New Manager, New Record Deal, New Horizons
Their first performance as INXS was in 1979, at the Ocean Beach Hotel in Umina, New South Wales. By the end of that year, after passing on the Christian rock idea as well as on Garry Morris himself, the band hired Chris “CM” Murphy as their new manager. They continued performing on the Oz pub circuit.
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Murphy proved to be an adept business manager and negotiator, and, by 1980, the band had signed a five-album record deal with Deluxe Records, an independent label out of Sydney run by Michael Browning, the former manager of AC/DC. INXS remained an exclusively Aussie phenomenon until their third album, 1982’s Shabooh Shoobah. It was the album that gave the group their first rankings on the Billboard Hot 100 and made them go global. The One Thing and Don’t Change” reached #46 on the Billboard 200.