Do we like them?

Do we like Andrew Farriss?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy turned up and there's real good on the record, but what we could open and read is thin, so it stops short of the top.

Andrew Farriss is the keyboardist and main songwriter behind INXS, the band he co-founded in 1977. If you've heard a stadium sing along to an Aussie rock song from the eighties, there's a fair chance he wrote the bones of it.

The scandal section is short, because there isn't one. We searched court records, lawsuits and allegations, and nothing came up against Andrew. The legal stories that did show up belonged to his brother Tim, and that's a different bloke.

On the harm check, we went looking for anything he's said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and found no words or acts of his own that count against him. We also found no sign of a slide into grievance or conspiracy talk. That's an absence of evidence rather than a glowing character reference, so we're not pretending to know his politics.

Nothing new on him lately that we could open and read, so there's no fresh stoush to report. Searches pointed to a new country-leaning solo album this year, but we couldn't read those pages ourselves, so take that as a lead rather than a fact.

The good stuff is real. In January 2020 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the performing arts as a musician, composer and producer. Noise11 reported the honour also recognised his mentoring of students at the Australian National University, and he said of it, “It is a wonderful honor.”

He's also happy to talk about the music with a bit of humility. Speaking about INXS's biggest ballad, he said he never thought it suited the album it ended up on, which is a very songwriter thing to say about a song that became a classic anyway.