The Dead Heart
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Midnight Oil on the Road for New Year

(Original article online here)

At a time when most people are in the middle of Christmas and New Year festivities, Midnight Oil is on the road. "I actually prefer it, to be truthful, Oils bass player Dwayne 'Bones' Hillman said by telephone from his Sydney home on Christmas Eve. "I think the last time we did it was about two years ago. We did Fremantle Oval, in Perth. For me it alleviates a whole lot of problems. You don't have to worry about what the hell you're doing for a start. It's kind of all organised. I don't have a problem with this one at all.

Midnight Oil is due to play the Lismore Workers' Club on New Year's Eve and it will be the first time Far North Coast audiences have heard material from its new album, Breathe. "I think the main thing is that we are actually out on the road," Hillman said. It's one of those weird businesses where once you start doing it you have to string them together and someone proposes a run of places you actually go to. I guess, with the North Coast, it sort of makes sense that we do that, 'cause otherwise we take all those people out and we've got to accommodate them and pay their wages etc. So it becomes an expensive exercise if we become a bit of a holiday camp, so it's like a working militia."

The similarity between the band and thousands of holidaymakers on the road ends with the kilometres they travel in common. "At least we are driving on that deadly highway, but the trouble is we're not stopping and going to beach like everyone else," Hillman said. "We tend to play five nights a week when we are actually out touring out of Sydney. It's kind of a slipstream ... these Taragos that sort of chug off and they're on this little mission from Hell.

Hillman accepts this writer's apologies for treating the band as though it had split up in an article published about 12 months ago. "A lot of people did that," he said. "I was in New Zealand at the time and so I came back and there was all these messages on my machine and faxed copies if newspaper articles and stuff ... "I knew that we hadn't, but it was amazing how that one came out. It was even on the Channel 10 news. It was a strange period of time. It was almost as if people wanted that to be the truth." Hillman seems used to the protests that greet this statement. "It's the power of speculation," he said. "We were in Perth the other night and one person turned around to me and summed it up really well. "She said: 'You guys are like Arnotts biscuits'. I turned 'round and looked at her and I went: 'What, we go all soggy in the heat?'

"She was just referring to the fact that we are an Australian icon and then proceeded to say we should never break up and I thought: 'Well, that's really ridiculous because we're going to be out there up at the Tweed Heads Workers' Club or something when we are 65". Hillman discounts suggestions that the band went through a midlife crisis about two years ago, which gave rise to the speculation of its demise. "I've been hearing a lot about this midlife crisis thing -- both professionally and personally over the past 12 months, I must admit," he said. "I guess that I don't know. I've sat down and tried to figure out whether I've actually had one or not. I guess my answer to that was 'no', but there was something that was going on genetically. It was a funny one because it all happened about the time of that music seminar thing ..."

Coverage of the music seminar included the first suggestions that Midnight Oil could split. "Well, it was a statement that came from our management actually" Hillman said. "We've done this on a couple of occasions, where after being in that kind of circle of making a record and touring for nine months and then coming back and making another album on the back of that and then going out again for nine months, you reach a certain point where you've just got to stop. Because if you keep doing it, you become blase about it and tensions personally build up anyway. It's a long time for men to be separated from their family and loved ones or whatever and travel under those circumstances and operate every night of the week. Of course, you are going to get a period where you are going to say 'fuck you' to somebody else and they are going to say that about you. So it was just for longevity purposes really that we had to say: 'Okay, we are going to stop for a year and we're not really going to see each other and people do what they have to do.

"At the end of that time, we'll get back together again and usually when that happens, we come back usually quite rejuvenated and usually with a vast amount of material for songs which has been written by various people or structures or parts of things like that. This kind of little magic creeps back in again as soon as we start playing and after a couple of hours it doesn't really seem like we've stopped, although to the public it seems like we've disappeared. We're very definitely back."

Underwater, the first single from Breathe, is receiving extensive airplay and heralds a different Midnight Oil. It was a bit of a conscious descision to try ... I don't know, it is like an evolution thing. Every time you make a record you don't want it to sound like the last one and that's a hard thing to do when you have a team of five people who have been working together for a long time. Naturally, you fall into habits. You approach things a certain way which you know is going to work and which feels comfortable for a you as a musician to do. So we pushed ourselves a bit more. I'd find myself doing something and I'd go:'Haven't I done this on another record before?' So you've just got to challenge yourself a little bit more and try to be a bit more removed. "Sometimes that's a hard thing to do, bit I think on Breathe we actually achieved it. It's all in the hands of the punters really. To a lot of people, they probably can't grasp it at all. It's probably not the Midnight Oil album they wanted to hear, but you know, otherwise we just make the same record 15 times."

Underwater employs an unusual snare drum sound which dominates the song. "It's a real snare drum with a real snare head, it was just tuned strangely I think," Hillman said."I don't know, Robbie twists little knobs and does all this stuff. He's always tuning his drums up to do something or other. I guess that's his trade secret, the Robbie Hirst thing. The snare does stick out. It's like a huge boil on the butt of society. I think the whole way we recorded that album technically, for a lot of people, was a 'no no'. It was done in a rehearsal room, the majority of it, before we went to New Orleans. Underwater was done in a little studio in Darling Harbour. Malcolm walked around the drum kit and threw a couple of microphones on the floor and stuck one overhead and every time, I'd go to get a cup of tea I'd stand on them and he'd go:'That's my sound! That's my sound! (grumbles' and I'd go:'Oh shit, okay! (sounds contrite)' It was a very rough approach to it ... not going into a sterile glass studio with dacquiris on a Friday afternoon and isolation booths. It was BYO cheese sandwiches and milk if you want a cup of tea. This time it was like:'Don't lie on the floor for too long or you get covered in cockroaches'."

Support for Midnight Oil at the Lismore Workers' Club will be Mother Hubbard. I guess I should end it off by being the good conscientious person and just remind everyone, don't get a skinful and drive home after Midnight Oil's New Year's Eve show, because it's a rotten way to end your life and it's a rotten way for us to wake up the next morning with the reality that someone did something that bloody stupid after one of our shows," Hillman said.

From Northern Star, by Paul Shaw

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