Remind Peter Garrett - singer, lyricist, family man, activist and advocate - of this in 1997 and he grins and laughs, apparently delighted with the image of Sony staff tearing their hair out.

"We certainly weren't going to do the record company's job for them and we had other things to do, we had more music to make," is Garrett's response.

"The idea around Earth And Sun And Moon (1993) and Breathe was that we were going to do a couple of records and we weren't going to go out on the publicity thing and spend a lot of time flashing our teeth at people ... [those albums] were there for people and if they got on to them, fine, and if they didn't, then it didn't really matter."

Garrett, who lives with his wife and three daughters in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, has agreed to a rare interview, ostensibly to promote the new collection of Midnight Oil songs, 20,000 Watt RSL. This pow-wow takes place on the beautiful, near-deserted beach at Cabbage Tree Point, on tranquil Jervis Bay.

Garrett, one of the most potent images of Australian life from the past two decades, is dressed in mustard jeans, work boots, T-shirt and straw hat, a bag holding his towel and a change of clothes slung over his shoulder. Before work though, he insists on having a swim - but no pictures in his Speedos.

Midnight Oil's 20,000 Watt RSL recently entered the charts in pole position. As Garrett makes clear, it is a collection of songs chosen with care, with a point and a deliberate running order.

"We had a big listening party while we were doing Redneck Wonderland [the band's next studio album, to be released in '98]," said Garrett. "We decided to construct a Midnight Oil set for the living room. If we could walk into anyone's house and play anything off the last 10 albums that we've made, what would we play? And in what order would we like them to come?

"We basically sat there with two CD players and a tape player running in sequence and we did a song list like we do before a show."

Since 1989's Blue Sky Mining, Midnight Oil's local sales have been in freefall. At the peak of their popularity in the 1980s (10-1, Red Sails In The Sunset, Diesel And Dust and Blue Sky Mining), Midnight Oil's albums sold between 350,000-500,000 copies each in Australia. Worldwide sales for Diesel And Dust topped five million. None of the Oils' last three albums has cracked the 100,000 mark locally.

Does it hurt to have shed so many supporters? "Ah, no. We don't think about it, it's honestly not relevant to Midnight Oil at all," says Garrett. "We've never been a numbers band. We started with pretty humble ambitions; can we write songs about our country and live in our country and stay alive by doing that? If we can, then we've succeeded.

While 20,000 Watt RSL will keep Midnight Oil's name in the public arena for a few months, the real test of the band's ability to rebuild its audience will come next year with Redneck Wonderland. It promises to be the angriest Midnight Oil album in years. Two of the new songs were snuck on to 20,000 Watt RSL: in What Goes On and White Skin Black Heart, we see how edgy the new record will be.

Breathe wore its rough-and-ready, recorded live-to-tape feel on its sleeve, and Redneck Wonderland, produced by Regurgitator's main man Magoo, will also display all the hallmarks of a band embracing drum loops, electronic samples and other tools that are part and parcel of modern recording.

"It was a case of, if we are going to give these songs anywhere near the edge they need, then we are going to have to come at it from a completely different angle to what we did with the last record," Garrett says.

The disquiet stretches across the whole album?

"Yeah, and it gets stronger as the record goes on. In some ways Redneck Wonderland is attributable to what's happened over the last 18 months, since we've had a new government, since we've decided we're going to be backward-looking, narrow, that we're going to allow racism to spread its wings, that we're going to completely fail the test of coming to terms with our own past and our people - Aboriginal people - where we're going to be mean and demolish the planks of a civil society with this completely outmoded, outdated, atavistic attitude to government and people that this government seems to have."

"It is the greatest and most ... [he is momentarily lost for words] they have comprehensively failed, unlike any other government, to address any of the issues in anything like a forward-thinking way."

Since his 20s Garrett has been one of the Oils, surrounded by extraordinarily talented musicians, writers and arrangers Martin Rotsey, Rob Hirst and Jim Moginie. While this trio's skills have given Garrett a strong base from which to deliver his performance, it is his vocal delivery that defines the band.

"I don't see myself as a singer ... or as a particularly good one. I see myself as someone who is able to work with songs that have come through the Midnight Oil thing and it is out of those songs that I am able to make some kind of sense and make them work as vocal performances. And they are performances, as opposed to singing.

"It's a strange thing," says Garrett, "but I've always just had this complete thought that I was meant to sing in this band, and this band was going to have me singing for it.

"We see ourselves as people who are constantly finding new ways of producing music as a band. That's it. It is a completely uncomplicated, simple thing."

MIDNIGHT OIL: A BRIEF HISTORY

1971 Drummer Rob Hirst, guitarist/keyboardist Jim Moginie and bass player Andrew James start playing around Sydney
1975 Peter Garrett joins
1976 Martin Rotsey joins and the band becomes Midnight Oil
1978 Self-titled debut album released. They perform an anti-uranium-mining concert
1979 Head Injuries released.
1980 Andrew James leaves to be replaced by Peter Gifford
1981 Record Place Without A Postcard in UK
1982 Record 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 with Nick Launay
1984 Record Red Sails In The Sunset in Tokyo with Launay
1985 Oils tour US, Europe and UK and release EP Species Deceases
1986 Black Fella/White Fella tour of the Top End with the Warumpi Band
1987 Diesel And Dust is released
1989 Record Blue Sky Mining with new bass player Bones Hillman.
1992 Scream In Blue live album released.
1993 Earth And Sun And Moon released.
1996 Breathe released.
1997 20,000 Watt RSL released.

GARRETT ON THE BIBLE AND THE BIG PICTURE

"The Bible is a book that rewards reading from so many different levels and at so many different times in your life. I came back to it in the early 1980s.

I can sort of find a church anywhere, really. I can find it with a bunch of people busking on a street corner. The brand name thing has never been a big issue for me. I think that something important happens when a group of people get together and do something other than focus on themselves. If (the church) starts blaming people for their problems and judging people, then for me it's not a healthy exercise.

Sometimes I'd probably say I'm even further away (from answering life's big questions), but it's a fascinating journey and it's not an easy thing to talk about. It's easy to do it in short bursts, but, you know, it's a conversation you're having with the sky."

GARRETT ON HIS 1984 SENATE RUN

"There's nothing about the Senate run (as a Nuclear Disarmament Party candidate) that I would change except that not enough people knew that the only reason I didn't sit was because the Liberal Party and the Labor Party exchanged their preferences to keep me out. I'm talking about the knowledge of that. Otherwise, if I ran again tomorrow I would be perfectly content for it to go the same way. I don't harbor any misgivings about not being elected, nor do I think about what I would've done had I been elected. I don't think about it at all, unless someone asks me."

From The Sunday Age, by Peter Holmes

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