Peter Garrett: I would think that a serious pulpit is the last thing rock and roll should be, and it's the last thing I'd think Midnight Oil was. I would think that we're actually a very different animal to that; we've just got an extending arm that happens to have a McNeil-Lehrer component. I think that we're primarily writers and performers, and before anything else, we-and I- approach the stage in a very primal sense. This is the place where you're going to carve out something that moves and surges from the raw material of amplifiers and prehistoric drum kits with bits of animal skin and bits of wood and bits of electricity; and anything that happens after that is a byproduct of that initial, primal carving.

"I think the only misconception that people have about us is that we're just a bunch of serious students of world issues that sit around all day nodding our heads, reading copies of Foreign Affair, and trying to figure out ways of making a rhyming couplet out of "global warming" and "fish aren't spawning." That would be a real caricature of what we do. Our marriage of word and music happens like a stew. It doesn't happen like an agenda. It's not something that's necessarily premeditated. It can be quite intuitive.

MG: How conscious are you about the way you present yourself on stage? Do you make decisions when to be animated or dramatic?

PG: No. I approach the stage in a fairly naked frame of mind. I'm just responding to the pulse of the music. Any performance aspects, which ultimately do become incorporated into what you do on-stage, have generally come about as a gut response as things happen. I like to move, but I don't analyze the movement. It's not choreographed.

MG: How do you navigate between what's natural and unnatural?

PG: There's an element of performance that's communication, and there's a place for the grand gesture if you're in a grand place. If it's a grand moment, you can do it and it'll work. I've certainly got a lot of grand gestures in my repertoire, but I try not to think about using them - I just hope that they'll pop out at the right time.

MG: Has it gotten easier for you since you began performing as a band back in 1977?

PG: Some parts have become easier, and other parts have become harder. Some people draw a fence around their performance; it's highly stylized and can be very effective in an entertainment sense, but you always get the feeling that it's never going to go any further than that. With Midnight Oil, we're not so much interested in the visual aspect of it. We're just interested in the effect of the band that gets itself in a certain place and then tries to throw that at the people. Some times you've got to take risks, and you've got to ignore the safety barriers a little bit and just go for it and see what happens.

From Musician, by Michael Gelfand

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