This is....my favourite band of all time.

Oh where to begin.... we could be here for a while!

So I will begin at the very first memory....... it was 1987 and I was in Year 8. My best friends older brother had a licence, and was allowed to drive his mum's mission brown station wagon to pick us up after school. Each and every day, he had the same tape playing in the tape deck.... INXS KICK.

At that stage, I was actually infatuated with Bros (does anyone actually remember them), but it didn't take long before I headed down to the local record shop (before cd's were invented for any youngens reading along), and bought my first ever album with my own money....

So that's when my secret infatuation with Michael Hutchence began, although Jon Farris was (and still is) also a hottie.

Above photo is me with my albums in 1991

In 1990, INXS realeased X (which I also bought on record) and that was probably about the time when I decided to go backwards and collect all of their earlier albums too. It probably took me a year (mainly because I lived in a country hick town miles away from anywhere) so it was only when I was in big towns like Bendigo or Melbourne that I could search the record shops for old albums. I eventually found all of them except for Dekadance.

I also bought anything else I could find relating to members of INXS like the MaxQ album, Dogs in Space movie, video specials, books etc.....

Photos of my bedroom wall in 1991 or 1992 when they were covered in INXS posters.

But of course, the best thing about an obsession with a band is the very first concert. My first ever concert was Jimmy Barnes at the Glasshouse (that's if you don't count Humphrey B Bear back in the 70's) and my second was INXS at The Tennis Centre just after my 17th birthday.

I had to make a deal with my best friend at the time who hated INXS. She would only come to the concert with me, if I agreed to go to see AC/DC with her. We lived in a country hick town with no way of even buying tickets for the concert, so luckily my auntie who lived in Melbourne agreed to buy the tickets for us. We had to catch the V-Line train to Melbourne (about a 4 hour trip) and we stayed at my aunties house.

Original 1991 tickets are still in the photo album..... Looking at the tickets now, I'm just realising what crappy seats we had for INXS (upper KK) when compared to AC/DC (lower E). I was so excited about the concert that I never even realised.

My second INXS concert was 3 years later....Mr CurlyPops and I went to see them at Festival Hall in 1994 (obviously ticket sales had dropped quite a bit to go from selling out 4 shows at the Tennis Centre in 1991 back to 2 shows at Festival Hall in 1994) .

We were planning to buy tickets for the 1997 concert but never got around to it.... then of course, the tour was cancelled a week before it started .

What came next was Rockstar INXS in 2005 and the band chose JD as their new frontman. We went to the concert at the Palais in September 2006 (can't find my tickets) and then again in March 2007.

Of course it's not the same without Michael, but JD is still a great frontman.

I even managed to find my old concert t-shirts (with paint splatters on them). The one on the left (1991) is now 17 years old and the one on the right (1994) is now 14 years old.

I've moved over 20 times and de-cluttered every time but the only collection that I've ever kept are my INXS goodies.

Thankyou to Sharon for filling in for Angela and letting me choose this weeks theme....it was a lovely wander down memory lane for me. I'm heading off to check whether I'm the only obsessed music fan in blogland!