The ritzy clubs and hotels which scatter the village, built over recent years to cash in on a new-found tourism industry, are empty; the wet season brings with it the end of the tourist trade.

The new buildings have done more than just change the landscape of Broome. The shift from pearling centre to holiday resort has forced the town to acknowledge the twentieth century, but there's still a spirit of old-fashioned colonial community.

This communal bond fascinates Rob Hirst. In his eyes, the place presents tangible elements of an ideal society, a working-model for a discrimination-free Australia. He eagerly points out how the "sons and daughters of Asian pearling luggers mix freely with Aboriginal kids and Anglo-Saxons from the south." He calls it a unique melting pot. "People in Broome are like a real community," he enthuses.

His words are expressed with the passion of a local but the pin-point side-burns which reach across his face brand him an outsider. And everyone knows the only outsiders in town this Sunday evening are Midnight Oil. The band have been around for the last four days filming a clip to "In The Valley," the second single from their eighth studio album Earth and Sun and Moon, and word is out that they might jump up onstage tonight at the old Roebuck Hotel.

In anticipation, 200 people cram into the beer-garden of the venue which sits in the middle of China Town, Broome's main drag. When the resident local band Scrap Metal finish their set, they invite the Oils to the stage. The band borrows Scrap Metal's instruments, and despite having only played a handful of shows in the last year, give a typically electric 40-minute performance which focuses heavily on material from Earth and Sun and Moon.

It's the first show the Oils have played since completing the album, the first chance to judge reactions to fully arranged songs such as the psychedelic-drenched "Outbreak of Love" and the neo-patriotic "Truganini," the first single from the disc. So, after the show, the Oils are on a high.

A few weeks later, back in Sydney and in the middle of preparations for a world tour, the memories of the Broome show are still vivid in the Oils's consciousness. "Shows like that really want to make you play again," gushes Hirst.

Peter Garrett was similarly elated. "It was terrific," he says. "No roadies, no light shows, no nothing. We just rocked up and played in front of a totally open sea of faces."

One of the main aims of the new project was to create music that was accessible on all scales, from a local beer-barn to a stadium in South America. The Broome show was the first indication they got it right. "You've got to still be able to do it like that," says Garrett. "That's the thing about the band: If you want to get to the bottom of how people hang together, they actually hang together by responding to the same guitar chords and having an underlying consensus about what makes the world go around. And what they want to do in it, without owning one another's morality or ideology particularly but just... you know... diversity in Marshall amps. That's the secret of success: tolerance, diversity and Marshall amps."

For Garrett, the performance in Broome marked the end of a natural cycle of Earth and Sun and Moon which began in Adelaide two years earlier. Becoming disillusioned with the health of rock, Garrett - along with guitarists Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey - travelled to the Womad festival in search of some guidance. "I was sort of at a point where I just felt the whole rock thing was too much of a charade and it was too limiting and everybody was just repeating themselves," explains Garrett. "And if Guns N' Roses are the biggest rock band in the world, you know, I'd prefer to be learning chess.

"We went down to Womad and we heard all these amazing people performing their music without hangers on, without backstage passes, without ostentatious, shallow, kind of would-be glamorous fatuousness and it really just seemed to make a lot of sense to us. So, we thought, 'Oh well, it's a reason to keep playing because these people are really doing it genuinely and there's just no bullshit there,' so we came back and started doing the record. It was a good experience."

Smiling, he leans forward, raising his voice and a hand: "I wouldn't say it was a seminal, moving experience, but it was a good one."

The first course of action, the band decided, was to rid itself of all technological aids: the sequencers and samplers, which had worked their way on to the Oils albums in the Eighties, were outcast.

Hirst says the success of 1992's live album, Scream in Blue, reiterated to the band there was still an audience who appreciated and wanted "real people playing real instruments." He points to the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as further evidence of this. "Although they remind us a lot of bands that we've heard in the past, the fact is they're great players and they're twisting it enough to make it their own. That's all you've got to do. This reinventing of the wheel totally is fabrication but if you can just twist it slightly, you've got your own thing and that's what it's about."

With an artistic vision of the new work taking shape, the Oils emerged from a year-long musical exile and regrouped in February 1992.

The break had proved to be a period of change and reassessment for the Oils. For the first time, members started stepping out of the collective womb and became involved in musical projects outside the band. While Rotsey and bassist Bones Hillman escaped the music industry completely, Hirst went off and recorded and album, Ghostwriters, with Dorland Bray (ex-Do Re Mi) and Rick Grossman (Hoodoo Gurus), and Moginie added his talent to a new Neil Murray record. The spreading of musical wings was a point of contention in the Oils office for a while - such acts contradicting the band's long standing convention of remaining detached from the music world around it - but it was finally agreed, according to Hirst, that "whatever the individuals are able to create, either musically or politically outside, it's not really going to equate to the sort of impact this band has had and potentially can have. Fundamentally there's a belief that this band is something worth preserving."

Together again, the band locked themselves away in a small rehearsal room in Sydney and built up a pool of some 18 songs and dedicated the early months of 1992 to putting them through what Garrett calls "the mutual discard society."

It's a luxury which circumstances did not allow for 1990's Blue Sky Mining and Garrett believed it proved detrimental to the album. "I think we just went into the studio in Blue Sky Mining with the success of Diesel and Dust hanging around," he says. "I think there's lots of tensions at work when you do that. It was like, Diesel worked but we didn't want to do that again and we didn't have a lot of songs that were quite ready, so we went in with the songs that were there.

"They were quite good songs but we hadn't worked up and played them together as a band that much because we'd been touring quite a lot. And I think the producer (Warne Livesey) had an approach to it which was to try to make each song bigger than it deserved to be. And we got there with it - it's not a bad record - but it just relied on machines and production techniques to make the songs come to life."

From the Blue Sky Mining experience, the band started defining what they wanted from the new sessions. The focus was on songs that could be played on just guitar, bass and drums "and we wanted things that had a reasonably immediate feel to them, that weren't too anal," adds Garrett. "Midnight Oil can get terribly anal and cerebral about its music because everybody's sitting around all day trying. Eventually the trying can lose life. So we wanted to make sure it didn't lose its life."

Once the band had a rough song blueprint for the album, they moved into Megaphon studios in the industrial suburb of St. Peters to begin work on demos.

The small, plain room - set among factories and warehouses - fit perfectly into the scope of what was being created. Impressed by the ambience captured on the demos, the Oils decided to use the studio for the record proper.

Improvements had to be made: a new control room was built, another room had half 44-gallon drums affixed to the walls. The renovations meant time was lost and when producer Nick Launay arrived to begin work, the hammering of nails was the only rhythm coming out of Megaphon.

It had been eight years since Launay had worked with the Oils, having produced 1983's 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and 1985's Red Sails in the Sunset. When family commitments meant he couldn't continue the partnership, it was he who had recommended fellow-Englishman Warne Livesey, who the Oils subsequently used on 1987's Diesel and Dust and Blue Sky Mine.

"We couldn't find anybody else that we liked better to do it," says Garrett of Launay. "We'd stayed in touch with him, we enjoyed his company, we admired his work and he was quite open to the idea of going to somewhere like Megaphon and seeing if it could work. He's a mate."

The emphasis in the studio was on live performance and the room was set up like a garage jam, each member in eye-contact. Hirst believes it was crucial to the recording. "Regardless of what people say, experience has shown that even if you can see people, but you're blocked off with glass, a cabin-fever sets in and you just don't play the same way. It's an intangible thing but it's got to do with the chemistry of the band. And if you've been playing together as long as we have, it's important that we actually play physically together and you pick up all those intangible signals."

The spirit of redefining and developing the band's chemistry was sustained throughout the sessions. And after five months in the studio, a transformed Midnight Oil emerged.

Midnight Oil 1993 is a much more world-weary beast than the anthem-chanting moral guardian of the past. From Garrett's opening statements of, "Well, I'm as old as the hills and young as the day/Nobody sees things in quite the same way" ("Feeding Frenzy") - delivered over swirling Hammond and piercing guitars - the change in attitude and style is striking.

The images of Earth and Sun and Moon - as the title suggests - are all engulfing. From the cosmic view of the title track through to the solitude of "In the Valley," it's obvious that Oils have dug deep into their collective soul and uncovered another level of emotional depth.

"I suppose in a musical and lyrical sense, we are saying that there are unfolding possibilities and lots of very beautiful things existing within horror and behind the landscape of trivialised murder and destruction and so on and so forth," Garrett rambles merrily. "And that may be just a bunch of people trying to stay sane. That may be what it is. I don't know. But, just like everybody else, I think we're caught up in a crescendo of a thundering, charging, brutal and yet somehow uplifting world."

He says the Oils feel an urgency to be part of the changing world, to be players rather than bystanders. "Even if that's where that's about something real. We think it all adds to the great cosmic drama that's being played out. And we find there's a tremendous number of people who seem to respond very strongly to that in a physical way and also with their heads and their tongues and their ears. I think that's quite hopeful.

"I'm not saying Midnight Oil by the way; I think that sense of possibility comes out of just being able to pull great art out of murder."

It's early March and Peter Garrett is working his way through a salad in a cafe down the road from the Oils's headquarters in the inner Sydney suburb of Glebe. For the Oils, Earth and Sun and Moon is already into its second year of life and with the work now a public commodity, the Oils are preparing to take its theme of regeneration on to its next natural stage. During the last week, the band has been back in Megaphon rehearsing for a world tour and breaking in keyboardist Chris Abrahams (formerly of the Sparklers) who's been brought in to give Moginie more stage time on guitar. Over the next week, the band will play a handful of warm-up shows in Coolangatta then fly directly to South America to begin their seven-month global trek.

With his enormous figure confined to a chair - deprived of its height and overbearing stature - Garrett remains a striking figure of rock & roll, the icon Bono's "Fly" buzzes to be. He jokes about being genetically gifted for his job, about being "lucky enough to be born with the right kind of shaped face and elongated bone structure, nothing much around the ear-drums and not particularly sensitive so that I could keep doing it for more than six months."

He says there's no transition required from the Peter Garrett with the salad to the scrambling, screaming Peter Garrett in performance. Yet something almost mystical takes place when he fronts the Oils on stage.

In concert mode, the band and their music erupt into another dimension. Few bands receive a more passionate response from their audience. It's a power - a gift - that the band doesn't take lightly. While Hirst defines it as a "unique chemistry," Garrett makes no claims to understanding the magic or wanting to understand it. "I just cannot be somebody who analyses what they do," he states dryly. "I don't mind analysing a book or a film or the politics of a party or the surf but I don't want to analyse what I do because then it will go, it will just disappear."

What he does offer is a view from the inside. "We are not desperate to be liked or loved," he says, defining his position. "We never have been. As people or as musicians. The fact that we have an audience is terrific for us. So all the other stuff, it all becomes side issues, just for magazines or record companies to hang hats on because they need to do that. And we need that to advance the momentum but you're still inside the bubble with your music, with your ideas, and I think when that's broken then there's a problem.

"Because what happens then is that you start to play with it. And when you start to play with it - even if you're playing with it quite creatively and maybe just to survive - I think there's a danger then that you're not taking it as seriously as you ought to be. Because it's really a very serious business creating something worthwhile, even if it's surrounded by gaudiness and bright lights and crap and disposable three-minute crutch songs, we're actually trying to create something that means something, that means something to us."

Consequently, Garrett is not interested in being drawn into discussions about the significance of the change. He sees it simply as putting down the flag they feel they've been carrying for everybody. "I don't know why we didn't do it a couple of years ago," he says with a smile.

He's even more averse to speaking about the spiritual elements of the album ("Being a spiritual kind of guy, I get a bit nervous when those words are used") but his descriptions take on ethereal qualities nonetheless. "The earth and sun and moon make up and constitute far more of our human psyche than we really believe, and affect it far more than most people recognise," he philosophises, his long arm - as if in stage mode - freezing at different intervals to emphasise particular points. "And we're drawing a veil over those things. We're sewing fields of stainless steel and broken glass over those enormously significant and profound human shaping symbols which are also big, big realities. In the night sky for explorers, for every baby ever born that went away from a human and found something else, it found one of those three - earth, sun or moon. That's kept us and made us what we are, that's what we're wrestling with.

"So in that sense it's big." His arms freeze at full stretch to stress his dramatic pause, then he lets them fall to his side and smiles. "But in the other sense, Jimmy just walked in with a hummable pop song and said, 'Hey, what do you think about this one?' and we all said, 'Yeah, that's pretty good. Let's put it on the record.'"

For Hirst, the essential ingredient of the album is groove. "The record is very dependent on 'feels' this time," he says. "That hasn't necessarily been apart of what the Oils have done in the past."

On several tracks, the groove borrows heavily from the psychedelic strains of the Sixties, recalling the Doors's and the Beatles's more acidic ventures. Garrett says such songs "take you out of the 'We're-on-a-mission-to-make-serious-music' rut and throws you across onto the 'We-will-happily-play-with-other-things;' styles, ideas, 'feels' that we think are quite good fun in terms of dancing and listening."

He says that after nearly two decades, 15 years on from their debut self-titled album, after a generation of "elbowing, biting, scratching, barging" through local pubs and on to the international stage, the band feel free to challenge all preconceptions of what Midnight Oil should be. "We don't need to prove we can make another record that sounds just like us," he says. "We can obviously do it. Now we can just enjoy ourselves when we make records even more by playing in the studio and playing with the writing a little bit.

"You've got to do that. Even if you've got to force yourself to be a child. You've got to do it."

From Rolling Stone (Aus), by Dino Scatena

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