The INXS frontman Michael Hutchence had a fascination with Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume, in which an 18th-century homunculus with a powerful set of nostrils murders 24 virgins to extract their scent for a bottled cologne, and is eventually torn to pieces by a Parisian mob. He gave a copy to his lover Kylie Minogue. He took his sister Tina, who’d raised him in infancy, to trace the book’s locations. And he read passages of Perfume aloud, which feature as ghostly voiceover in a new BBC Two documentary, Mystify: Michael Hutchence.
Seven years after the book’s publication Hutchence, by now dating Helena Christensen, received a punch from a Danish taxi driver that caused two areas of brain damage and deprived him of his sense of smell. In the new film, a neurology expert explains the connection between smell and desire. A renowned “sensualist”, in losing his sense of smell the frontman had been left “floating in space”, deprived of the essence of his being, after what the band still refer to as his “pushbike accident”.
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