Midnight Oil.

'Oils Stand Tall'
Noel Mengel

MIDNIGHT Oil: Australia's greatest rock band. For anyone who witnessed the Oils on a stage, in some super-heated pub, in a stadium, at an outdoor festival, on the back of a truck in the desert, there was no question.

A night with Midnight Oil was about as good as rock 'n' roll can get.

Early memory: standing in a packed campus bar waiting to see my first Oils' gig, circa 1979.

Three microphone stands across the front of the stage, and the one in the middle towering way...up...there. Geez, this guy is going to be tall.

He was. The band played a long, teasing intro, then Garrett was there, always moving, striking shapes, grinning, sweat flying from that shaven head in the days when no one had a shaven head.

And there was something in that sound -- dynamic, kicking, spitting, soaring -- that sounded like...Australia. Sunburn. Sweat. Dust. Surf.

They didn't sound like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Byrds, The Stones, The Who, The Beatles, like prog or punk or plod or pop.

They just sounded like themselves, even before they had clearly defined their sound on record.

Driving it relentlessly along was drummer Rob Hirst, part Charlie Watts, part Keith Moon.

He splashed water on his floor tom, attacked it relentlessly, bouncing sticks into the ceiling, audience, as spraying water was captured by the spotlight.

Another memory: an Oils show at the old Surfair, Marcoola, in 1981, observing from close quarters while playing in the support band. No sign of Garrett at soundcheck or backstage. Cheeseclothed surfies roared: 'Oils, Oils, Oils.' We just played harder.

Just before showtime Garrett drove his hire car into the car park, calmly walked backstage. No Origin-style pep-talk from the coach or anything like that. But the moment the lights hit him on that stage, he became that other Peter Garrett.

In more than 20 years of seeing their shows, I can never remember them playing at anything less than their blazing best. No off nights, no Oasis-style dummy spits. If ever there was something amiss behind the scenes, they never let you see it.

What's more, they said things that mattered, planted ideas and never pandered to the lowest common denominator.

They emerged from the northern beaches of Sydney in a band called Farm.

At the end of 1976, Garrett completed his law degree at ANU and concentrated on the band, with the line-up firming around Hirst, guitarists Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey: the core line-up that would still be with them until the end, a chemistry later completed with bassist Bones Hillman.

Right from the start, Midnight Oil did it their way.

They refused to play on 'Countdown' and retained artistic control in a game where record companies, promoters and agents were used to winning every battle.

A political streak floated to the surface in their lyrics but was fully formed on their 1982 breakthrough album 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, a clear-eyed rethink of their sound and vision, less strident, more focused.

'I see sunburnt faces around with skin so brown/Smiling zinc cream and crowds,' Garrett sang on "The Power & The Passion". 'Flat chat. Pine Gap. In every home a Big Mac / And no one goes out back, that's that.'

And "Short Memory": 'Smallish man Afghanistan / A watchdog in a nervous land / They're only there to lend a hand.' And the closing line: 'In the tents new rifles, hey, short memory.'

Tim Winton said it best in his 'Kiss No Bum, Tug No Forelock' essay with the 20,000 Watt RSL compilation: 'The music contained an unmistakable atmosphere of the suburban Australian life...a jerky agitation, an itch I recognised.'

'Australia seemed about to stop thinking and just go shopping and here was a band anxious about our communal future.'

'This wasn't mere teen angst or personal teething trouble...At last there was an Australian band with something on its mind.'

And they made you want to jump and dance and shout.

They were more interested in the Australia outside the capital cities than any other band, too. In the '80s they went bush with the 'Blackfella/Whitefella' tour of the outback. Beds Are Burning, their Aboriginal land-rights anthem, might be the most important Australian rock song ever written.

They wrote songs called "Maralinga", "Kosciuszko", "Truganini", "Dreamworld", "Surf's Up Tonight".

Their last major Australian tour took them from Alice Springs to Darwin, Cairns, Mt. Isa and Capella.

Their last album, Capricornia, takes its name from Xavier Herbert's epic novel set in the country's north.

'Have you ever built your house in a town called Pissitaway?' Garrett sings.

'Well we do the same things that we always do/Nothing changes but the channel changes view.'

The song, by Jim Moginie, is called "Too Much Sunshine". Still trying to scratch that itch.

Unlike most albums by bands in their third decade, Capricornia is a great record.

At the time of its release, I wrote: 'No Australian band has lifted up so many people, delivered so many consistent albums, played so many great shows, kept finding ways to revitalise themselves and keep their audience challenged and entertained.'

Back on the northern beaches in 1976, I think they would have settled for that.
Courier Mail