Hottest Couples Of All Time, Part 1

by Alexandra Molotkow

I am not, nor have I ever been an INXS fan — not that there’s anything wrong with INXS, just, what’s to like about their music? Wait, is there something to like?? I’m actually very open. But I do have a serious thing for Michael Hutchence. I like his face and his floppy hair, his air of tragedy and his *sensualism* and because he was once one half of a sex partnership with the even sexier Kylie Minogue.

“Kylie had one relationship that so outshone all ­others it continues to cast a ­lengthening shadow over her life,” Virginia Blackburn, her “unofficial biographer,” wrote in the Express. The two met at a “seedy” bar in Sydney in 1988 and started dating the following year. Kylie has confirmed his opening line was something like, “I don’t know what we should do first, have lunch or have sex,” which is not a good line, but I’ll allow it.

Minogue was a public sweetheart at the time, an unremarkable kiddie pop singer and star of the Australian soap opera Neighbours. He was a “bad boy,” a druggie and noted sex-haver. Together they formed a traditional “good-girl-bad-boy” alliance; he famously told an interviewer that his hobby was “corrupting Kylie Minogue.”

“Let’s just say I was 21 and my eyes were open to the world,” she told Australian GQ for a cover story last year. “You want to experience everything and I couldn’t think of a better person to, you know, take those first steps into the big wide world with.” Former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke once heard them fucking in a seat behind him in first class. He winked.

Hutchence left Kylie for Helena Christensen, after two years together (“It was great love, and it was true heartbreak,” the singer told Australia’s 60 Minutes in 2014). He left Christensen for Paula Yates, his partner at the time he was found dead in a hotel room in November 1997 (she died three years later, of a heroin overdose). She claimed he had died of autoerotic asphyxiation, though the coroner ruled it a suicide.

Friends said he’d been depressed since 1992, when a bike accident in Copenhagen fractured his skull and eliminated most of his senses of taste and smell. “Ever since the accident, he was on a slow decline,” filmmaker Richard Lowenstein told the Independent in 1998. “I’d never seen any evidence of depression, erratic behaviour or violent temper before it. I saw all those things after it. One night in Melbourne, he broke down and sobbed in my arms. He said, ‘I can’t even taste my girlfriend any more.’ His girlfriend then was Helena. For someone who was such a sensual being, this loss of primary senses affected his notion of place in the world and, I believe, damaged his psyche.”

Yates said in an interview after his death, “I think he had tried everything. I hope he had.”

I’m not crazy about the politics behind the whole “worldly man/innocent girl” trope, but if Michael, as Kylie claims, encouraged her transformation from “I Should Be So Lucky” (not that there’s anything wrong with that song) to “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” then right on. And it feels a little bit wrong to fetishize the dead, but Hutchence’s sexuality seems part of his legacy. Back to Lowenstein:

He would flirt with everybody — women or waiters in restaurants. He had a magnetic effect on men as well as women. The attraction to women wasn’t as a conventional male stud, but as a man who had feminine qualities and feline body language without being effeminate. That was hugely attractive to women, along with the direct eye contact that he gave everyone. He wanted to seduce everyone, if not physically then metaphysically.

Minogue: “He was just this kind of, expansive, all-encompassing love of life.”