Andy co-wrote many of the songs and co-produced the only solo album release by Michael Hutchence of INXS, which was released posthumously after his death.

One day in 1995, Michael Hutchence called Andy and asked him if he’d like to play some guitar on a solo album he was working on. A short while later, he called back and said what he’d really meant was would Andy work with him on the album. Andy travelled to Michael’s home in the South of France and soon they were writing this album together, at first mostly in France, though also at Andy’s London home. The process stretched out as Michael had to return to work with INXS and Andy produced another album, by The Jesus Lizard, and eventually included recording sessions at different studios including Realworld and pulling in different collaborators, notably Danny Saber and John X Volaitis and, on vocals, Joe Strummer and Gail Ann Dorsey. It was almost complete at the time of Michael’s death in November 1997. Andy worked with Bono to finish the track “Slide Away” and the album was released on V2 Records in October 1999.

Andy writing on the 10th anniversary of Michael’s death in The Telegraph, November 22nd, 2007:

“We weren’t an obvious musical pairing when we first started working together in the late spring of 1995. My band Gang of Four isn’t exactly associated with the kind of stadium rock that Michael had become famous for.

“In the music business, there’s often a tension between commercial success and artistic integrity.

“Michael and I were perceived as being on opposite sides of that divide, though neither of us accepted such glib classifications. He was also a tabloid staple, whose affairs with Kylie Minogue and Helena Christiansen had now been eclipsed by his passionate involvement with Paula Yates.

“I wasn’t interested in INXS, which seemed to me irretrievably stuck in the ’80s, or in the tabloid kerfuffles, but I had always admired Michael. He was so clearly the focus of his band, an extraordinary frontman and a great singer – a phenomenon.

“So when he phoned me, as I was finishing the last mix of the Gang of Four album Shrinkwrapped, and asked shyly (he was always shy with strangers) if I would consider playing some guitar on his solo album, I immediately said yes.

“He called back a few minutes later and said what he really meant was would I come down to his place in the South of France to write some songs with him. He was worried that was too much to ask.

“We spent a couple of months writing in his house in Roquefort les Pins. My then girlfriend, Catherine Mayer, now my wife, used to fly down at weekends, and Paula was in residence for weeks at a time.

“We set up an improvised studio in one of the bedrooms, and Paula would lie on the bed in very minimal attire, or canoodle with Michael, or tease me by sitting on my lap and pretending to mistake my asthma inhaler for a sign of appreciation.

“Writing with Michael came easily but was hard graft, too. I would play guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, programme computers, engineer, get something going, and then Michael would sing over it.

“He would sing for hours, take after take. Sometimes I’d think we had something pretty good, and he’d suddenly decide to come at it from a completely different angle. He was fiercely inventive. I wrote some of the words. Other lyrics just poured out of Michael – love songs to Paula and bitter meditations on their situation.

“Life in the South of France seemed idyllic. Paula’s daughters would visit, and everyone would be happy.

“But Michael’s life was in turmoil, and the songs reflected his misery and sense of hopelessness. It’s a great record, darker and more interesting and ambitious than anything else he ever made, but I can’t listen for long. It’s infused with premonitions of what would happen, the thoughts of a man who has contemplated suicide more than once.

“We had a lot of fun on the road to destruction, though. He was a quiet person, soft-voiced, but could be flamboyant.”

Andy interviewed for Perfect Sound Forever/ Furious.com:

“He did want to make something that was artistically ambitious and wasn’t just a set of very polished pop songs. He wanted which went beyond peoples’ normal perception of him. That definitely happened. He’d done the international pop-star bit very well, better than most in a way. But he was also interested in doing something quite different, which is why he funded it himself. He knew that there’d be pressures from record companies [otherwise].

“There’s a couple of tracks that are very different from the way they would have been if Michael was finishing it. Obviously, ‘Slide Away’, which is the duet with Bono, would have not come out in that way. That’s something very definitely that was my response to his death. It was just this strange thing, coming across this last thing that I’d done with him. It was not finished though- there was this chorus and this ‘slide away’ lyric. It was strange to come back to this and hear him say ‘I just want to slide away and come alive again’. I just wanted to somehow have it finished and be on the record. The way I figured out how to do it was to get Bono to come on and do the vocal. It was an opportunity for me and Bono to say goodbye as well. It was a finishing off process.”

Andy’s widow Catherine Mayer writing about Michael in The Guardian in Oct 2017 – Read HERE.