There's a TV commercial running on television stations in Sydney that explains a lot about modern-day Australia. The ad is for McDonald's, and seeks to show just how Australian McDonald's really is. As a slow pan across Ayers Rock dissolved into a similar view of a Big Mac, we are assured that "prime Aussie beef" and "fresh Tasmanian potatoes" give McDonald's "the very best of everything" Down Under.

So much for the vegemite sandwich.

Such a sales pitch seems almost absurd on this side of the Pacific, where we feel confident that Australia is all tart accents and kangaroo jokes, while McDonald's is as American as Uncle McSam. On Australian TV, though, the spot runs between episodes of "Dallas," "Simon and Simon" and "The A-Team," and seems nothing out of the ordinary. Especially not when you can walk, as I did, down a street in suburban Sydney and pass a 7-11, a Colonel Sanders' Kentucky-Fried Chicken stand and a Carvel Ice Cream shop in the space of three blocks.

That's not to say that Australia is turning into the "all-American amusement park" Randy Newman satirically prophesied in "Political Science." But the cultural shadow cast by the United States is pretty long down there. Even the music scene, so recently hyped on this side of the Pacific as the Next Big Wave, seems much the same. According to the Australian charts in early April, the top single was by USA for Africa, and the number one album was Bruce Springsteen's Born In The USA.

"Y'see," explains singer Peter Garrett, as the subject comes up in a conference room at Midnight Oil's offices in Sydney, "there's this argument about the universality of rock 'n' roll. But there's not much of that happening at all. Really, it's just the Americanization of rock 'n' roll." In other words, he says, adjusting the world's tastes to meet American standards, a sort of rock n' roll colonialism voluntarily imposed upon bands eager for the big bucks American success can deliver.

"We just wanted to reverse that flow a little bit."

Which is why Midnight Oil refused to "write for America, as many Australian bands have done," drummer Rob Hirst puts it. Instead, the band has taken a like-it-or-lump-it attitude toward presenting Red Sails In The Sunset, Midnight Oil's most powerful - and uncompromisingly Australian - album, to America.

On the one hand, the record delivers the perfect compromise between art-rock intricacy and pub-rock ferocity, widely varying the music's textures while simultaneously maximizing its impact. On the other hand, the songs tend to address topics that leave most Yanks yawping in ignorance. This isn't the Australia of bush hats and sheep dip, but a country as complex as our own.

A country, needless to say, most Americans don't know beans about.

The members of Midnight Oil acknowledge that, though what to do about it frankly stumps them. In fact, Hirst half-jokes that the reason the band wants to tour America is that, "We've too much money now. We want to go and lose it all, so there'll be a challenge left. So where can you lose money faster than anywhere else? We figured we'd do a big American tour."

Truth be told, though, there's a genuine feeling within the band that it's time for a fair exchange. "Obviously, we're introducing stuff that makes sense to Australians that Americans aren't going to be able to acknowledge straight away," Garrett says. "But we'd say that we've had Hollywood, and all that's gone with that, for many, many years. (Australians) watch a lot of American television, they listen to a lot of American music, and they're eating a lot of American food. Their life is determined by the actions of American people."

"We think about this a lot when we consider travelling overseas," adds Hirst. "For instance, the Japanese version of Red Sails comes with an inner sleeve that goes to great length - or appears to, my Japanese not being very good - explaining what this band is on about."

"We've got a problem, because what we're saying is very important to us. But in half the world, either they can't understand us because they don't know the language, or they can't understand us because they don't know where we're coming from.

"And we are making it more difficult with each album. With the last album, 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, 'Power And Passion' got quite a bit of airplay as a single. So the logical thing for us to have done, in terms of going after international success in a big way, would have been to hone our music into one area; not be so specific about place names and famous people here, which mean nothing outside Australia; and go travel our asses off, the way a lot of Australian bands in the 70s did, AC/DC being an example. Just wear people down with great live playing until we couldn't be ignored anymore.

"In actual fact, we're going the opposite way. So far, at least, we haven't made any concessions."

The Sound of Fury

Midnight Oil began life on the pub circuit in Sydney, origins that are far from unique in Australian rock. "Other bands you might have heard of who were spawned from this very apprenticeship," says Hirst, "would be people like Cold Chisel, Rose Tattoo, Angel City. These bands were characterized by the fact that their attack was loud, and it appealed to people who spent their days either in very hard jobs or unemployment queues, and wanted their music hard and fast."

Going on that much, it's tempting to draw comparisons to the working-class bars of America or Britain, but pub life in Australia is not so simple. For one thing, Australians head to their locals for reasons other than why Americans hit the bars. "Most of the year 'round, you've got a hot climate," explains guitarist Martin Rotsey, "and Australians are very active as far as sport in concerned. And it's like a social occasion after you've done something energetic to sit down and drink and rave about it to one another, right?"

Weekdays, this might be at neighbourhood pubs, which in Australia are more common at street corners that traffic lights, but come the weekend, many Aussies flock to huge venues accommodating 1,500 people or more. Understandably, this changes the dynamic of bar-band music somewhat.

"For the pubs, putting on entertainment is not really drinking and music going hand-in-hand," Rotsey says. "We're at the pubs to get entertained." For that matter, the bands aren't used as a draw to sell alcohol, as is the case here in the States, for the big money-makers in many of the large outfits are the poker machines.

Consequently, the only way a band like Midnight Oil could survive was by fighting for attention. Garrett sums up the basic aesthetic as "Play loud," while Peter Gifford adds, "At the big houses, you can't hear the band - it's too crowded."

"At the big houses," counters guitarist Jim Moginie, "you can't get to the bar because it's too crowded."

Where Midnight Oil cut its teeth, though, inattention was sometimes a blessing, because the surfing crowd which built their first following rarely hesitated to express displeasure.

"They wouldn't put up with any bullshit," explains Rotsey, and Hirst adds, "You throw a slow song on, then exit out the back door before the beer glasses start heading in your direction. It's a little bit like those Southern clubs where they put up the chicken wire. It's a great apprenticeship for having records, because if you can survive those days, you can play anything."

"Yeah," laughs Moginie, "I wouldn't want to walk into some of those pubs that we played with the Red Sails set."

It's hard for the American listener to get a sense of just how far Midnight Oil has moved from its pub rock roots, for the only albums readily available in this country, 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, and Red Sails In The Sunset, are the exceptions, not the rule. For instance, Midnight Oil, the band's 1978 debut, is stripped down and basic, espousing hard rock sentiments with brisk, new wave efficiency and no small amount of grit. Hirst's description -- "putting a live show in the studio and trying to come up with the best answer," - explains a lot of the rawness, but also offers a clue to the band's edge. "All the bands of the late 60s and the early 70s were our influences," he explains, " and I think what the punk explosion did for us was to say, 'Look, that's the natural way the band plays; let's make energy the bottom line for the band.' It still is. I think that's the one thing that puts us apart from most other bands in this country."

Maybe. But the most obvious differences now are stylistic, for Midnight Oil has taken eclecticism to new heights, mostly through a series of false starts. Consider Place Without A Postcard, produced in 1981 by Glyn Johns and which seemed to set the Oils down the road to heavy rock heaven. It was the perfect commercial distillation of the band's live sound; maybe that's why the next album, 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, was built around dense textures and intricate arrangements, taking a sort of hooligan's approach to art rock.

Says Garrett, though, "All that happened when we got to 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, was that the whole thing where musicians who want to create a sound will go and look for an instrument or a way of creating it which is a bit different from just a guitar and an amp."

The new stuff is far more involved. Not only has the band broadened its instrumental axis, with Moginie adding keyboards (and, in the studio, clarinet) and Gifford the Chapman Stick, but the use of these extra sounds is a step away from the brash functionalism of the band's early days. Some of it echoes the work with Glyn Johns, as with "Best Of Both Worlds" from Red Sails, where a careful blend of brass and guitar lends tremendous impact to the verses.

But there's a lot more than cleverly-hyped hard-rock guitar running through the album. In fact, complains Hirst, some fans find the sound of Red Sails a bit too diverse for their liking. "A lot of people think our music doesn't make sense, that it is far too polarized," he states flatly.

Which seems only natural for an album that, on one song ("When The Generals Talk"), deals in hip hop-style tape edits, while on another ("Helps Me Helps You"), sets its rhythms with a didjeridu drone. Eclectic? That's not the half of it.

This is no mere muddle, though, for each unlikely device makes perfect sense when heard in context. It isn't simply Garrett's belief in looking for the perfect sound, because there's a considerable structural acuity to these recordings. The Oils have discovered how to develop their material so that the arrangement shifts gears as the melody accelerates and decelerates, and that allows the song to coast along smoothly. As a result, "Who Can Stand In The Way" is able to work its way through hard rock and rap from a misty electric guitar intro to a duelling acoustic blues guitar finale without really straying form its basic melodic idea.

Of course, reproducing all this live is a different matter altogether. Moginie, with his rack of keyboards and assortment of guitars, seems forever to be leaping from instrument to instrument, while Hirst must divide his attention between his drum kit, drum machines and the vocal duties he shares with Garrett. As the material has grown more texturally varied, the instrumental switch-offs have mushroomed. "Which makes the live show an exhausting thing to play," admits Hirst, "as well as witness. But we're sort of honing our thing." Indeed, Rotsey admits to having abandoned his attempts to use Vox amps live, because a normal outfit wasn't loud enough, while with a full array, "it begins to look like a music shop up there."

But the band's approach is so communal - even though most of the writing is done by Moginie, with either or both Hirst and Garrett -- that scaling down the arrangements is as easy as building them in the studio. "I mean, we've been playing together for a long time now," says Garrett. "So in a sense, once you've built up that kind of thing, it doesn't really matter what sort of music you find yourself writing or performing or playing. It's going to come out sounding like Midnight Oil. Because it is.

"I mean, we've been called a heavy metal band, we've been called a punk band, we've been called an art rock band. But people here don't try to whack a label on you like they do in America. Here, they'll listen to it; if they like it, great."

Helps You, Helps Me

Last year, Peter Garrett did something rock singers never do. He ran for the Australian Senate. This was no joke candidacy. As Garrett says, "It was deadly serious." Garrett, though running as a single-issue candidate, chose the nuclear question as his focus, and hit home with a lot of Australians. "There hadn't been anyone in this country who's articulated the anti-nuclear arguments well," he says, "and I think that I was able to do that. I was serious about it.

"Maybe," he shrugs, "I was just lucky, because I'm a lawyer, and I can speak the language if I have to. There was a feeling in the straight media, who didn't know us, that it was just a rock 'n' roll gimmick. But our audience, and a lot of people in this country, know that we're serious about the issues that we think are important, and the benefits that we've been active in show that we mean it."

Garrett did well, drawing the support of intellectuals like writer Patrick White as well as rank-and-file voters, but in the end fell victim to Australian politics.

"Briefly," explains Rob Hirst, "Peter got many more primary votes - that's the first vote you cast - than the Democrat, who was the guy he was running against for the vacant seventh position. But owing to a system of preferences in this country, whereby there are one-two-three-four preferences, the second and third preferences are weighted as much as the primary votes. If the major parties in this country - which are the Liberals and the Labour - allot their preferences to one side or the other, then those secondary votes, those twos and threes and fours and things, can actually swamp the primary votes. And that's what happened: In a quirk of cynicism, the Australian Labour Party gave its preferences to its traditional enemies, the Liberals, and, having done that, that completely swamped Pete's chances."

It's a hard reality, but strangely typical of the view Midnight Oil takes of Australian politics and history. The only trick for American listeners is understanding the key to these issues. Take, for instance, "Jimmy Sharman's Boxers," off Red Sails In The Sunset. Over here, it just seems a saga of hell on the boxing circuit, where drunkenness and physical abuse are the voluntary limits of the participants' universe. But when you understand who Sharman's boxers were, the song takes on an entirely new aspect. "Jimmy Sharman was a boxing troupe entrepreneur during most of this century," explains Hirst, "and he made a travelling show, half of which was make up of aboriginal boxers, who were drawn from the Outback of Australia, northern Queensland and places. And as with the mobility of blacks in America, whose only way up was music or sport, these Aboriginals would join up with boxing as a way out of poverty, and they'd get to travel. But he's a rather controversial character now, owing to the conditions which he ran those tents."

Of course, America, not having aborigines, should find such songs meaningless. Or should they? Consider the issue of aboriginal land rights. "Kosciuszko," also from Red Sails, "is about mining rights versus aboriginal rights, which is a big issue here," Hirst says. In the U.S., the same issue is being addressed in the courts through Indian land rights cases, with similar exploitative deals and legal double-crosses in pursuit of natural resources. So who says Americans can't understand what Midnight Oil is on about?

Of course, there's one song on the new album any American can understand, with footnotes. Called "Harrisburg," it's as chilling a depiction of the Three Mile Island debacle as you're likely to hear. "The words for that were actually taken from a poem by an Australian poet named David Gibbons," says Moginie, who wrote the music. "It's a very long poem, as he wrote it; we just took a few of the lines, with his permission, and more or less constructed a song around it. It was very simply, very succinctly put, instead of propagandizing. That's what attracted us to it in the first place."

Does it seem odd that TMI should be a major issue Down Under, far away from any potential fallout? "I think we're fascinated that it isn't a major issue in America," Garrett counters. "It's a major issue everywhere in the world, Australia no different than anywhere else. All that's happened in the United States is that the nuclear weapons question is always intrinsically linked to ideologies and national pride, that sort of stuff. The nuclear issue's been covered up, really. But I think in Australia we have a sense that we don't have to inherit all the incredible problems that America and Europe have, and that we can make some stand for ourselves, and for the Pacific area."

Is "Harrisburg," then, more of a message to the world?

"It's the American single, mate," laughs Garrett.

Sidebar: Burning of the Midnight Lamp

Rob Hirst uses a drum kit compiled of various Ludwig and Premier drums - the actual assortment varies - with Ludwig and Premier hardware, and an SDS 7 Simmons set he uses "very sparingly. I've also used LinnDrums and [Oberheim] DMX rhythm machines." His cymbals are a mix of Paiste and Zildjian, "big cymbals. 14-inch Paiste ripple high-hats; the crash cymbals are all 20-inch and 22-inch. The small ones break and don't sound good." His drums are fitted with white Remo Ambassador heads, "because they're clean and they ring," and his sticks are thin and wooden, "like 5As and stuff."

When recording Red Sails In The Sunset, however, he used Yamaha drums, and then dubbed the cymbal parts later with "whatever was hanging 'round the studio." He never records with cymbals, by the way, "because in the acoustic environments where we record drums, the cymbals just crash over everything."

Jim Moginie plays a Gretsch solid body, outfitted with GHS .010s, through two Carlsboros - "They're an English amp, and when I went American we couldn't get any, so I used Roland Jazz Chorus amps, which are pretty similar." His guitar effects are limited to a Choron 30 tremolo unit, and a volume pedal. His acoustic guitar is a Washburn, with GHS medium lights.

His keyboard setup includes a Yamaha CP-7 piano, run through a Boss flanger; a Yamaha YC-25D organ, through and old Roland chorus; a DX7; and a Casio VL-Tone. "And a Yamaha Portasound, which I got in Japan. It's got a cheap burn-on of a dog barking, various sounds like that. It's quite a weird little number."

Martin Rotsey usually plays a stock '63 Stratocaster, although his favourite guitar is a Rickenbacker twelve-string, with a custom-built twelve-piece bridge. His acoustic is also a Washburn, and he, too, uses GHS .010s, although he adds, "We sort of change a lot, just get a box of something. We're liable to use something else the next week." Both he and Moginie use Jim Dunlop picks, "so we can swap. It's more convenient live." His amps are 100 watt Marshalls, with a single cabinet, and his effects are Boss overdrive and graphic pedals.

Onstage, Peter Gifford plays "a pretty old Fender Precision," which currently sports Bill Lawrence pickups, but which he plans to change to Mighty Mites. His amp is an Ampeg SVT head, which ran through four 15-inch JBL's, although, he adds, "now I've got Electro-Voices installed in two of the boxes." His strings are Rotosound Swing Bass, or GHS Light if Rotosounds aren't available. As for effects, "I usually just pick up the throw-offs from the guitar players," currently a Boss chorus and flanger, and Rat distortion. In the studio, though, he played an Ibanez Musician bass, and an Ibanez single-pickup fretless.

Peter Garrett's only instruments are a couple of Marine Band harmonicas, although he does allow that "occasionally, I'll pick up an Ovation six-string acoustic, and wave it around my head." Mike of choice is a Shure SM58.

From Musician Magazine, by J.D. Considine

(Note: this article has not been approved for reproduction.)