tdh Opinions Reviews 20,000 Watt RSL

20,000 Watt RSL

Reviewed by Sanity Music Press

For 20 years Midnight Oil have been a fixture of the Australian music scene. Feisty, independent and wilfully stubborn, they've created a body of work which stands amongst the greatest creative contributions to modern Australian culture. Ten albums and 21 years into their career, the band has just released their first Greatest Hits Collection. Rob Hirst and Peter Garret speak to Music Press about life in the band that refuses to die.

The first thing you'll learn about Midnight Oil's new album - the enigmatically named 20000 Watt RSL - is that the members of the band aren't all that keen on the concept of a compilation album. For once, the band who have made a career out of delivering quotable quotes about their latest direction are pulling up a little short in the enthusiasm department.

"I guess in some ways the bad views these sorts of albums as a necessary evil", says Peter Garret, "but albums like this do give you the opportunity to lay a whole lot of stuff on the table. We've approached it from the point of view that these songs still have a lot of life, and a lot of meaning, so let's see if we can put them together in such a way as to make something quite special."

"I'll be honest and say there are several members of the band who were dead against it from the outset because they felt it had an element of a requiem about it. My own view was that this was always going to happen, it's one of those fairly inevitable things that happens in all artists' careers, so lets do it at the right time and make it as good as we can make it. It's like Scream in Blue - make it the best live album we can possibly make."

Phew, we've got that over with. If you want to hear some real enthusiasm, all you have to do is ask the band about the two new tracks which appear on 20000 Watt RSL. The tracks - What Goes On and current single White Skin Black Heart - are lifted from the all-but-completed new disc Redneck Wonderland, which is due for release in early 1998. Produced by Regurgitator's mainman, Magoo, the album reveals a radical left-turn towards a more experimental, contemporary-sounding recording.

"The two new tracks on the album have a different sound which is basically the result of our work in the studio with Magoo," says the band's drummer and co-songwriter Rob Hirst. "That's really the kind of sound we've gone for on Redneck Wonderland, the new album, which is to say it's a direct reaction to the last one. We've always been very reactive, in that sense."

In getting Garrett and Hirst to cast their minds back over 20 years in the spotlight as one of Australia's most important and popular bands - not to mention controversial, opionated and about 20 other adjectives - several things emerge. Firstly, the band is immensely proud of their musical heritage, and rightly so. Secondly, that the band is an organic, evolving beast given to ongoing self-examination and reassessment. If many bands at this stage in their careers are locked into a successful formula. Midnight Oil is the very opposite: constantly seeking to reject the past and move into the future. The fact that the five band's members often disagree only makes the process more interesting.

"The challenges change as you go on," says Hirst. "Our challenge now is to stay relevant, to make a record at this point in time that still sounds like a bunch of guy's who've never been to a studio before, with that same spontaneity and energy, and not be too smart about it and use all the little studio tricks we've learned in 20 years."

"This band has a virtually unlimited reach in terms of what it thinks it can do. The reason were still together is that we feel that way, and even though we don't all agree on everything, and even though we have to bounce ourselves off several different walls in the process, we do still arrive at things that are pretty good. I'd say we all feel incredibly fortunate to be in this ensemble that creates music together - and not only that, but to be actually going through a fertile period."

So there you have it: two Forty-something guys who still have both The Power and The Passion in large doses. A band who, despite the inevitable onset of age and the passage of years, refuses to mellow or lie down quietly. A band that clearly has more thana little life left.

"We exist in an industry where most artists don't write about anything about the world and its condition," says Garret. "We're in a minority, so we tend to stand out. So people have thought of us as the Political Rock Band with this dogma, this agenda. Which all ignores the fact that our music comes from jamming, from random scraps of ideas, from all the bits of inspiration that any artist feeds from. But we're not afraid of the fact that we have meaning in our songs, and we don't apologise for it. Why whitewash it when you can say it clearly?"

Reviewer: Unknown