MIDNIGHT OIL

MIDNIGHT OIL

FEATURES

''We'll save Australia Don't wanna hurt no kangaroo We'll build an All-American amusement park there They got surfin' too'

Randy Newman 1969

by Michael Davis

1988 has already seen some pretty bizarre sights— fortunately, not all of them on the negative side. Seriously, if someone had told you last year that Midnight Oil were about to break through to mainstream acceptance on the strength of a tune about giving part of Australia back to the Aborigines, you'd have been just a tad doubtful, right? But it's happened. Diesel And Dust has been sniffing around the Top 20 for a month as I write this and 'Beds Are Burning' is a bona fide hit single.

Although musically they've been a world-class rock band since 1979's Head Injuries album, and they've been Australian superstars since '82, the Oils have generally been considered Downunderdogs here. Lead singer/primary lyricist Peter Garrett's bald head has put him at odds with every haircut brigade around, at least until Sinead O'Connor exposed her pretty pate to public view. Garrett sang exclusively about Australian situations, and the band's arrangements were liable to veer off in unlikely directions at a moment's notice. They couldn't even get Columbia, their American record company, to release the songs from their 1985 Species Deceases EP in any form.

But their fortunes took a turn for the better at the turn of the year despite another series of setbacks. They had to break in a brand new bass player—Bones Hillman—after Peter Gifford retired from the road; then Garrett tore up his knee, smashing it against a road case, so the band had to postpone their U.S. tour for three weeks. But none of this affected the snowballing popularity of this band of musical activists who actually investigate social problems before writing about them.

I'm talking with drummer/singer/songwriter Rob Hirst about how the songwriting breaks down within the band. Although Garrett has the most visibility, both onstage and in his second career as a busy social activist, most of the music originates with keyboardist/guitarist/singer/songwriter Jim Moginie and/or Hirst. As a matter of fact, that's where Midnight Oil itself germinated.

'Jim and I and Andrew Jones, who was the first bass player, organized tours on our holidays while we were still in school,' Hirst recalls. 'We played to many surf audiences up and down the New South Wales coast; I used to book the venues myself and put the posters up. Eventually, I realized that I really didn't want to drum and sing lead so we advertised and Pete joined. He did a couple of coastal tours with us, then moved up to Sydney to join us full time. 'Round about that time, Martin (lead guitarist Rotsey) joined as well so the lineup's been the same since then except for the two changes on bass.

'Jim's and my writing partnership goes right back to when we first met as schoolkids,' he continues. 'We've been very fortunate that I instinctively approach music from a lyric and melodic and rhythmic way while Jim would approach it from a chordal. . . musician's way, if you like. He could compensate for my deficiencies and I could add melodic and arrangement ideas, something you either have a knack for or you don't. Most of the Oils' material has come about by combining those two ends. Then Martin comes in, saying that's good or that's dross, and Pete comes in, saying whether or not he can sing it, adding lyrics.'

Even after close to a ful decade of listening to the Oils, I (still can't listen to one of their songs and immediately know who did the lyrics for it. Their group aesthetic seems to be stronger than anyone's individual ego.

''I think that's part of why a band can and should be stronger than a bunch of musicians thrown together,' he nodded. 'Over time, the writers begin to be able to write for each other. Jim and I can sit down and we instinctively know what Pete can sing and what should be discarded. So much so that a song like 'Warakurna' was presented by Jim as a complete demo, where he played all the instruments, wrote all the lyrics, everything. The band's finished version was more or less an attempt to get as close to the demo as possible. That's happened in the past—'US Forces' was another example—where the person writing empathized with what the singer can do totally and there being no dispute.'

When I try to formulate a question about giving the band as a whole songwriting credits on Diesel And Dust, Hirst cuts me off at the comma.

'That was a mistake, actually,' he allows. 'The individual writers should have been credited. 'Warakurna' and 'Arctic World' and 'Sell My Soul' are Jim's, whereas 'Beds Are Burning' and 'Bullroarer' are more mine, if that gives you any guide.'

'Beds Are Burning' is proving to be the breakthrough song/video for Midnight Oil in this country, its hummable chorus in no way disguising its theme of Aboriginal land rights, a concern that carries over to the Diesel And Dust LP as a whole. What makes this more than just another piece of National Geographic-rock is that the Oils have done their homework. Their long history of political and social activism in Australia led to an invitation to write songs for the film Uluru—An Anangu Story, concerning the Aborigines regaining Uluru, or Ayers Rock.

''Manhattanization is coming Open your eyes if you dare Carry us on to the crossroads Come to your senses and care'

Moginie/Garrett 1985

'We wrote three songs,' relates Hirst: ' 'The Dead Heart,' an early version of 'Beds Are Burning' and another song.

They played The Dead Heart' through a public address system for the Aboriginals and through an interpreter. They said it fairly accurately represented what they wanted to say.

It went with the film and from that came the invitation to tour the settlements; while white folks in the cities were celebrating our bicentennial, we were getting an insight into what had happened to Aboriginal people over the last 200 years.'

It turned out to be much more than an exotic vacation or a fact-finding mission. According to Hirst, adapting the band's sound to the Outback environment in order to communicate with the Aboriginals changed the way they approach their music forever.

'That tour, which was called the Blackfella Whitefella tour and goes back over 18 months now, had a profound effect on us,' Hirst acknowledges. 'It not only influenced the lyric input but it also put the Oils into the third phase of our music. The first was a band picking up on the energy of English punk music, combining it with Australian elements, but basically getting the sound down live. The first albums were like that and Species Deceases as well. Then there was the phase of Nick Launay producing the band (10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1; Red Sails In The Sunset) making records that sound good rather than thrashing away. The third phase, beginning with Diesel, finds us turning away from doing typical Oils things like shifting gears five times during a song or layering electric guitars until your ears bleed. It's more taking the power of consistent rhythms and trying to put some of that sense of incredible space and distance that you get in the Australian environment that we had, which was our strongest musical tradition before World War II.'

That response set off bells in my head. Of course. The greater use of acoustic guitars, the more memorable melodies, the social concerns. What Midnight Oil have done is to re-invent folk-rock on their own continent. By drawing more deeply on their own roots, they're able to communicate better with others as well.

When Peter smashed his leg,' offers Hirst, ''I went to Ireland for ten days to have a listen to it. I was lucky enough to get to sit down in this farmhouse with this family who all played instruments. They played for us for hours and hours and I was just drinking it up; it was fantastic and it was compatible with every bit of music that I'd ever heard. We, of course, inherited that music when the Irish came over in enormous numbers during the potato famine in the 1850's.

'So that appears on the record, but so did an experience like sitting down with the elders of Kintore, one of the most remote and hostile settlements in Australia, and have the Aboriginals playing their music in that environment, under the clearest, brightest sky you'll ever see. Then hearing that sound evaporate into what they call The Great Quiet, their expression for not hearing any background noise, which you don't out there.'

Things like keeping a steady rhythm throughout a piece and leaving enough space so that you can hear it fade away when it's gone are new for Midnight Oil; theirs has been an urban music, full of contrasting sections vying with each other for attention, then changing direction, heading off somewhere new.

'That reached an extreme on an album like Red Sails In The Sunset, which is eleven songs with nothing in common all thrown together,' noted Hirst. 'We made it in Tokyo and at that time, we just had this attitude of any musical idea that came up was going to be accepted and worked upon. That's why you have a weird combination like 'When the Generals Talk' followed by a rocker like 'Best of Both Worlds.' Then that side ends with 'Bakerman,' played by a horn section that was a bunch of Japanese schoolkids who got let off for the afternoon to come down and play it. I'll leave it up to the fans and musicologists to decide whether it came off or not but having that latitude within the Oils helps explain how we've been able to stay together for so long.'

Red Sails In The Sunset was a highly-produced LP; in order to blow off some steam that had built up during the careful recording sessions, the group went back into the studio and cranked out the intense, angry EP Species Deceases. It harkened back to their more explosive early work and like the Place Without A Postcard and Head Injuries LPs, it can only be currently found in your local import bins.

'We got a very clear idea why,' Hirst shakes his head. 'I think that Columbia felt that Species, recorded in all its glory ill 'four or five days, was far too raw and brash and exciting to release. So they, decided, in their infinite wisdom, not to, which is a shame, because 'Hercules' and 'Progress,' particularly, have been staples of the live set.'

They're also more indicative of how the band sounds live—much more powerful than their records. They may have a hit single on the radio but that didn't stop a slamming pit from forming on the floor of the Hollywood Palladium the last time they played Los Angeles/

The drum kit that Hirst has put together to power the band reflects his philosophy of using what works, whether it's stylish or not, and updating his kit subtly, with some Australian-made devices.

'It's still bashing away on the old Ludwigs,' he admits.

''It's still a joy for me to play an acoustic drum kit. I can't play an electric drum kit because they don't bounce like what I'm used to playing. Plus, they don't sound as good, which is • why I prefer those old wooden drums from the '60s.

''My kit's always been divided in two,' he continues. ''The first two toms and the snare are very highly tuned and bouncy for the fast songs; the other two are lower, for the slower stuff.'

This doesn't mean Hirst is a stranger to sampling technology, just that he uses it sparingly.

'We've got a new Australian sampler,' he explains,

'which takes the sounds directly off the master tapes of the songs. We put them onto chips and they're played off Simmons pads. We're just using our own sounds, not the sampled sounds that you can buy. We sampled the snare and did all sorts of things to it to make it consistent live, depending on the acoustic environment, because you can't always rely on the halls.

'Really, though, my kit's just a ramshackle collection of Ludwig drums from the '60s, all thrown together with a big water tank that we found out »n the desert, which is miked up as well,' he concludes. 'I play it sometimes in the middle of that solo in 'Power And The Passion.' I was playing it in Melbourne recently and I heard someone else playing it as well. I turned around and Paul Hester from Crowded House popped his head out. Somehow, without telling me, he had crawled up the inside of the tanks and was playing it from the inside. He was standing on a roadie's shoulders; then he sort of popped out the top.'

Since he brought up 'Power And The Passion,' the tune from 10... 1 that first got the Oils' foot in the American door, I figured I'd ask him about the groundbreaking drum solo on that tune; how much was flesh and how much was machine?

'That was based on a Linn,' he remembers. 'Then it was played acoustically over the top. I doubled the pattern acoustically so it sounded real and then in the middle, I did all those punctuations and the solo of course. At the time, I was very reticent about using the Linn. Actually, I was sort of bullied into it by Nick Launay, who was quite right because it needed to be a dance track and it needed to have that effect.

'I mean, I don't have any problem with rhythm machines. We don't use 'em live but we have used 'em in the studio simply because for some areas of rhythm, they provide a mechanical function which is what you want. It was great for recording 'Power And The Passion,' We recorded it in the Townhouse studio in London; anything you hit or throw or smash in that room sounds great. The solo ends with one of those neon lighting tubes being thrown against a brick wall. Had a lot of fun; had to ciean up after it as well.'

Just what we need: a drummer (and band) able to enjoy a bit of messy fun but refusing to ignore the responsibilities that come with it. About time they started to clean up over here. ®