A ferocious intensity: that is the best way to describe Midnight Oil when they were at their peak. For anyone lucky enough to experience the band on stage, whether it be at a cavernous entertainment centre or a sticky pub, it was as though the Oils might explode at any moment, taking out their audience too. Driving bass and drums, duelling guitars, rousing choruses and a singer who danced as if he had been shot out of a washing machine; even on record, especially the earlier ones, it could sound as though the speakers would catch fire.
What might it have been like to be a member, recording 13 studio albums and an enviable suite of number-one singles, touring the world and garnering the adoration, often obsession, of fans?
Jim Moginie, co-founder, co-songwriter, guitarist and keyboardist, attempts to answer that question in The Silver River, a memoir of music, family and home. Well, in a way.
When he first sat down to document his Midnight Oil experiences in Ireland in 2010, Moginie wanted to produce “an instruction manual” for his children to “better understand their father” – but he wanted the work to be “writerly” too.
Towards the beginning, he evokes a night in 2007 when Midnight Oil were on a hiatus and he was about to perform at an insalubrious venue near Wollongong, New South Wales with his band Jim Moginie & the Family Dog. Pitifully low ticket sales. Playing songs on borrowed instruments. Drunk blokes wanting to reminisce about his old band. It is a scene both clear-eyed and heartbreaking – here was a musician trying to free himself from his past but getting a lesson in how inescapable it is, and how hard it can be starting from scratch.
In no way is Midnight Oil a rags-to-riches tale: the founding members attended some of Sydney’s most prestigious private schools. For his part, Moginie was raised by adoptive parents on Sydney’s wealthy north shore. The memoir begins there, then follows as he forms the band with drummer and co-songwriter Rob Hirst in 1971, recruiting the imposing Peter Garrett as frontman and finding success on their own terms – the music industry didn’t know what to do with this audacious lot who wanted to write songs about catching the bus to Bondi and Armistice Day. Skyhooks they were not.
But Moginie soon began to struggle. Indeed, he repeatedly confesses to feeling that Midnight Oil became a heavy weight. By the time the band was recording Earth and Sun and Moon in 1992, he was worried about a newfound “radio-friendliness and safer melodic nature” – but he didn’t want to upset his bandmates. “My identity was being swallowed up by the need to be faceless men – Easter Island statues with guitars.”
A few pages later, Moginie revisits that metaphor: “The band demanded so much from one another, silently and not so silently. I was operating behind the united front, the Easter Island statues where the party line ruled, the moving segment of a corporate caterpillar.”
No doubt writing a rock memoir is challenging: fans will want all the gossip – infighting, sordid touring stories – as well as insight into the creative process, all the while expecting the same artistry in a book that goes into creating a great song. But frustratingly we are given few insights into the process; albums come and go, the writer seeming to not know what to think about them any more, and the reader is tempted to conclude the band just cobbled songs together like carpenters. (Moginie would go on to work with Silverchair, Sarah Blasko and Neil Finn, among many others, so he must know a thing or two about creativity.)
Despite the clearly inexhaustible work ethic, how the band worked remains a mystery too, save a few more colourful observations: Hirst was good at staring into the distance during photo shoots, Midnight Oil once shared a joint that had been smoked by Bob Dylan, and Garrett became the band’s CEO. Although Moginie writes that he was profoundly moved by a 1986 tour through the Western Desert and the Top End with Warumpi Band, he admits he was always more interested in the music than the politics.
The memoir changes direction when Moginie describes finding his birth parents in his 40s. This material is genuinely affecting, revealing a trauma that is multidimensional and never leaves the body. About meeting his birth mother in Goulburn NSW, he writes: “She was more fragile than I had imagined, with an expression on her face that looked happy, scared and frozen all at once … There seemed to be a light radiating out of her in all directions.”
Hours later, when driving back to Sydney with his partner, Moginie fell asleep in the passenger seat, exhausted. “It felt strangely like the sleep of a metamorphosis or a transfiguration. When an actor takes off his mask he reveals his true identity.”
While the memoir is lyrical in parts, some sections are thinly sketched, and the later Midnight Oil years are dashed off as if written in an email on a deadline. The overall effect of the book is one of sadness: a boy from the suburbs wanted to play guitar in a band for a living primarily because he felt a need to “belong”, and that dream was fulfilled to a stratospheric extent, but ultimately it became a beast of burden.
Towards the end of The Silver River, Moginie shares a brief but illuminating episode. In 2022, a Midnight Oil concert in Canberra is cancelled by police at the last minute due to heavy rain. The next day, Moginie is confronted by a fan who chastises him and the band for not announcing the cancellation themselves.
“He was so rude to you, Dad,” Moginie’s daughter tells him. “People expect so much from you.”
The Silver River by Jim Moginie is out now through HarperCollins
