Profile: Midnight Oil (Original article online here) "I can still see the red dirt and clay on our equipment," muses Midnight Oil guitarist Jim Moginie, referring to his band's legendary "Black Fella White Fella" Australian desert tour of July 1986. During that long, hot month seven years ago, the band visited Aborigine tribes scattered across Australia's outback. Martin Rotsey, the band's other guitarist, recounts, "We got out our acoustic guitars and the elders said, 'We'll sing a few songs, and you sing a few songs.' So we played some well-known songs like Dylan's 'Blowin' In The Wind' and 'The Last Time.' They'd respond with these ancient chants. There we were, playing songs about 10 or so years old, and they were doing things that could have been 10,000 years old." Midnight Oil took away a load of wisdom from their primal outback experience, and applied it to 1988's brilliant Diesel and Dust, evidenced by the cries of "Beds Are Burning," the hit single which gave the band an instant international following. On Midnight Oil's new Columbia album, Earth And Sun And Moon, the band delved deeper into volatile subject matter. Says Moginie, "It doesn't come naturally for us to write songs about luuuv. We have more of a European outlook. We don't separate the issues into 'this is music, this is politics' - it's all part of the same thing." It's been a long road from Sydney to Earth. The band hooked up in 1975 when Moginie and Rotsey were in high school. It was the close of the "era of the star guitar player," according to Moginie, as his influences moved from rock stalwarts like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Led Zeppelin to the white-hot punk of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. The band played seamy pubs and dicey outdoor gigs, up to 300 shows a year. The Oils hung tough, eventually garnering attention with the new-wavey "Power And The Passion" from 1982's 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1. Further acclaim came with 1985's Red Sails In The Sunset, followed by the blistering Species Deceases EP. But it was Diesel And Dust's churning "Beds Are Burning" that put the band over the top, with its driving acoustic track augmented by Rotsey's Strat and Jazzmaster lines and Moginie's E-Bowed Telecaster howling over the choruses. That album was followed by the knockout punch of 1990's Blue Sky Mining. Recorded using analog equipment, Earth And Sun And Moon displays a more intimate feel than the digital sheen of Blue Sky Mining. "We wanted to get something wild, hairy, and spontaneous onto this record," Moginie says. That spark is evident on "Bushfire" where Moginie fingers a Dobro while Rotsey waves his magic wah during the solo and outro sections. "You can feel the mood underneath," adds Rotsey. "We built that up with a rhythmic track rather than resorting to the computers to fill it in." And say, is that a sitar on "Drums of Heaven"? "You mean the pumpkin with strings?" jokes Rotsey, who provided the apocalyptic squeals and bends on the latter half of the track. Explains Moginie, "We've had this fascination with acoustic instruments ever since we heard the Stones' 'Street Fighting Man.' And the sitar is just another acoustic instrument with strings on it, isn't it?" When not strumming an acoustic instrument, Moginie plays a customized '60s Gibson SG or a '70s Gretsch, and plugs into a Marshall JCM900 amp, sometimes relying on a Boogie Coliseum for studio work. Rotsey rocks a '70s Les Paul Pro through his own JCM900, and also stomps a Big Muff and various Boss pedals. So when Oil played for the natives, what was the reaction? "I think we may have been too loud for them," says Moginie. Rotsey concurs: "It's really quiet out there. There's not a noise for a thousand miles." Except, that is, for the sizzling of Midnight Oil. From Guitar Player, by Mike Mettler (Note: this article has been approved for reproduction.)