INXS – Never Tear Us Apart (Chords)
INXS’s Kick is one of my favourite albums of the 80s. But today’s post was prompted by Courtney Barnett’s cover for an Apple ad in celebration of gay marriage in Australia (she’s covered the whole of Kick in the past). It’s a fantastic mix of pop, blues and rock elements.
The chords are dead easy. In the verse you only have to add or remove one finger for each chord change. The only thing slightly unusual is the time signature.
12/8 Time
12/8 isn’t a common time signature for a pop song and adds to the song’s bluesy edge. You might not have come across it before. But it’s not hard to get the hang. You can just think of it like 4/4 time but with each beat being a triplet. So I count it like this:
1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and a
Count that along with the strings at the beginning and you’ll have it down.
Suggested Strumming
I use this as the main strum:
d – d u d –
Intro and Verse: Do the main strum four times for each chord. Here’s how that sounds:
Chorus: Do the main strum twice for each chord until the last line.
Twiddly Bits
I’ve written up the simple guitar chords. But the strings are a little more complex. Here I’m mimicking the short stabs by plucking all the strings at once rather than strumming.
The short guitar riff can be played like this. Here I’m strumming an Am where the drums are in the original.
Finally there’s the bluesy sax solo. The solo starts out using the A blues scale which is the A minor pentatonic with the addition of the Eb on the A-string, 6th fret (lots more on both those scales in the How to Play Blues Ukulele ebook). Then in bar 4 it switches to the C major scale building up into the C chord at the start of the chorus.
Thanks for doing this, wasn’t much of an INXS fan before, but I’m really diggin’ it on the uke.