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Bullet the Blue Sky

(Original article online here)

On Midnight Oil's 7th album home is where the heart is - but the band is going to be all over the globe with their best record yet. More songs about Power, Passion and Politics.

It was hot. It was incredibly hot. Out on a salt pan fifty miles north of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia the temperature reached 46.6 degrees, the hottest day on record. In fact, there is nowhere on this broken down planet where you'll find temperatures of more than 50 degrees. The same week eight Aboriginals had died in the desert from thirst and exposure when their car broke down.

No one in their right mind would be out here on a salt pan, miles from shade in this unhuman, merciless weather. Well, nobody except Midnight Oil who have taken immense pride in defying the conventional wisdom for the past thirteen years. The five musicians were standing on the salt pan which, incidentally, was reflecting the intense sun directly into their eyes. The salt, meanwhile, corroding their shoes as they walked and blowing into their eyes, unprotected because of the camera for this video shoot.

Peter Garrett would do a take and then dash out of frame to continue his interview with one of the three film crews who had travelled to this place without a postcard. And then he would run, in the 46 degree heat, back for another bash a the song, then across the dried lake, back for another question.

The next day the streets of Kalgoorlie played host to Midnight Oil. The papers said it was the largest turn out the town had seen since the Queen visited. They came from miles around for the biggest block party in the Southern Hemisphere. Hundreds of them and the three documentary film crews; one from Italy, one from France and one from Alan Bond, all in the scorching heat, with a little respite from the fire hoses.

For five days the band shot footage and hung around the gold mining city, trying to cram as much work and as much information into their time there as possible. The town in return, was abuzz with talk of this band which has assumed a status quite unlike any other rock band in the world. And while the group as a whole went about the business of gearing the wheels of the rock & roll industry Peter Garrett tried to snatch time to work on a speech he was to give in the Senate in Canberra, a matter of days hence.

At times Midnight Oil resembles a small army. When they go into action they take not only their own baggage but a retinue of film crews and documentarians and photographers and journalists who are servicing the band's growing international audience. Underneath the intense glare of the limelight Midnight Oil have managed to be both totally public property and intensely private.

In January of 1989 Midnight Oil geared up their machine for the release of their seventh album, Blue Sky Mining. After a string of records including the album 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 which stayed on the national charts for 186 weeks in the early Eighties, and Diesel And Dust which made them international superstars, the Oil machine was preparing for the long haul. Beginning in the middle of nowhere with the shoot for the first single "Blue Sky Mine."

In Kalgoorlie, however, it was clear that things are changing. The band mixed easily with locals and encouraged their involvement. In return it was clear, perhaps for the first time, that although Midnight Oil sing their songs about issues of life and death there's a joyousness, a celebration about their music. Clearly they were enjoying the performance, heat and fire hoses notwithstanding. It seemed that the almost military front that the band has maintained was wilting a little. "Part of the Oil thing that I do dislike is that people think we operate like a quasi-military operation," says drummer Rob Hirst. "That's not in the spirit of the music or what we do. If people could only see some of our meetings with people yelling at each other. The group doesn't operate in a streamlined way, although [manager] Gary Morris keeps the business side together. We are aware that there is a proselytizing side that we have sometimes fallen into, that people have sometimes felt that the band was speaking from its high horse."

Hirst and guitarist Jim Moginie are hanging around The Office, Midnight Oil's headquarters in Sydney's inner-western suburb of Glebe. Moginie looks around the room as if to point out how far away from the yuppie business ethic Midnight Oil are. On the one hand, the band is now a multi-national corporation of sorts with sales of their last album, Diesel And Dust, looming towards the three million mark worldwide.

On the other hand, The Office, this medium sized terrace house, looks no different than it ever did. Tour manager Michael Lippold's cattle dogs prowl around the backyard. On of the chairs in the boardroom is broken, the couch is a little worse for wear, the posters haven't been changed in some years and every available piece of space is in use. As Moginie points out, between the band's eleven kids and Michael's dogs, furniture wouldn't stand much of a chance.

The real reason is that Midnight Oil didn't form to become either yuppies or businessmen; their main focus is on the music. All the rest is a little irrelevant.

The four original members of the group, Hirst, Moginie, Garrett and guitarist Martin Rotsey have been determined to do it their way from day one. They have certainly had their ups and downs financially. In the late Seventies they fought the booking agencies and were prevented from playing many of the choice venues around the country. They spent the early part of this decade on the edge of poverty in order to pay for their own recordings.

Peter Garrett tells the story of the band's first record deal which stipulated lunch be provided during the sessions for the first album. The band were in Alberts studio in Sydney when the legendary Easybeat George Young walked through and observed the group hoeing into their sandwiches and wryly observed, "My God, a band that eats!"

While they've achieved financial security in the last twelve years, the tightness of the group remains their single greatest strength. As Moginie observes: "Pete, to some extent, is a public figure and he pays that price. We are in the band Midnight Oil but we're incredibly lucky to have a relationship between the five people in a little shell. It's cloistered and we've fought very hard to keep it like that."

At the same time there is a remarkable flexibility in the group, particularly with regard to Garrett's activities in politics. Since his 1984 campaign for the Senate on the Nuclear Disarmament Party ticket Garrett has been a political figure called upon to sit on government committees for changes to the Constitution and for lobby groups formed to oppose the Australian Card. At present he is President of the Australian Conservation Foundation; a group which lobbies in favour of protecting the environment.

"The way the band operates is such that we've always let people do what they do best," explains Hirst. "Pete's best avenue is communication. He's an incredibly charismatic performer in that area of public speaking and organising issues and people. He'd be the first to admit that when we're going in to make a record he's not going to be the one behind the board and calling the shots."

Midnight Oil have just completed their seventh album in thirteen years, with two EPs in there somewhere. Despite the fact that the group maintains it's loose attitude, their roles are now pretty clearly defined. With the writing falling to Hirst and Moginie with Garrett playing frontman while Rotsey and bassplayer Dwayne 'Bones' Hillman. For all of that time, for all those records and thousands of gigs, the band seems to be charging into the Nineties like a half-back with his eyes fixed between the posts.

"That's very exciting for a band that, to be frank with you, was running out of challenges in Australia and New Zealand. We toured and toured this country. We used to do an average of 170 or 180 shows a year between 1979 and 1983. We were touring constantly in the pubs and running out of the inspiration that keeps a band like us going. We were lucky that Diesel got away and we and a whole fresh audience with no assumed knowledge. We were back playing club shows, initially, in front of 1,000 or 1,500 people. Which is what we needed."


The Diesel And Dust album was a cycle of songs inspired by a trip the band made to the Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. The most 'Australian' of their records to date, Diesel And Dust was remarkable not only for its stories of the desert but for its unique sound. They explored rhythms and sounds which had heretofore not been heard on a rock & roll record. The bass-and-drum patterns which reflected the endless highways and the impossible horizons of the outback were completely unique and it was the music which carried the message to the rest of the world.

Diesel And Dust was released in late 1987. The band intended to spend the Bicentennial outside Australia. They toured Europe and the U.S.A. extensively and on their third American tour were accompanied by Aboriginal band Yothu Yindi and American Indian activist/poet Graffiti Man to underline the theme of the struggle of indigenous peoples.

"We ended the tour with a benefit in a place called Mesa, Arizona. The show was for ten thousand Navaho and a couple of thousand Hopi Indian people who had been displaced," Hirst recalls. "This sounds very familiar in the Northern Territory and Queensland here. They had been displaced by the Peabody Coal Company who were attempting to shift these people, who had been there for centuries, off their land because of the enormously rich coal seams. The company was trying to move them down to very marginal land and the Indians were at a point where their money was running out."

Finishing the tour with a lesson in local affairs is typical of the Oils current mode of operations. The 'Blackfella Whitefella' tour which led to Diesel And Dust gave the band first hand experience of a situation which had previously only been a concept.

The problem with being in any rock & roll band is that one tends to move around the country in a small self-contained group and one's experiences are, at best, transitory. The day to day details are taken care of, this being, after all, showbusiness.

Out in the Western Desert, however, the Oils learnt humility and learnt that they could use the band to explore the world and highlight issues. Hence the Blue Sky Mining album which, on one level, is a travelogue detailing their journey across America and around Australia while also highlighting current issues such as the fate of the Antarctic.

"It's a travelogue album, dealing with where we think things are at, and where we're at," explains Garrett. "Part of it would be influenced by what we had seen, particularly Rob's got a couple of songs which are real, 'I went to New York and hey, it's never meant to be like this.'

"And add to that the sort of general swing towards ecological things. I mean we don't mind being an issues band, we think there needs to be issues in life and we've always run really strongly on them and we're happy to run on this one. If we've got company, that's great. You know, we probably would have made this record anyway, even if everybody had suddenly decided that they wanted to turn the light green."

"The band has always had that side, you only have to go back to "Koala Sprint" on (second album) Head Injuries. It's something we've always been on about," adds Hirst. "Blue Sky Mining is a title which has already puzzled a few people. There's definitely that side, with the wind generators and the purple sky, which talks about energy for free and all the alternatives that will take us into the next century without the threat of a nuclear catastrophe or an ozone depleted sky.

"But it's also got another connotation. The blue sky mining companies are those which shoot for the sky without assets and then crumble like few have lately. They're the people who give nothing back to the community, that have tax schemes in the Dutch Antilles and a crew of accountants who make sure they put nothing back."

The album has an overriding theme of care for the environment which is manifest not simply in a collection of "issues" songs enumerating the sins of mankind against nature. Rather, it's an eclectic selection of tunes about observing the past and taking care whether that be for workers in asbestos mines or the homeless on the streets or the forests around Australia.

Mostly though, the album attempts to outline an ethic drawn from the traditional Australian attitude that goes back to Henry Lawson. So, in a sense, although scenes in the lyrics of the record take place in Burma, Antarctica and New York; this is as much an "Australian" record as any the band has made.

"This record is firmly in the area of love for our country and everything in it which is slipping away from us," says Hirst. "We have characters in this country and we have scenery and a feeling which can't be duplicated anywhere else in the world. We are part of that group of people who are trying to translate what it's like to be an Australian going into the Nineties. There is this peculiar sense of alienation and melancholy that goes with the Australian experience.

"I'm not saying that we're bushmen, or any people other than those people that have subconsciously absorbed that desert, that space out there... whether we've visited it or not, it has impinged directly upon our attitude towards ourselves and the world. That's what sets us apart. That sense of the incredible expanse has been partly responsible for our strange sense of inferiority, of melancholy, of isolation, of frustration.

"I think with a lot of Midnight Oil stuff what you'll find is even when the beat is up, the mood is down. There is a lot of melancholy on this record and I believe that comes with isolation and an inability to change your destiny. The fact that Australia is at the behest of power brokers from overseas, both in big corporations and governments."


The album makes no bones about where the group stands on the issues of rampant capitalism and the environment. As Hirst explains, "It's like those pollutants mucked down the storm water drain that come out the next morning; paint factories' dioxins pumped out into the bay and when they get caught they just think, 'Oh shit, what's the fine? Five grand? Okay.' What's five grand to them? That shopping list mentality as to pollutants has got to stop, the fines have got to be enormous. You've got to run companies out of business for crimes against nature.

"These days all anyone talks about is the fucking economy. It's a peculiarly pragmatic period where the sort of considerations we used to talk about are swept away as extravagant, inept or old hippy bullshit. I'm proud to say that some of those elements are still in Oil music. The fascination with the economy isn't a fascination shared by the Oils.

"Forget about the fact that Hawke will save Jervis Bay, forget about the fact that he's saved a part of Kakadu, forget about the fact that Richardson now has a genuine concern about the country and where it's going... if he can't magically wave the wand and bring interest rates down because we've got a country which is living beyond its means, he'll be out. If the Suntan Kid promises the world, and the people go with him it shows the imbecility and ignorance of the country in my opinion."

While Hirst would not probably fall short of endorsement of the Hawke government, particularly on social justice issues, it's clear that he sees the band's message very clearly placed in the immediate present.

The album is rich in specifics but perhaps most clearly on the first single, "Blue Sky Mine," which was inspired firstly by a book, Blue Murder, by Ben Hills, detailing the history of the blue asbestos mine in Wittenoom, Western Australia. The mine was started by Lang Hancock on 1943, by which time the dangerous properties of blue asbestos were apparent, and later run by sugar manufacturing giant CSR.

"Seven thousand people came through that mine before it closed in 1966 and more than two thousand of those people will die of asbestosis or mesothelioma. Five hundred people have already died."

Basically, the result of contact with blue asbestos is that one's lungs turn to cement and an immensely painful and terrifyingly inevitable death follows. The asbestos has not only affected the miners but almost everyone in the town including the children who played in the dust and the women who washed their husband's clothes. Many of the sufferers spent as little as six months or a matter of weeks in the town and are now terminally ill.

"They were working in seams only three or four foot high for incredible hours," says Hirst. "The asbestos fibre would lodge in their lungs and cause the most horrible, long lingering death. It's an incredible story and one that has been repeated in the U.S. by the Johns Manville company. They were already being sued before the blue mine up at Wittenoom was even opened so there was no question that CSR knew from the start the dangers of working with asbestos.

"The only reason this hasn't risen to the prominence of something like Bhopal or Chernobyl is because the company is settling with the litigants out of court with secrecy clauses. Many of the litigants die before the cases even reach judgement due to the slow process of the courts and the progress of the disease."

"The thing that made me most angry," adds Moginie, "was that they'd spent millions of dollars in court fighting the people who were trying to get compensation from them. Millions and millions in heavy duty legal argument."


Perhaps one of the lasting experiences of Midnight Oil's the desert tour was the band learnt about the power of a whisper.

"We realised when we got out there," recalls Moginie, "the usual set that we would play, which is flat chat, just didn't work. The first few nights we spent revving it up even more and then we realised that to get to the people sometimes it's better to whisper. When we started to play quietly people would move up the front to hear. We learnt a bit of seduction."

"I think you'll find on Blue Sky Mining that quite a bit of the vocal treatment is understated in that same sort of way," agrees Hirst. "We find that seduction and the implied power of the band can get across messages that aren't soap box, didactic statements."

Certainly the musical side of the band has never been stretched quite so far. The group has defined their roles to the point where most of the music is left to Hirst and Moginie before it gets worked up in the demo studio and finally in recording. Their extensive tours have bound the musicians together to point where they play almost intuitively together but at the same time they're committed to broadening their sound.

They began work on the album in the first week of 1989 and heard final mixes just before New Year's Eve. Diesel And Dust producer Warne Livesey once again supervised the album paying particular attention to Garrett's vocals.

Despite his increasing profile as a political figure, Garrett found a fresh commitment to the band during this record, rediscovering his musical roots. One could see him at Rhinoceros studios between takes wrapped up in a game of pool or animatedly discussing rock music. When a current affairs program comes on the TV, his attention switches immediately and he becomes engrossed in the future of the union movement.

However, it's clear that a serious political commitment doesn't necessarily preclude a love of music. "He's an enthusiast," agrees Hirst. "He's got the bands that he loves, starting with the Easybeats. He played in a Canberra rock & roll band called Rock Island Line... he joined the band at a time when we were looking for a lead singer and his voice has changed from being a high tremulous vibrato to a mid-range down now even whispering the stuff. This record is notable if only because of the leaps and bounds in Peter's recorded voice and his ability to translate the lyrics on to tape so convincingly. He's perhaps the last to see it."

"Pete is a very good musician in a way that is overlooked because he's thought to be a politician," says Moginie. "His instrument is his voice and there's so much character there, especially when you put it up against just an acoustic guitar where there's no hiding behind production, like on 'One Country'."

Garrett may be finding himself as a musician, but Moginie is already one of the most highly regarded players in the country. Nick Launay who produced the 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 album and Red Sails in the Sunset regards the band as one of the tightest and inventive groups he has ever come across. He recalls one session during the Red Sails album when they decided to put a backwards steel guitar part on the track. In order to get it right Moginie had to play the part to a rhythm track played backwards so that all the beats were slurred in the wrong accent and the vocals were rendered gibberish. Moginie went into the studio and nailed the part in the first take.

One of the most quiet and unassuming of the Oils, Moginie takes charge of the band's sound and arrangements, writing the parts for the brass and strings. He is the arbiter in this sometimes noisy democracy on matters of songs. Moginie also writes, with Hirst, the bulk of the songs and the lyrics.

At this point there is an almost intuitive relationship between the members of the band. Hirst and Moginie have been playing together for almost twenty years, often with Rotsey, whose guitar parts, especially the rhythm feels, bind the band to their massive sound.

Bones Hillman is the final piece in the jigsaw, the third bass player in the band's career, following Andrew James and Peter Gifford. Hillman was born in New Zealand where he was playing in new wave bands before crossing the Tasman with expatriate Kiwis the Swingers for their Number One single "Counting the Beat." Hillman was at a loose end when the Oils rang Crowded House looking for a replacement for Peter Gifford and according to Garrett, Bones "fits like a glove. He sings like a kookaburra and plays like a Bondi Lifesaver."

According to Hirst: "If a bloke is someone who is never in a bad mood, always up-vibing and very down-to-earth sort of character then Bones is it. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that Bones' easygoing good humour has been an enormous asset."


"You get to realise that things aren't going to be changed overnight," says Hirst. "I think that's an understanding that the band has learnt as well. You work towards things gradually, you set your goals and down the track, sometimes when you least expect it, you reach them."

The band have survived for more than a decade now having fought with the music industry, paid for most of their recordings themselves and financed themselves in order to maintain their critical distance. They have made serious mistakes, defied bankruptcy and rewritten the rule book. At the same time they continue on as ever before. The process of decision making is still split five ways to the point where photos from a recent shoot are supervised personally by Rotsey.

This ramshackle machine is not designed for establishing hierarchies. What they are determined to do is play music, which involves a commitment to live playing.

"All the bands which we can think of that stop playing live, stop. They stop artistically or they disappear up each others recording studios. I think this band will always see the need to have that communication with an audience. In our opinion you're a band in name only unless you tread the boards."

Midnight Oil's boards have extended somewhat. They begin a world tour in April in Europe which then crosses America before playing Australia in the late winter with a tour of large venues interspersed with smaller gigs to satisfy the backlog of requests for benefits.

Judging by the two gigs the band played last year; a show at the Building Bridges concert and a benefit for the Tibet Council Midnight Oil have lost none of their power as a live band. Despite the onset of middle age. Not only do they have a sense of history but the urgency of their songs still propels the band.

And their is a sort of glue of collective experience and shared vision which keeps them pushing forward. So that even after a day of unspeakable heat and discomfort you will find the band inevitably with their guitars out thrashing through Crowded House songs.

I don't believe that the individuals in this band are really that much outside the framework of Midnight Oil," Hirst says finally, and with no trace of false modesty. "I don't think any of us are such great musicians or songwriters, individually, that we could take the world by storm."

From Rolling Stone (Aus), by Toby Creswell

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