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.”
Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line is the title of a feature-length documentary about the band. Directed by Paul Clarke, the film has been five years or more in the making. Midnight Oil is, in Monty Python’s phrase, “more of an autonomous collective”. For that reason, dealing with Midnight Oil can be infuriating. But their staunch solidarity has kept them together in the face of enormous pressure and their crusade has woven them into Australian history unlike any other artist.
The chemistry was the making and the breaking of the band. For Jim Moginie making music was the only way he felt normal. I saw Rob Hirst play in his high school garage band and even then he had the showmanship, the flair and the beats. Martin Rotsey was born with a guitar on his hip.
The focus of Midnight Oil was always going to be its large, bald frontman. At 198cm (6ft 6), or thereabouts, Peter Garrett is big in every way. He is incredibly generous and open-hearted. Tireless. Smart and warm in person. He can also be tough as nails when he wants to be, especially about controlling the narrative of his life. For a person in public life, Garrett is intensely private; in interviews he deftly deflects discussion about family, the band, his emotions or his spiritual beliefs.
Sources close to the band described the division in the group as “the politicians” and “the musicians’’. Hirst and Garrett were at different times leaders and, as Moginie wrote in his recent memoir, they didn’t always see eye to eye. In the middle, guitarist Rotsey was, according to Sony’s Chris Moss, “the cool one” who usually had the final say on most things.
Garrett and the band’s former manager Gary Morris were responsible for strategising the way Midnight Oil operated. Morris thrived on confrontation and was happy to take on record companies, promoters and the media while aligning the band with leftwing activism. When a whale needed a benefit concert, Midnight Oil was ready to go.
When the Oils started in the late 1970s, there was no shortage of disaffected, pimply young men with a Fender and a chip on their shoulder. There was also no shortage of songs bewailing the state of the world. But Midnight Oil did it bigger and better. As Garrett wrote in his memoir Big Blue Sky: “Midnight Oil’s message wasn’t in the songs themselves, which varied … The message was in joining the music with actions that matched what was being sung. Were we earnest and self righteous? Yes, we were.”
The first two Midnight Oil records were full of piss and vinegar written in overcrowded pubs. Their connection with suburban Australians was unbreakable. When the club insisted patrons have a collared shirt, the Oils raided the local Vinnies and handed out Hawaiian shirts to the fans wearing T-shirts. It was there in the songs too – lyrics about apathy in the suburbs, the entropy of dead-end jobs and the hollow Australian torpidity.
The Power and the Passion, a signature song, is about exactly that. Midnight Oil itself, at that point in 1982, was the opposite of apathy. Hirst, in his own words, was having a “mini-nervous breakdown”. The day of that session, he had gone for a run to deal with his rising anxiety; he turned up in the studio essentially still running and smashed out the distinctive drum part and his duet with the rhythm machine.
Midnight Oil’s previous album Place Without a Postcard had failed to secure international release. Nonetheless they punted everything they had, down to the last dollar, on the new album.
“People were getting dissatisfied,” Hirst recalls. “But here’s the thing, it was that dissatisfaction in my case – kind of a mini-nervous breakdown, I think, with panic attacks and whatever – that comes out on the album. It’s a desperate sounding album by a band that was actually pretty desperate, we needed to make that breakthrough.”
The resulting album 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 was not what the fans expected. The Oils, with producer Nick Launay, had created a sound that was at the cutting edge of modern rock’n’roll, with two hit singles to boot. The album was on the charts for more than three years.
“It was a cultural monster,” Moss says. “That album changed everything. It shone a spotlight on Australia like never before. The album’s critical acclaim brought international A&R men looking for the next Midnight Oil. The album made the band a household name and Garrett slid into a role as a champion of various causes. Clearly this was not just a rock band any more.”
The Oils’ live shows were now massive productions. Garrett was an incredible frontman, his dancing was something to behold. He was in his natural state declaiming the evils of the world while behind him Hirst’s right foot and the bass put all caps on the vitriol.
Far from taking the win, Midnight Oil doubled down by going to Japan to make Red Sails In the Sunset. It was 1984 and the cold war was raging. Nuclear conflict had never seemed more real. Thousands were taking to the streets for nuclear disarmament. According to some people close to the band, this time Garrett went through a crisis, part of which manifested in him embracing Christianity more fervently. That same year he was thrust right into the national spotlight. As the album was prepared for release, Bob Hawke called an election and the Nuclear Disarmament Party offered Garrett the top spot on their Senate ticket.
I recall going to a Midnight Oil rehearsal at this time and everyone was there but the singer, who was in full campaign mode. The band were conflicted: they supported their friend, but it was possible his crusade would cost them their life’s work. They were just on the brink of reaching the next level.
Garrett came within a whisker of the Senate seat and learned about real politics the hard way.
Up to this point, about 10 years since they first jammed in the school auditorium, Midnight Oil were kings of complaint rock. However, to some extent, the big targets of their songs were things like US imperialism, militarism, the bomb. Then everything changed. “It’s as though my life is divided into two halves,” Moginie says. “The first half is before the Blackfella Whitefella tour; and the second half is everything after.”
The Warumpi Band were a mostly Indigenous quartet who had a strong following in the Northern Territory. They invited Midnight Oil on a joint tour in mid-1986. At one of the first gigs the Warumpis finished to rapturous applause. The Oils launched into their show, and the audience quickly disappeared into the night. The lesson the band took away was that it was time to listen, not to lecture.
“For six weeks on that tour, both in the western desert and then the top end, I was almost mute. Hardly said a word,” Hirst says. “For me, that’s something. First of all, I couldn’t believe what I saw was happening in this country that I believed I knew. And also, you had to listen very carefully to the quiet information that was being given to you by elders, who speak very quietly. We just needed to shut up for a while and listen. I think that’s what we did. And it came out on the music we recorded.”
The Diesel and Dust album and the single Beds Are Burning moved on from the hard rock to a new kind of rhythm based on the feel of the Jeep on rough desert highways. Suddenly Midnight Oil had not only reinvented themselves but they had a song and a sound embraced by radio across the US and Europe.
More than chart positions and sales, Diesel and Dust matured the band. They were reacting directly to real world problems and real people. These private school boys from the leafy north shore (it’s always referred to as leafy) had real skin in these songs. The anger they felt at the dispossession they found in the desert was balanced by a deep love for the country and the landscape.
Blue Sky Mine and Diesel and Dust sold millions of copies in the US and Europe, especially France. Success has its price, though, and that’s time away from families and Australia. Months on end in buses not built for lead singers almost 2 metres tall.
Everything was going smoothly until Earth and Sun and Moon. While Midnight Oil were in the studio, the music world changed. Smells Like Teen Spirit was a line in the sand. Corporate rock sucked. Alternative, amateurish, angry was it for the day. There was a whole new posse of angry young men, from Pearl Jam and Nirvana to Ice-T and Tupac.
According to Moss, the problem came three days before Sony was to launch the Truganini single. The track reached #1 on the Alternative chart until, suddenly, the label’s support was withdrawn and the band lost their commercial momentum in the US. “They [Sony] fucked it completely,” says Moss. It was a great disappointment.
Although the Oils made three great albums in the late 90s to early 2000s, including their most angry and adventurous album Redneck Wonderland and the underrated Capricornia, they never quite regained their feet. They didn’t know where they fit or how to reach their audience. Garrett was increasingly drawn to activism. The others pursued different interests. In December 2002 Garrett left Midnight Oil for politics.
Nine years in parliament were hard fought. As the frontman for Midnight Oil or as a member of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Garrett had no filters. Suddenly, as a Labor minister, he had a boss. During his political career, he stopped whaling in the Southern Ocean and was behind a variety of other initiatives in education and the environment.
Meanwhile, the rest of Midnight Oil pursued various music projects until 2016, when someone suggested a victory lap tour. The response was overwhelming. The Great Circle tour took 77 dates in 16 countries, finishing at Sydney’s Domain, which is where Paul Clarke’s film starts. By the end of that tour, the musicians were physically spent. Moginie was effectively playing from a wheelchair. Hirst’s body was so broken he faced months of recovery.
The band that had begun as teenagers was past pension age. Moginie writes in The Silver River that he was ambivalent about continuing, but the pull of the magic was too great. If they continued, there had to be new material. Five years earlier they were washed up; by the 2020s they were putting together two albums – one with First Nations artists, and Resist, the final salvo from Midnight Oil.
Finally, on 3 October 2022, it was all over. The final set at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion went for more than three-and-a-half hours, flat chat. Environment minister Tanya Plibersek was in the mosh pit. You couldn’t help but reflect how this band, and a few others, changed the culture in this country. In 1973, Australian artists were rarely played on the radio or signed to a record deal. Australian writers used American geography in their desperate hope to succeed. In 1973, very few young Australians were concerned about land rights or environmental destruction, but Midnight Oil put all of those issues front and centre – even for those who were not fans of the band.
“Leaving Midnight Oil behind was like being cut adrift from a monumental ship but still subjected to its weight and pull,” Moginie once wrote. As are we all.
Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line premiered at Sydney film festival on Wednesday night and will be released in Australian cinemas on 4 July
