Ask Midnight Oil fans what drummer Rob Hirst will be remembered for, and the most likely answer will be his drum solo on Power and the Passion, one of the band’s big early hits. It’s an explosive minute of almost literal madness – Hirst was on the verge of a breakdown when the track was recorded in 1982, for their breakthrough album 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Drum solos had, by that time, become a symbol of rock excess. But this wasn’t just another vulgar display of virtuosity. It was more musical than most guitar solos, enhancing a song already full of moving parts. Live, much of it was played on a corrugated iron water tank Hirst retrieved from the desert on the Oils’ Blackfella/Whitefella tour in 1986.
What’s less appreciated is that while Hirst was a phenomenal drummer and percussionist, he was an equally accomplished songwriter. His name appears in the credits of some of the biggest anthems of the 80s and 90s: not only Power and the Passion, but Beds Are Burning, The Dead Heart, Forgotten Years, King of the Mountain, and countless deeper cuts.
Usually it was Hirst who provided the skeleton of these songs, with guitarist Jim Moginie (Hirst’s main songwriting partner) fleshing them out. The Dead Heart is a good example: according to Moginie’s memoir The Silver River, Hirst came in with the lyric and melody. Moginie added the “doo-doo-doo” hook and the shift from a minor to major key in the intro.
On other occasions, their partnership worked in reverse. In 1985, the band was working on a full-tilt Moginie track called Valuable Thing. The music was great, but the lyrics lacked focus. Minutes before singer Peter Garrett recorded them, Hirst had an epiphany, recasting it as Hercules – an elegy for the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace vessel sunk by the French government in Auckland.
Similarly, when Moginie presented a composition with the working title Women in History, Hirst rewrote it in a series of bullet-point lines about how those who forget the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them. This became Short Memory, hardly the usual cars-and-girls fare of most popular music.
Finally, there were the times when Hirst brought in songs fully formed. Forgotten Years was one: a track Garrett ranked alongside Eric Bogle’s And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda and Redgum’s I Was Only 19 among the great anti-war songs of their generation, inspired by the experiences of Hirst’s father and grandfather.
Hirst had a gift for summing up a song’s overriding sentiment in a few words: “Nothing’s as precious as a hole in the ground” is the defining lyric and climactic moment of Blue Sky Mine. Sung with bitter irony, the song was written for the asbestos victims of the Wittenoom disaster. It remains equally applicable to any rapacious mining operation today.
And when the Oils returned to the studio in 2019 for the first time since the release of 2002’s Capricornia – the band’s last album before Garrett’s career in federal politics – Hirst was first out of the gate with the songs First Nation and Gadigal Land. The latter won Song of the Year at the Apra awards in 2021.
It would be unfair – on Moginie especially – to describe Midnight Oil as Hirst’s band. The pair met in high school; initial rehearsals were held in 1972, in the home owned by Moginie’s adoptive parents on Sydney’s north shore. Hirst lugged his drums up the stairs, and there’s a rough recording which sounds like him kicking them back down again, just for the fun of it.
But Hirst was the heartbeat, a force of nature and born showman who led the band from the back. His kick drum was slightly ahead of the beat, while his snare was just a fraction behind, turning the band into a pump-action live juggernaut. Hirst could sing, too: pinpoint high harmonies over Garrett’s more declamatory style.
Perhaps most of all, along with Garrett and original manager Gary Morris, Hirst was responsible for constructing Midnight Oil’s five-against-the-world persona. This was no regular band. The Oils were more like an impenetrable fortress, determined to do things their way, or not at all.
Even the album title 10–1 was an oblique reference to Countdown, the long-running Australian version of Top of the Pops Midnight Oil refused to play. “We were a bloody-minded bunch of bastards,” Hirst told me once. “We were very demanding on everyone around us, including each other. We were hard to deal with; we antagonised and irritated a lot of people.”
Hirst maintained an active creative life outside his main band. His final EP with Moginie and Hamish Stuart topped the Aria charts on release in November. Other projects included the Ghostwriters, which he formed with longtime friend Rick Grossman, of the Hoodoo Gurus, and longstanding blues trio the Backsliders. Finally, there was the Break, an instrumental surf outfit he formed with other members of the Oils during Garrett’s time in parliament.
It’s a testament to Hirst’s songwriting brilliance, as much as Garrett’s leadership and the group’s overwhelming zeal, that the band succeeded so righteously at pissing off all the right people: corrupt politicians, greedy developers, music industry fakes. Hirst fully embodied the power and the passion that drove Midnight Oil until the very end. He died on his feet.
