And Midnight Oil - lead singer, Peter Garrett, guitarists, Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey, bassist Dwayne "Bones" Hillman, who in 1988 replaced longtime bassman Peter Gifford, and Hirst - have been observed more than most. During the Eighties, possibly no popular artist, working in any medium, anywhere in the world blurred the lines between entertainment and "message" as much as Midnight Oil.

Lead singer, Peter Garrett, via his run for the Senate in 1984 on a Nuclear Disarmament Party ticket and his more recent trouble-shooting as president of Australian Conservation Foundation - not to mention his cue-ball scalp and imposing six-and-a-half-foot frame - has become amongst the most recognisable people in this country and his profile internationally is substantial and ever-increasing. Further, the band was articulated socio-political concerns since its inception in the mid-Seventies, and particularly they've worn their concerns on their sleeves since 1981's Place Without a Postcard.

This commitment to what Rob Hirst refers to as "the big topics, the ones most bands avoid like the plague, such as politics and religion," has alienated fans, attracted others to the band and generally been the source of the most coverage and debate concerning the band over the years.

And yet, Rob Hirst indicates that the band should be seen, first and foremost, as musicians, as entertainers. And clearly, the band's advances in its music have been gargantuan, and often schizophrenic. They entered the Eighties on the independent label Powderworks, selling records almost exclusively to a committed live following and closed the decade with the corporate giant CBS records, moving millions of records around the globe.

Until their 1983 album, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, the band was primarily a straight-forward electric rock & roll act with an uncommon live energy. However, that album changed the rules not only for Midnight Oil, but for Australian music. For a band that had built a reputation for playing rough and rumble Oz pub rock, 10-1 was a complete about face.

The band recorded the album overseas, with Englishman Nick Launay, and together they crafted complex soundscapes that married acoustic instruments with swirly synths, drum machines, white noise and still managed, in the meltdown, to be incredibly accessible. Launay, primarily on the strength of this record, went on to produce major works for INXS, the Church, the Models and later, Kate Ceberano.

Midnight Oil moved on to record Red Sails in the Sunset, which perhaps overstepped the boundaries in the techno stakes, and then cut back with the fiercely primitive Species Deceases, another about face, returning them to their pub roots. The band's undoubted masterwork, however, was 1988's Diesel and Dust, which was recorded on the back of its now legendary tour of central Australia.

The songs that emanated from the Blackfella/Whitefella tour voiced the plight of the Australian Aboriginal and the cultural blows dealt it by white Australia. The tour also brought a new humility and subtlety to the band. Paradoxically, perhaps, considering it's pointed and localised subject matter, it was the album that established Midnight Oil as a bona-fide chart success in America.

The band has moved into the Nineties, consolidating on the success of the Diesel and Dust with the album Blue Sky Mining and an international tour in its support. This interview was conducted with Rob Hirst at the end of that exhausting tour, as Midnight Oil entered a year-plus sabbatical, a period during which time the band intends to "recharge the batteries" and seek new input.

If one thinks of Midnight Oil during the Eighties, the most obvious image that it conjures is of control, a band consumed by doing things its own way.

Well, it's true, we had a very clear idea of what Midnight Oil was about and the environment in which it succeeded.

Was that born with the band, was that a dictum from the outset?

I think it was born back at the Antler (the hotel, The Royal Antler, Narrabeen, Sydney), where it was 110 degrees inside, where you had two-thousand people with their shirts off and beer getting thrown around. In this volatile environment what you had to do was deliver at all costs. The people that remember those shows remember them as being a band that played the songs three times faster than on record, that played them very savagely, that smashed up stages if they were inadequate, that yelled at members of the audience if they were abusive.

Which is the complete antithesis of the perception of Midnight Oil today.

Let's de-bunk the myth of peace, love and understanding in those early shows in places like the Antler, there was none of that. You had a whole bunch of young boys who were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, who were dying to smash a glass and put it into your face.

Let's not think of surfers as being this subculture of love; nothing we encountered at Mt Druitt or Blacktown or Leyton in Melbourne or any of the industrial areas while we were overseas was anything like the surf culture, so it figured that a band that was born in that environment would have this determination to entertain at any cost. There was a lot of aggression around us, it just didn't enter into our vocabulary.

You entered the decade having recorded 'Midnight Oil' and 'Head Injuries' on the independent label Powderworks and with a massive live following. This obviously gave you enormous bargaining power when you went to the major labels with 'Place Without a Postcard'.

This was the great asset that Australian recording had at that time. You had this plethora of independent labels taking the risks and signing up all these bands, and then the usual situation was that the best ones would be bought out by a major. But at least you had this mood of risk taking; you had Triple J playing a host of alternate music, the pubs were thriving, and you had a real excitement which was generated by the overseas acts, particularly people like Costello, the Clash, XTC, the Stranglers, all those bands that came out of a very exciting period.

And that independence which we learned to love with Powderworks, once we had it it was something that we could never lose. So when we went to CBS and said "Look, we want to do a deal with you and this is the way it's going to be, it's going to be a deal that is completely hands off in the creative sense," we were able to get it.

'Place Without a Postcard' was a turning point for Midnight Oil. You engaged an overseas producer, Glynn Johns, you recorded it in England and began, on songs like 'Burnie' and 'Lucky Country', to look closely at the state of this nation.

During the Eighties bands like us would constantly go overseas because we felt that we needed to keep up with what was going on. It's a bit like being in a country town. You can be the biggest band in Dubbo but eventually you need to come to Sydney. And a band in Sydney eventually needs to go to the world.

It wasn't because we wanted to be biggest band in the world, it was because we knew that with the lack of population in Australia we were going to outgrow our potential here. And more specifically, we needed the excitement and inspiration from other parts of the world.

So you always looked at the band as long-term?

No we never saw the band, ever, as long-term. We were always amazed, come the new year, that the band was still together.

But there always was this feeling that a lot of the innovation in music was coming from England and to a lesser extent the United States and if we wanted to improve what we were doing then we had to be in the thick of it.

Was it being away from the country that brought such a distinctly Australian flavour to that record?

Yeah, well the first two albums were about local concerns, very Sydney based. That's where the Oils were at. But as we toured the country our horizons obviously broadened, and then when we were in England we were very homesick and nostalgic at times.

And, of course, Place Without a Postcard was rejected by A&M records, who were funding it. It's ironic, because later in the decade people were clammering for Australian sounding bands. But in '81 the only Australian thing they could relate to was Rolf Harris, and that was a prospect so horrifying that anything Australian was going to be commercial suicide.

Sonically, 'Place Without a Postcard' hasn't aged well.

No, well it was aged at the time it was made because Glynn was still applying 1960 recording techniques. He's a very determined man and he knew at the time exactly how he was going to record it. He recorded Place Without a Postcard in 1981 exactly as he recorded Who's Next in 1971. He's a purist in that respect and we respect him for that, but we needed someone like a Nick Launay for the true potential of this band.

There are a lot of real Oil fans though that still count Place Without a Postcard as being the most honest Oil album, in that it simply is five musicians. Most of those takes were live, including Peter's singing; he actually sang along with the playing. I mean, that's unheard of in the late Eighties, where band's spend years in the studio with 48-track recorders.

By contrast, '10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1', with its state of the art production, was a bolt from the dark.

Yeah, I remember people saying, when they heard it, that this wasn't the band that they thought they knew.

Where did it come from?

You had this great combination of Nick Launay, a young producer with an incredibly inventive mind who up until then had done a bit of work with the Birthday Party and Gang of Four and people like that, but this was the first record that he was actually able to go mad on with any sort of budget. He had all these things that he'd been storing up and it all came out on 10-1, he let loose.

You combine this with a band whose anger and frustration at that time was at its peak, who had no international deal, was living on these cheap Indian curries down the west-end of London and literally had to make it or fold.

I mean, I was having this mini-nervous breakdown at the time and was very homesick and taking it out on everyone. If you listen to the drumming on "Only The Strong," it was done in an environment of pure panic and therapy. I played that way at the time because I was spinning out. I needed to either run ten miles around west London or get it out on the drum kit. And I don't think you can beat that for making a record of anger and commitment, and it is still the best example of that. We might have gone off capturing other spirits later on, with Diesel or whatever, but nothing is more convincing and genuinely angry than that 10-1 period because you're talking about a band that was incredibly desperate.

The songs became a lot more complex, the sounds a lot weirder on '10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.' Nick Launay was obviously crucial in opening the band up to new technology.

Oh, absolutely. My vision of Nick then was of a lanky chap, with one finger on the control desk and crawling around on the floor looking for the wrong leads to get the most weird and wonderful sounds ever put onto record.

Just being in England was so good, because you're in an environment that's taking every risk and in that environment we learnt to take risks. I mean, on "Power and the Passion," for me to even contemplate using a rhythm machine was anathema. Nick more or less had to tie me down and gaffer tape my hands on to the damn thing, 'cause I hated the bloody things with a vengeance.

This was a pub band, a real band, this stunk of disco and faking it. It was only later that most good musicians and particularly drummers and rhythmitists realised that it's all tools of the trade.

I think Kraftwerk said it really honestly, and there's a band that used computers with a very teutonic approach to them, they said, "We use rhythm machines because they play so relaxed," and it's true. There's no sense of the machine losing time so you immediately relax with it, and there are some songs which need that.

"Power and the Passion" is actually a very relaxed track, it gets its urgency from what we put on top. So is "The Dead Heart," it needed the relaxation of a drum machine to get the lay of it.

It sounds like the Oils must have been listening to a lot of music that people wouldn't have guessed.

Yes, we were.

For instance, had you quoted Kraftwerk in the early Eighties, your audience would have been horrified.

I think we were always a band of contradictions. We had this image of being a tough pub band from the suburbs, but there was a lot more musicianship going on than the pubs allowed us to express, I'm saying this particularly in Jim's defence. So having geographically removed ourselves from the pubs of Australia, we decided that we didn't need to be constrained to the three chords. It's an area we loved, but we could go further than that, we could explore and we needed to for our own sanity.

How do you look back on 'Red Sails in the Sunset?'

I think Red Sails was a little bit like Blue Sky in that it wasn't nearly as focused (as its predecessor). I think the two most focused records we made in the Eighties were 10-1 and Diesel.

Red Sails was an extremely eclectic record and Blue Sky is as well and they were born of a band perhaps, ... (long pause) ... not totally unified in its members, but determined to explore the frontiers of what the band was about.

Why did you record it in Japan, and do you think that was a mistake?

Imagine living in central Tokyo for three and a half months, it's ridiculous in retrospect, and it cost us dearly, but at the time it put us in an environment where anything went. It was so bizarre, no-one spoke English for a start, so we had to develop this bizarre sign language. We ended up learning a fair bit of Japanese just so we could make the record, but the influence of the explosion of Japanese youth, the excitement and the claustrophobia of Tokyo itself, the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which we visited, they all had an influence on the record.

Internally, that whole period sounds like it was a trying time for Midnight Oil?

Pete at that time was becoming ... perhaps Peter had always been a Christian, but that was the point though where he committed his faith, so he was very much pre-occupied. But one of the great things about the band and one of the only reasons why we've been able to survive so far is that if there's been a deficiency, where someone is preoccupied with something else, the others will pull in to make it work There's this mutual respect within the band, this determination to make it work at all costs and for it to be as good as possible with everything that you do.

There was no shortage of musical ideas around with Red Sails, probably too many. If anything, the band had a tendency to cram everything it ever had in the back of its mind onto that album, which makes it a pretty tortuous listening experience. If you actually lie on the carpet and listen from go to whoa, you're a loony case by the end of it. Species Deceases should really be seen as a reaction to Red Sails.

It all came out anyway and you had a lot of people covering up for the people who were preoccupied.

Would that explain why you sang on a number of tracks?

Well, in a way it did. But that was actually more because on songs like "Kosciusko" and "Generals Talk," Pete didn't really feel he could do those sort of melodies justice.

And this has been one of the difficulties with a lot of bands where the main writers aren't the vocalist. You've constantly got a certain number of songs that can't be related to the person who has to deliver it and because a song like "Kosciusko" was obviously a strong song and needed to be on the album I ended up singing it. That was more just a musical decision I think. I just sang on the demo and Pete said, "Well, look, I don't think you're going to get a better performance from me doing it, so who don't we just keep it."

Would that be the most tense time in the band's history?

One of them.

'Red Sails' coincided with Garrett's run for the Senate didn't it?

Absolutely. We came back from Japan and you had Pete standing for the Senate and the tour that followed, the Red Sail tour, whilst being a very successful tour was a very difficult period. Pete was doing shows in Sydney then rushing off at like seven o'clock in the morning, with five hours sleep, to Melbourne to speak on behalf of the NDP.

You had all these security checks backstage in case there were microphones, because at that time there were grey suited men jotting down everything he said, hoping he would say something controversial that could be used against him, something which would jeopardise the campaign.

The band appeared to be totally in support of him, was that really the case?

Yes, but we weren't sure how the band would continue if Pete had won. I felt firmly at the time that it would have been a great shame for the band to have been put on the back burner. But it didn't come to be.

I've always believed, and still do, that pursuing the same political aims that the NDP were attempting through our music was better than doing so in a straight political sense. And in retrospect, of course, the band has reached many more people internationally with what it said than any straight political process could have.

Midnight Oil's success, your growth, has mirrored or run parallel to the growing concerns with environmental issues, the growing conscience of the Eighties?

It's interesting that you mentioned the increased conscience of the Eighties; if we assume that the Seventies were a dead letter decade in terms of people not being concerned about anything, except image, success and fashion, a host of ephemeral issues, the Eighties, looking back at it, were a period of not only great change, but politicisation, which we hadn't seen since the Sixties.

We went to the United States many times during the Eighties, last year we toured extensively again, and through our eyes what had happened in that ten years was that a whole underclass section of Americans - the homeless, the minorities, the impoverished, particularly people from a Hispanic background, blacks, poor farmers, the mid-west generally - whole sections were ignored by the administration in Washington and became, in relative terms, much poorer during that decade. Meanwhile, the giants of Wall Street - the huge corporations, the Exxons, the Rockefellers and a host of other buddies of the Reagan Republican administration became enormously wealthy.

That's just the American example; the Australian example is not dissimilar. We have one single figure dominating the Eighties here too: RJ Hawke. And his promises to end poverty just seemed so facile and so pompously expedient in retrospect. As we go into our recession - which is always defined by the Japanese index or the American index - there seems very little likelihood that we will come within a ghost of a chance of fulfilling his expectations of ending child poverty.

Your critics, who have been outspoken recently, have charged that rock and politics don't mix. What impact do you think music, and particularly Midnight Oil's music, had during the Eighties?

The people that claim that only have to look at what happened in the Eighties to see what effect music did have in a directly political form. I'm referring locally, to the EAT concert, where music was first used as a major benevolent force. Internationally, of course, there was Live Aid, which was perhaps the most significant altruistic adventure of our age, the huge Mandela marches around the world, U2's and Sting's efforts with rainforests and Amnesty International, and the nuclear marches and concerts, which people like the Oils were involved with.

There are those that think that change can only ever be achieved by the strictly political protest. Hawke told us earlier in the decade, "you can write as many songs as you like, you can scrawl your slogans on the wall, but it won't change, one iota, the decisions of my government." This was at the time of Pete's run for the Senate, and he only said it because he was terrified.

It's a difficult thing to quantify, but I've always felt very strongly that the broad area in which the Oils work, where you have musicians that move outside the directly musical process into areas of politics and a viewpoint is put, to be torn down, to be distorted, that's the area of real change.

Do you feel that too much emphasis has been placed on your politics?

To do what we do, you got to still have the basics of it, and this is where some people and why journalists were always hedging around the tracks, and only a few of them got to the guts of what the Oils were doing. Inevitably, they concentrated on what the band was doing outside the strict musical sense, 'cause this was newsworthy, this was different.

I could go on through our press file of the Eighties and look at what's been written about the Oils, ninety-five percent would be about parts of the band which involve the Oils probably five percent. We are a musical band that spends the majority of its time, like every other band, writing songs, in demo studios, in recording studios, on tour buses, the grind and the joy of actually doing the band. This obviously isn't a big deal so it isn't commented on.

The crucial moment for Midnight Oil during the Eighties would surely be the Blackfella/Whitefella tour of central Australia.

Absolutely. The desert tour united us very much. We were certainly on the same wavelength, this was '87 and we realised that by the time '88 rolled around that the focus was going to be very much on Australia and the original Australians, the injustices of the last two hundred years, on the question of the Aboriginal future and of a treaty for Aboriginal people.

We were enormously moved by what we experienced in the desert and speaking for myself, what I saw out there wasn't something that I could reconcile for months afterwards. I couldn't understand how we could have allowed this incredible civilisation to be living like the dogs that they sleep with in the desert; living under bits of corrugated iron, with children dying of Western introduced disease, of petrol sniffing. It's a civilisation brought to its knees by a host of influences, all of which were western and all of which were bad.

The sound of the band definitely changed after that tour, you really learnt the value of minimalism?

I think the main things with Diesel were to let the song speak for itself, to use acoustic instruments as much as possible and to not put anything on the record which was unnecessary. It was a cheap and quick record to make and it was a successful record.

By this time Martin and Jim had developed that great thing - which is now very much an identifiable Oils thing, but it wasn't earlier in the decade - the twin acoustic guitars playing in tandem. To actually see them in the studio playing off each other is one of the most incredible musical experiences. As a drummer, I just love that side of it because it's so rhythmic.

By that time also, we discovered the melodic quotient of the band, a lot of melody from the vocal area was starting to come in, so on the choruses to "The Dead Heart" and "Beds are Burning" everyone steps up to a microphone in sync. Jimmy Barnes, of all people, had said years and years ago, "ah Midnight Oil? Good band, but they've got to get their vocals together." And he was right. Now when you go and see the band Bones and I are singing along all the time, every song. That was a side that I was really happy to see, that really strengthened an area which perhaps had been a bit weak.

The band seems to have made a point of distancing itself from the cliched images of rock & roll - the sex and drugs, the live fast die young image?

We lost Giffo (Peter Gifford) to an excessive lifestyle. So the band's had it's casualties. Giffo felt that his health was so poor that although he played on Diesel and Dust, the idea of playing those songs on an extensive world tour was such that he couldn't guarantee that he'd be able to fulfil that, cause touring's really hard, let's face it. So in that sense, we lost our bass man.

It appears that the band has easily coped with success and the celebrity that brings. You've always managed to guard and maintain a private life.

Outside Pete, yes. You get people who come up, but they're usually very polite. They just want to say hello, there's no hysteria.

We're not the only band, I'm sure the members of the Hunters get about their business. One of the refreshing things about Australia is that we don't elevate ordinary people to this absurd stardom status.

At the same time though, the Oils haven't been naive to image, you've been shrewd operators.

With us the image came from being a non-image, we were aware that we never would convince anyone, not that we wanted to, by tarting ourselves up or putting an emphasis on hair or clothes, the bullshit.

Outside Peter of course, who's a striking looking person, the rest of us could have just been someone who walked off the street and got up and played.

That doesn't mean that we didn't understand or like what other people were doing in an outrageous area. I can look at Prince and say, not only is this person a consummate musician, fantastic writer, guitarist, producer, songwriter - more talent than anyone really should have - but he also has this incredibly outrageous stage act; well we understand that it's entertainment and love it. I think Prince is definitely one of the most important figures, if not the most important figure of the Eighties. But that just wasn't our modus.

But something like your refusal to play 'Countdown' in the early Eighties, that was something you obviously exploited to your advantage. It added to your renegade image, don't you think?

Absolutely not. We didn't give a rats arse about Countdown, we gave it no thought whatsoever. It was a journalistic beat-up which was harped upon all the time, while we were getting on with business.

How do you think that your audience has changed over the years?

We have a different audience in different parts of the world. It's tied together by the fact that most people know the Oils, they know that there's more to it than simply a melody and a rhythm and people bashing away at drums and guitars. There are some people who are only interested in that and that's fine, we don't want to dictate to people what they should get out of it, it's got to be first and foremost entertainment or the rest doesn't follow.

I think what's happened is we've shed people with every record and tour and we've gained.

Do you think you've alienated people?

Definitely. We alienated people when we went from a surfie pub in Narrabeen and played to city punks and we alienated city punks when we played in the suburbs. We alienated Australians when we first made overseas inroads, because we were the Australian band. We alienated people when we made 10-1 because we were no longer a pub band. We alienated people when we made Diesel and Dust, how dare we speak on behalf of Aboriginal people, what right did we have?

There are those sort of people that would have you remain exactly what you were fifteen years ago, not realising that you certainly wouldn't be here in 1991 if that was the case. You try to, at least on the local scene, stay one jump ahead of what's going on.

What do you see in store for Midnight Oil in the Nineties?

I'd be very loathe to comment on that, in the same way that if you'd asked the question anytime through the Eighties I would have baulked at it. Because although in retrospect you look at a career and it can seem calculating, like there was a masterplan, it hasn't been like that at all.

There have been cases were I have honestly thought that the band wouldn't survive, there have been times when I was playing when I felt that it would probably be good if the band didn't survive (laughs). There has been some music which I think maybe we should never have made. There is some that I think is very good. I think the majority is pretty good, but there was some awful music we made.

I mean, "General's Talking," we should never have made "General's Talking."

Why?

Because it was done as a musical joke and we realised soon after that people didn't associate Midnight Oil with musical jokes.

It was supposed to be a character, an Idi Amin sort of figure, the mythical African dictator, but people missed it altogether. We realised it wasn't really our niche, apart from the fact that as a form of music, it definitely wasn't us. So there were a few like that, but I mean, big deal. I'm sure if you ask anyone there'd be some they wish they'd never done. And at least it had an honest intention even if it didn't work.

As far as the Nineties? Our little neck of the woods is very much an open book. We need a period of recoupment after pretty much working non-stop for three years. To make another hit record this band needs to get the same sort of input that it had before making 10-1 or Diesel. It needs to do it individually and collectively, it needs to recharge the batteries, we want to take a real break and then as material is written we'll see what we're going to do.

(This next section is kind of floating - not sure where it fits in - TDH)

Despite this risk taking and the shedding of the pub rock straitjacket, the Oils were never really accepted by the cool, inner-city scene. The Oils, particularly during the mid-Eighties, had no real contemporaries.

I think we were part of the Darlinghurst scene for about a fortnight, (laughs) and then we were immediately dropped because they smelt we were from the suburbs, which we were.

Midnight Oil was always middle Australia, it was never inner-city. It was never walked on the dark side of the street, it was always Aussie boys from the garage.

And yet in many ways the Oil were as innovative as any alternative act. The dub mix of "The Power and the Passion" was possibly the first time an Australian act released a remix, which later was to become 'de riguer.' I remember Sean Kelly of the Models, who were then at the height of their coolness, referring to that mix as a pivotal moment.

You've pointed to a very good irony here about the whole business, because the so-called risk taking, hip, cool, independent Darlinghurst and Carlton bands were almost always the most conservative. They were the ones at the end of the decade that were still playing jangly Rickenbacker stuff, which the Byrds had pioneered twenty years before.

And a lot of the mainstream bands, which had been so criticised for being boring, predictable, mega i.e. successful, the worst crime, have gone on to experiment. I'm not only referring to the Oils, I'm talking about INXS - they took this essential pub hardness and the power chord, teamed up with someone who understood power chords, like Chris Thomas, absorbed, unlike the Oils, funk and black music, put this potent combination together and created something quite unique.

With the success of INXS, Midnight Oil and Crowded House there was a lot of interest, internationally, in an "Australian sound." Do you think there is such a thing?

Manning Clark talks about "melancholy born of isolation," and I think that's a strong influence on the writing of good Australian musicians. The best Australian writers - and I'm talking about the Don Walkers, the Paul Kellys, the Mark Seymours and Chris Baileys - have got this sense of frustration and melancholy and a lot of sadness in their music, which Americans largely don't have. Largely, American music's about getting down and having a good time.

There's this other sense, a sense of space that we have here. We don't make claustrophobic music, we simply don't. There might be a small group of inner-city bands that do because they live in a claustrophobic environment but basically the sense of our music is space. That's the transition that we made between 10-1 - Red Sails and Diesel - Blue Sky, absorbing the great open space of Australia and putting it down in a musical form and taking this Anglo-Irish folk influence, which has been so strong in our makeup, pulling all this together. You could write a thesis about it, but when you got overseas you realised it was quite different from anything you were hearing.

From Rolling Stone (Aus), by John O'Donnell

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