Cool. Suave. And, Whose Feet Are Those?

Kick by INXS is one of my favourite albums by one of my favourite bands. Maybe it's because I'm an Aussie and I have to support my boys. Maybe it's because I was 13 when the album was released and at the start of my transition to becoming a teenager. A red-blooded teen boy. But this isn't about the music or my desperate desire to be cool that I want to talk about today. It never is on this blog.

It's the cover.

Specifically, it's Michael Hutchence, leaning against a white background, leather jacket, that hair, that look. Ladies loved him. Men wanted to be him. I wanted to be him. Kick came out in 1987 and Hutchence was the coolest human being on the planet. He wasn't just on the cover. He owned the cover. HE WAS THE COVER.

But there was always one thing that nagged at me. Those feet on the skateboard at the top of the cover. Whose are they?

Let's get into it.

The Man Behind the Cover

The artwork for Kick was put together by British designer Nick Egan, who had previously created sleeves for The Clash, Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop. By the time INXS came calling, Egan was already a big player in the world of album cover design. But he saw something in Michael Hutchence that others hadn't yet fully recognised; a true rock star, someone with a great voice, brilliant performance skills, and the right amount of decadence and intelligence.

The cover concept was developed jointly between Egan and Hutchence, with Australian fashion photographer Grant Matthews brought in to shoot it. The result was something that felt less like a rock album cover and more like a high fashion editorial. Bold. Confident. Deliberately cool. With big-lapelled leather jackets, baseball jackets and sneakers, it was after all, 1987.

The Band as a Unit

Here's something that makes the cover even more interesting once you know it. Hutchence was adamant that INXS be presented as a band, not as a frontman and his backing group. The band apparently once lost out on a Rolling Stone cover story because of Hutchence's insistence that the whole band be featured on the front rather than just himself. As guitarist Tim Farriss later confirmed: 'Michael said he didn't want to be on the cover without the band, and blew it out.' Somewhat ironic, considering you have to unfold the gatefold sleeve to see all six members on the cover of Kick.

Anyway, there's Hutchence on the front, all cool and sexy and suave and unavoidable. And the rest of the band? Hidden inside the gatefold. A compromise that somehow pleased everyone.

Those Feet

Right. The skateboard. The board itself is a classic PsychoStick skateboard - very much of its era, very 1987. But whose feet are actually on it?

The honest answer is that the record sleeve credits don't specifically tell us, and it has never been definitively confirmed publicly. What we do know is that the cover was a carefully styled shoot; everything on it was deliberate, chosen, considered. The skateboard wasn't an accident. It was a prop that anchored the whole image in a very specific cultural moment; street culture, youth culture, the late 80s at full tilt.

My guess? Kirk Pengilly. I can see him now, riding that skateboard and playing the saxophone at the same time. Or, it was probably a crew member or stylist on the shoot. Anyway, I guess the feet are almost incidental. It's the board that matters, sitting at the top of the frame like a casual afterthought that isn't casual at all.

Michael Jackson's Legs

Both Kick and Michael Jackson's Bad were released in 1987. Two of the biggest albums of that year, sitting on record shelves side by side. Someone, at some point, decided to place the Bad sleeve on top of Kick and noticed something remarkable. Jackson's legs align almost perfectly with the skateboard feet on the Kick cover.

Nobody planned it. The two covers were shot separately, by different photographers, for different artists, on different sides of the world. It's pure coincidence. A beautiful, ridiculous, wonderful coincidence that the internet has enjoyed ever since.

So, whose feet are those on the skateboard? Maybe Michael's.

The Euphoria Story

No piece about the Kick cover is complete without mentioning what HBO's Euphoria did to it in 2022. In a scene from Season Two, a character queues up Never Tear Us Apart on a jukebox and eagle-eyed viewers noticed the album cover in the jukebox window wasn't quite right.

Hutchence's face had been replaced by a stock image of a bearded Danish web developer named Alexander Burchardt, who spotted himself in the scene while watching the show with his girlfriend. HBO most likely couldn't secure a license to the original artwork, so they quietly substituted a stock image close enough to fool casual viewers.

It didn't fool the fans.

The Kick cover is so recognisable, so embedded in popular culture, that even a careful imitation couldn't slip past unnoticed. That's the mark of truly great album art.

What Makes It Work

The Kick cover succeeds because it understood exactly what INXS were becoming in 1987. Not just a band. A cultural moment. It introduced a high fashion sensibility into rock and roll at exactly the right moment, and it did it without losing an ounce of attitude.

As Egan himself has reflected, it's the influence Kick had that he is most proud of. And it's easy to see why. This wasn't just a record sleeve, it was a statement.

Hutchence on that cover isn't selling you an album. He's selling you a feeling. And nearly forty years later, it still works.

Even if we still don't know whose feet are on that skateboard.