The Dead Heart
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Peter Garrett's Forgotten Years

(Original article online here)

Peter Garrett admits that he always found it difficult to simply shut up, to keep his thoughts and views to himself. But he's done a pretty good job of it in recent years, virtually disappearing from public view since his band Midnight Oil went into self-imposed musical exile after it's last run of shows in the early weeks of 1995.

A few months back the Oils resurfaced, releasing a low-key album, Breathe, and setting sail on a short tour of pubs and clubs around Australia. But still no word from Garrett. The long-time moral mouthpiece of Australian rock remained eerily silent, choosing not to comment publicly on his band's oblique new path or, for that matter, anything else. "I had to manufacture myself an indestructible concrete gag and have it tied around my mouth," jokes the bald and towering singer from his home in country Mittagong, south of Sydney. "But really, it's just the case that there'd been a lot of public stuff that had gone on and it was time to bring some balance back for some private life to happen.

"I've got a family (wife Doris and three daughters), I've got friends and, like a normal person, I've got things that I just want to do. And it was time to do that. "It was a case of learning to say no to people. 'No, I can't open the school fete. No, I can't go up to the forest area'. Or, 'No, I can't give you a quote or something'. "There's a point where if you become totally public property, there's nothing of your private life left and then your going to turn into a waxworks figure. "I don't think that was particularly happening in a big way but there is always a danger that that will happen."

A law graduate who once came within a shaving rash of sitting in Federal Parliament, and a passionate environmental and anti-nuclear crusader, Garrett, 42, now prefers to spend his days in relative solitude. In contrast to his often brash and loud persona, Garrett has always been intensely spiritual and inward-looking. He's an intellectual who puts his young family and faith above all else. "Those things are really important to me," is about as specific as Garrett gets about his private life. "They're not things you make part of your PR. They're the things you really have to have, whatever you're doing, to make it out there in the crazy place."

However, he does add that he's rediscovered his love of surfing. Only a month ago he dug out his custom-made elongated surfboard and hit the water for the first time in years. "Absolutely jazzed to be out riding again," he says with the buzz of a long-haired beach bum. "I'm just reversing all the cycles. "I never wore my tie but I prowled the corridors of power in the '80's and now, in the mid-'90's, I'm trying carve a few lines across a few big walls of water outside of the city. I'm falling off all the time but that doesn't matter."

Garrett's also enjoying strutting his wares on stage again, treading those familiar boards again out front of Midnight Oil. "I'm fairly tingly about it at the moment," Garrett says. "I don't know how long it will last. But it feels quite fresh. "I think that's the key at this point, to go in really fresh with a little bit of tingle and then your going to end up with it going somewhere instead of it just standing still. "We've always taken those breaks - it's kind of been a part of the way we are as a band. We don't have a conventional work pattern, but it just seems to keep us alive. "And the band's on fire at the moment, I'm glad to say. It's all hail and thunder."

That said, Garrett admits he's not looking forward to the inevitable, forthcoming world tour in support of their ninth studio album, Breathe. As one of Australia's most successful bands throughout the '80's, selling more than 11 million albums worldwide, Midnight Oil has lived much of it's life on the road. When it wasn't doing circuits of Australia, the band would spend months on end in America. But Garrett says that his 20-year-old band now want's to do things differently. "Considering the time it was taking us to get through making a record then playing to out audience, it's always taken us longer than we would have liked. We're going to record as we go a lot more now. "We're back in the studio next year and we'll start another record. And the touring that we do, we'll be picking it for its edginess and its impact and its stimulation and it's colour and movement as opposed to its dollars and cents."

Breathe is the first product of this new ethic. Created and recorded at an extraordinary pace by Oils' standards, it follows on from the more mellow tones offered by the band's last album, 1993's Earth and Sun and Moon. "I think it's the record we were trying to make when we made Earth and Sun and Moon to some extent," Garrett says. "Just a little leaner, a little less meat. There's very little gloss on it. "It's fairly emotional and fairly deconstructed for us for us. And we just went with the songs that worked. "Some people have said that it sounds a bit muted to them. The stuff live is really very powerful but I think it was much more just trying to keep it as honest as possible. "That's an overworked word. Bill Clinton says he's honest and I'm saying our record's honest. Who do you believe? But hopefully it's there in the grooves."

It's clear to any fan that the Midnight Oil on Breathe bears little resemblance to the political beast that built it's reputation and audience on anthemic songs. Hits such and US Forces, Power and the Passion, Hercules, Beds Are Burning, Blue Sky Mine, When the Generals Talk have become Australian classics and stalwarts of local radio playlists. In contrast to the bravado and aggro of those songs, Midnight Oil's new music explores the band's sensitive underbelly. The music, for the first time, hints at an acceptance that some things will never change, no matter how many people are shouting a chorus. And certainly, as far as Garrett is concerned, the band's days of waving the flag at every wrong in the world are over. "Midnight Oil shouldn't be seen as a preaching machine," he said. "We've always arrived at the music and the words for their own sake first because it's been what we've wanted to do and what's worked for us.

"But the other thing is that, yeah, there have been things that we've felt needed to be shouted and we've shouted them. Maybe that's just a reflective thing that happens when you make music late at night and then you wake up next morning and read the newspaper, you think: 'No damn it - I'm going to go down the street and try to sort that out'.

"But at the end of the day, that way an individual responds to a painting or to Pauline Hanson very much depends on their own situation, their own perspective, their own heart's state. In some ways, this record is a heart record.

Indeed Breathe is very much an introspective work, tinged with psychedelia and immersed in soft, free-flowing water imagery. Artistically, it's quite possibly the ensemble's finest moment. But not sounding totally convinced by his own loose praise for the record, Garrett ultimately describes Breathe as simply a product of the influences at play during the bands brief time back in the rehearsal room. "We didn't really know what we'd done until we got out. We just ended up making the record instead of rehearsing the record. [Producer Malcolm] Burns came across to listen to the demos and said: 'Well, these aren't really demos. These are album tracks. Why don't we just start'. Which was kind of like: 'That's a good idea. Why didn't we think of that?' And it went fairly quickly from there.

"So it's one of the quickest records we've made and I think the result is that you don't really know what you've got until you come out. "Different people have had different responses to it, which I guess we expected. If people like it, I'm delighted. If they don't, there's not much I can do about it.

"But I think, in some ways, we've got nothing to prove, nothing to lose as a band, everything to gain. So we just follow our musical instincts. "We cut ourselves off pretty much from everything else that was going on and tried to see what happened instantly instead of what happened after we thought about it. We tried not to think about it too much. And it's a record that the band feels pretty good about."

Garrett's thinly veiled apprehension about the commercial viability of Breathe probably has a lot to do with the fact that, two months after going into stores, it's proving to be the band's lowest-selling album ever. This week, Breathe sits at no. 85 on the Australian charts, having made its debut at number 3 but only spending 4 weeks in the top 50. So far, Breathe has only achieved gold status for sales in excess of 35,000. It's a far cry from the multi-platinum likes of 1982's 10-1 (which spent 171 weeks on the Australian charts) or 1988's Diesel and Dust.

But Garrett is adamant that Midnight Oil is not a spent force, that the band has not fallen victim to any generational shift in the music marketplace. "Firstly, I don't swallow this thing that a band is limited to a decade or a certain period," Garrett says. "There's a sound that I think can limit you but I don't think we fit into that. We started making music in the late '70s and we've come through a lot of periods of fashion of sound. We've pretty much stayed outside of that. It's not something that's ever affected us one way or the other.

"Because we've always been outside of it and haven't changed our haircuts to suit the times, we live or stand on our music. In that sense, the decades or the fashions don't really count all that much to us. At the same time, woe betide any trendy, youth-fascist, fashion-victim that tries to write us off. We'll have a really good go at breaking this generational straightjacket thing that everybody gets put into. We've been put into too many categories to accept any that they try to put on us. And we're seeing the next generation of Oils fans emerge and that's because we're out and we're playing and we're playing strongly. And that's what it's all about.

"All these lines that people draw around things are pretty meaningless. The music either soars or it sinks." Indeed, as the band's recent run of seel-out shows prove, Midnight Oil still has a young, strong, loyal audience. But it seems these kids are drawn to the band by the very same anthemic songs that made their parents Midnight Oil fans two decades ago. Whether Midnight Oil can convert its audience to its contemporary, more mature tones remains to be seen. Tomorrow [22/12/96] the Oils return to one of their old stomping grounds, Selinas at the Coogee Bay Hotel. The band is playing at the medium-sized beer barn in support of a new radio station, FBI (96.9 on the FM dial) which is vying for permanent broadcasting license. And that is why Garrett has broken his silence for this interview.

"I think they need a bit of a kick-along" he said. "It's consistent with the Oils' character to come in and boost up a radio station that we hope is going to operate in the best interests of the Sydney music scene. "Now that Triple J has gone national, it's obvious that there is a bit of a gap in the city which FBI is going to be allowed to fill. And the music that's being played on the station sounds pretty good. So we thought: 'Yeah, let's get in there and do something'."

Not that lack of local airplay is a problem the Oils have faced in a long time. "We're not whinging about it because we have been reasonable well-served over the years for radio airplay," he said. "I mean, we didn't get any in the beginning but the beginning is a long time ago. You're hearing the band played on Triple J, you're hearing it played on Triple M. Austereo have tended to stay away a bit from this record but basically we get airplay.

"We've got to that point where the name carries it through and the fan base carries you through. But it's not as easy for the young bands trying to get a foothold. I think what is happening id the flavour-of-the-month thing seems to have taken hold of people's senses to some extent. You're seeing people emerge and thinking: 'Oh, this sounds promising' and their getting one or two records away and then that's it. And if we're going to nurture talent...

"I mean, talent needs nurturing, especially in Australia, because our population is so small and the distance to overseas is so great. It needs to be nurtured and radio is, in some ways, a necessary part of the equation. There's some really healthy things happening, it's just keeping it going - that's the challenge. There's never going to be a shortage of bands emerging because that's what a lot of people want to do. I can identify with that - that's what I wanted to do.

"But it needs to be kept going, so that it's turned into something with a little bit of duration to it. A band should be able to build an audience out of its city, interstate and then across the oceans. That's ultimately what it's about."

Peter Garrett Mouths......

Pauline Hanson:
"It makes me a little angry at the thought that we haven't moved on from the racist attitudes of the '50s and '60s to the extent that we don't define social issues in terms of race. But she has no chance of lasting the distance and maybe, in some perverse way, has performed a useful function by lancing a boil which we've now got to deal with and talk about and deal with before the turn of the century, before reconciliation, before the Olympics, before the republic, before we make up our minds about what kind of country we are going to be."

Environment:
"Firstly, the selling off of any public property - whether its Telstra, a water board, a part of a forest, a part of the coast, a part of Australia's natural or financial heritage - really both bothers me. But, more particularly, with this government seeking to weaken the protection in things like natural parks, there's an element of giving with one hand and taking with another which I find very troubling. However I acknowledge that they went to the election with that policy and now they are carrying it out. So I just have to be a dissenting voice."

Nuclear Treaty:
"We've spent years in the trenches with it and then others came and carried the torch. I feel it is an extraordinary achievement for a lot of very dedicated and unrecognised people in the scientific community and the peace movement. And it's something that we're not making enough of because it's a really good moment for the planet where there aren't that many good moments to celebrate"

From Daily Telegraph, by Dino Scateno

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