Michael Hutchence talks about growing up in Hong Kong, fame and making music in 1994 interview

Hong Kong resident and rock superstar Michael Hutchence is cruising through an interview backstage at Singapore’s pristine indoor stadium. He sips a glass of wine, smokes several cigarettes, and gives surprisingly witty answers to a range of questions he’s probably heard before. We deal with the banner headlines, the beautiful girlfriends, the big bikes. He’s so relaxed and affable, it’s quite easy to bring up the latest “scandal”.

So, here goes: Michael, did your recent motorcycle accident in Copenhagen really leave you impotent?

There is a considerable pause. This long-time veteran – and victim – of the tabloid press is genuinely stunned. “Is that what they’re saying now? Oh, that’s a killer.” The 34-year-old INXS lead singer doubles up with laughter. “That would be God getting me back for my sins. Have you seen the smile on Helena’s face? Ask her if you need any proof.”

Helena is Helena Christenson, sweet-natured supermodel and long-time girlfriend of Michael Hutchence. She’s travelling with the band as far as Bangkok on their first Asian tour, but will miss Michael’s big homecoming in Hong Kong at the Queen Elizabeth Stadium on Wednesday and Thursday. Even she seems quite shocked by this rumour. “What can I say,” she laughs. “It was quite hard for us …” The entire band – Michael, the brothers Andrew, Jon and Tim Farriss, Kirk Pengilly and Garry Beers – cracks up. Michael says: “I assure the nation, it is working.”

It may sound funny, but the latest rumour about Hutchence is just one of a long line of half-truths and exaggerations which bother him greatly. “It was a bad accident, but not as bad as I first thought,” he said. “It left me with a four-inch scar on my head, but that’s all. I think the impotence story may have come from the fact that I had damage to my sense of smell and taste, which has basically all healed up. That was gone, 90 per cent, for quite a while. And your sense of smell is a sexual primal sense and it acts as a trigger. One in four people who suffer that lose their sexual drive.” He shrugs.

“Bad boy” Hutchence first hit the British tabloids when he dated Kylie Minogue, and he’s stayed gossip column fodder ever since. “I’ve lost a lot of control over my public persona,” he says. “You only have to do a couple of little things and you become a cartoon. It ends up that I start working for newspapers to create an image that’s not really me. I’ve been doing my damnedest over the last year trying to change all that. But you just don’t have too much control over it in the end.”