
“Elegantly Wasted” keeps that tradition alive.
The track moves rather than attacks.
There is a loose, seductive pulse beneath it, with guitar, rhythm section and vocal working together instead of competing for attention. Bruce Fairbairn produced the recording with Andrew Farriss, and the resulting sound is polished without becoming antiseptic.
That distinction is important.
A lesser band might have attempted to sound younger in 1997.
INXS instead sounds adult.
There is experience in the groove.
MICHAEL HUTCHENCE DOESN’T NEED TO SHOUT
By this stage, Hutchence understood one of the great secrets of sensual performance:
You do not have to push everything toward the audience. Sometimes you make the audience come toward you.
His performance has swagger, but it is not the exuberant swagger of somebody who has just discovered his attractiveness.
It is the confidence of someone who already knows.
That makes the vocal more interesting.
Hutchence sounds amused, cynical, seductive and slightly exhausted all at once. The attitude is central to the recording. The song is not merely about excess; it sounds as though it has survived excess.
INXS’s official biography describes Hutchence as both a sex symbol and a serious creative figure interested in poetry, art film and experimental music—an important combination when reconsidering performances like this one.
His appeal was never simply his face or body.
It was the tension between intelligence and appetite.
That tension is all over “Elegantly Wasted.”
THE BODY IS PART OF THE MUSIC
BEAUX HOMMES readers should pay attention to how physically INXS constructs rhythm.
You can almost wear this song.
It has the pace of someone crossing a hotel lobby in excellent clothes at two in the morning.
It doesn’t sprint.
It strolls.
That quality separated INXS from much of the rock culture surrounding them. Their best music understands that sexuality often comes from rhythm rather than volume.
For photographers, designers and filmmakers, there is an important lesson here:
Seduction requires negative space.
If everything is shouting, nothing feels intimate.
The arrangement leaves enough room for personality.
THE VIDEO: EVERYBODY IS GOING SOMEWHERE
The official video was directed by Walter Stern and places the band inside an airport-terminal environment, where travelers gradually notice and interact with them. A Los Angeles set was constructed to recreate the terminal interior.
It is an inspired location for this particular song.
An airport is simultaneously glamorous and exhausting.
Everyone has luggage.
Everyone is between places.
People arrive dressed for one identity and leave headed toward another.
There are strangers everywhere, yet almost nobody knows anybody.
In other words:
An airport is elegantly wasted architecture.
Thousands of people moving through beautiful spaces designed primarily for leaving them.
WHY THE AIRPORT WORKS
The video’s greatest idea is not a complicated narrative.
It is transience.
INXS wanders through this artificial international environment while other people watch.
That relationship is familiar territory for celebrity.
A famous person can be surrounded by hundreds of people while remaining strangely isolated from them. Everyone recognizes the face. Almost nobody knows the person.
The airport turns that condition into visual language.
It also captures something about the 1990s.
Before smartphones transformed airports into rooms full of people staring downward, terminals still carried a particular fantasy of international sophistication: magazines, business travelers, departure boards, expensive luggage, lounges, strangers glimpsed once and never seen again.
The video understands that mood.
MICHAEL HUTCHENCE AND THE CAMERA
The camera doesn’t need to turn Hutchence into a superhero.
It watches him.
That is enough.
Great screen presence often comes from a performer appearing to have a private life that continues beyond the frame.
Hutchence had that quality.
When he looks toward the camera, you don’t feel as though the camera created the moment. You feel as though it happened to catch him.
That is tremendously difficult to manufacture.
For models and photographers, the lesson is valuable:
Stop performing every second.
Sometimes presence becomes stronger when the subject appears temporarily uninterested in proving anything.
WALTER STERN’S APPROACH
Stern was already associated with visually forceful music videos, including several for The Prodigy, and in the same year would direct The Verve’s famous “Bitter Sweet Symphony.”
With INXS, however, he doesn’t overwhelm the band with technique.
The concept serves the performers.
That is another lesson worth stealing.
A director does not always need to demonstrate that he is directing.
Sometimes the smartest visual decision is finding an environment that makes the artist more legible.
The terminal does exactly that.
INXS looks cosmopolitan because the environment is cosmopolitan.
They look slightly displaced because airports are places of displacement.
They look famous because ordinary travelers surround them.
And they look strangely alone because everybody is ultimately traveling somewhere else.
FASHION WITHOUT A FASHION SHOW
The video also reminds us of something that contemporary fashion imagery occasionally forgets:
Style is often more convincing when people appear to be going somewhere.
Clothing acquires meaning through context.
A jacket in a studio is wardrobe.
A jacket worn through an international terminal becomes character.
This is one reason old music videos remain such useful references for fashion photographers. They show clothing functioning inside imagined lives rather than simply being displayed.
BEAUX HOMMES creators should study that distinction.
Do not always photograph the outfit.
Photograph the person who has somewhere to wear it.
A SONG THAT CHANGED AFTER 1997
It is impossible now to completely separate Elegantly Wasted from what happened later that year.
Hutchence died on November 22, 1997, at age 37.
That knowledge inevitably changes how some viewers experience the video.
Images of airports, movement, departure and people passing one another acquire meanings that were not necessarily intended when the video was made.
We should be careful about turning every artistic gesture into prophecy.
Artists do not owe us clues about their deaths.
But art changes when history changes around it.
Something that initially looked like cosmopolitan cool can later feel unexpectedly melancholy.
That is part of why old music videos deserve serious reconsideration.
We change.
Therefore the work changes with us.
WHY “ELEGANTLY WASTED” STILL WORKS
Because it does not sound desperate to be young.
Because Hutchence remains magnetic without turning the performance into self-parody.
Because INXS remembers that rock music can dance.
Because the title captures the strange romance of excess in two words.
And because beneath all the polish lies an uncomfortable idea:
What happens when the beautiful life stops being enough?
That is a far more interesting question than simple decadence.
WHAT CREATIVE PEOPLE CAN LEARN FROM IT
For BEAUX HOMMES readers working in art, music, fashion, photography, film or design, “Elegantly Wasted” offers several useful lessons.
Contradictions create character. Elegant/wasted. Beautiful/exhausted. Famous/alone. Controlled/excessive.
Location can do narrative work. The airport tells us something before anyone acts.
Sex appeal does not require desperation. Confidence can be quieter than exhibitionism.
Rhythm is visual. Watch how bodies move through architecture and crowds.
Fashion needs a world around it. Give clothes somewhere to live.
Do not imitate youth when maturity is more interesting.
And perhaps most importantly:
An artist’s late work should not automatically be judged against his greatest commercial period.
Sometimes late work tells us something the younger artist could not yet have known.
BEAUX HOMMES VERDICT
THE SONG: ★★★★½
Sleek, sensual, slightly weary and unmistakably INXS. It transforms decadence into atmosphere rather than spectacle.
THE VIDEO: ★★★★½
Simple concept, excellent location, strong visual intelligence and enormous screen presence from Hutchence. Its airport setting has become more evocative with time.
MICHAEL HUTCHENCE: ★★★★★
Not because nostalgia demands it.
Because the camera proves it.
He understood something that cannot be taught easily:
how to occupy space without asking permission to be looked at.
That is why “Elegantly Wasted” deserves another viewing.
It isn’t merely an INXS song from 1997.
It is a stylish document of a band—and a remarkable frontman—standing somewhere between arrival and departure.