Forty-four years ago, my first assignment for Rolling Stone was to interview Rob Hirst of Midnight Oil. Now, in the next century, I re-posed my first question to him: where are all the Midnight Oil love songs? A few boy-girl romance numbers would have shifted a lot more records.
“Well, it would have been easier if we hadn’t alienated all the music industry,” the drummer says, once he stops laughing. “It would have been easier if we got on Countdown. It would have been easy if we accepted a headline position on the first Lollapalooza. It would have been easier if we turned up to that Grammy nomination, but we didn’t do any of those things. And we got through regardless. That’s why it’s called The Hardest Line.”
