Essays

You Win Some You Lose Some

(Original article online here)

Midnight Oil have been a fearless force in the Australian music industry for nearly two decades They have made great strides and often great music by being willful stubborn and prepared to back themselves every time in the face of any foe.

This is the band that refused to appear on Countdown when that exposure could have helped immeasurably in that late '70s climate On this is the band which refused to get down and do any arse kissing that was going to weaken their resolve to show just how far a rock band could go if they stuck together like that gang they all start out pretending to be Even with a couple of line-up changes the impenetrable shell has not been broken.

Their singer ran for Senate but still refused to be singled out as frontman. Their drummer, the cute one according to the girls, was never going to lay on the beefcake to help spread the appeal. No this was a band. A band who were going to see it through together or go down in a screaming heap.

When success did come their way they took even less mucking around. Their 1989 album Diesel and Dust was the fastest selling LP in Australian music history and was certified platinum within three days and all this on the back of their fiery look at land rights, Beds Are Burning. Next they were aiming their sights at victims of asbestos mining. If they ever did appear to be ready to form a Rent-A-Cause coalition it was simply because they knew there were so many things that needed public attention and the best way they could draw the necessary attention was with drums and guitars.

They have remained happily standing on the outside of the hoopla of the music business and have made the unconventional their own.

So it is with some surprise the band has gone down the route of finally releasing a greatest hits compilation. Just like everybody else. No complaints from most people no doubt but there is a sense that this is one battle they have lost.

Drummer Rob Hirst was in his Sydney home this Monday. He wanted to talk about the band's new album, not this compilation 20 000 Watts RSL but the new album Redneck Wonderland which is due for release next February. He reckons compilations are for bands that have broken up and the one thing he is more emphatic about any is that Midnight Oil are far from a spent force. The way he tells it he, Peter Garrett, Jim Moginie, Martin Rotsey and Bones Hillman are only just beginning.

With a Greatest Hits coming out in October and new album scheduled for February could it be taken you had your hand forced in finally releasing a compilation?
Well, it wasn't something the band would have done unprompted. Personally I don't have a lot of collection records, I like getting the original stuff. Particularly because Midnight Oil have never been a band happy to lift even singles from the albums, we have always tried to make albums that hold together with the spirit of time and place with whatever we are doing. So the idea of taking 11 songs plus the two new ones out of their respective niches and putting them together was probably not something we would have done. We agonised over it for three months, tossed it around, whether we would make it a double record to give it a lot of depth as you can guess after 20 years recording there are a lot of songs left off but finally we arrived at something we could agree on.

There is a great story in the booklet by Perth author Tim Winton which gives a sense of being a Midnight Oil fan over a period of years and what it is like. It's reminded us that the songs mean a lot to people out there. I don't know if this fits your life, but songs to me always remind me of exactly what I was doing, a time and place and who I was with. That's what a lot of people have said about this record it has a lot of passion and reminds them of times of their life they might have forgotten.

I can see songs as a sound track to a lot of lives, but a lot of songs do that. With Midnight Oil, there has never been a sense that it is only rock and roll. It's much more important than that, isn't it?
Well, there a lot of bands doing only rock and roll. With Midnight Oil there has always been the sense that we have to comment about what is going on around us. There is so much going on in this country, particularly recently with the current Federal Government turning back the clock. The bile was visibly rising within the band members, which culminated in a couple of songs, particularly in [current single] White Skin, Black Heart which has come out on the 20,000 Watt record. I guess you can go two ways. You can pretend it is all going to go away, this increasing racism and xenophobia, like Howard did, or you can address it. We decided to do the latter.

Have you received much backlash for this stand over the years. I know Tim Winton wrote in his notes "There are times I wish they would just shut up and..."
[Cutting in] "Shut up and play yer guitar". Yeah. It's a bit of a fine line to tread because on one hand we were never likely to be a band that just abandoned our ideals and the writers were never just going to write commercial pap. The leopard was never going to change its spots. What the leopard attempted to do was to advance musically with each record and to go into different areas, into uncharted territories.

That was never more so that with the last record, Breathe, where we made a very atmospheric record that was a influenced a lot by our experience of recording in New Orleans and with [producer] Malcolm Burn.

Really the spirit of the band is very much like it was 20 years ago and if at times it has become a bit too much to take I think that is pretty much what you get with Midnight Oil. Maybe some of the records you can't listen to all the way through.

Certainly you can't put it on as background and have a quiet dinner. It addresses stuff and has a desire to provoke. We are not saying we are always right in what we say, but, I think generally, listening back to the songs, I think they stand up pretty well. The passion is there and that is missing in a lot of the stuff we hear.

After 20 years do you feel alone in that area?

No, there are others. Some have gone by the wayside but there are people in this country who, musically, have always gone out of their way to not just make musical collections of songs. Obviously Paul Kelly comes to mind. Tim and Neil Finn have always gone out of their way to address stuff and to be a part of protests and to offer themselves and their bands to be more than just performers. To go beyond that. The list goes on. Maybe we "were the most consistent and most vocal".

Why did you give the album that title?
That was one of Jim's lines. Bands like ourselves from the late 1970s to early '80s bands that were playing 180 shows a year tended to find themselves night after night in RSL's and Leagues clubs. That was the way you did it in Australia, as opposed to England for example where often as not you would be discovered by some svengali, put on the cover of the NME, then sent off for a quick tour of the Midlands to learn how to play. It was a different way of going about it.

This way was the road hard toughening way as pioneered by bands like AC/DC and we followed in that mode and, as a result, the bands from that period and I include INXS and Crowded House and all the bands that did all that work ended up being very good live, just because they did it all the time. That couldn't always be said for the current crop of English or even American bands.

In Australia there are many bands starved of that opportunity, too, aren't there?
I think the problem now is that we had an alternative to commercial radio, which wasn't playing us initially, and to Countdown, which we refused to go on, we had another way out and that was to play and play and have our name spread by word of mouth. Initially from the Royal Antler Hotel on the northern beaches of Sydney, to the city of Sydney, then Melbourne then to the other states and eventually internationally.

I don't think that opportunity is available to bands now and I think it will become harder not only through lack of venues. Now you've got a situation where the parallel import CD provisions are coming down and a lot of the independent record companies which traditionally have fed the big six majors with new acts are likely to be in peril because they are likely to be dumped on by deleted records from overseas and pirates.

There were halcyon days in the '80s, where Australians were doing more than playing second fiddle to international acts. They were getting really good recording budgets, they were filling the Entertainment Centres, but it may be little more than a blip as we descend into very tough times for Australian music, which doesn't seem to be valued by government.

What people don't realise is that even the big six have to make a profit on local product. And they do that out of distributing proven product from overseas. That needs to return a profit to both international companies here and also the independents. If it ceases to do that two things will happen. First, staff numbers will be cut and the industry will shrink and secondly there will not be the left over investment money to make sure the new Midnight Oil or whatever is coming through.

Do you see this as a crisis time for Midnight Oil in that regard?
We're beyond all that. [laughs] We are going into our third decade. But for the younger bands coming up don't have that opportunity.

I wasn't being flippant. Breathe wouldn't have done anywhere near as well as you would have hoped, would it?
We don't calculate stuff in terms of sales. It did well considering it was a low key, atmospheric sort of record. It didn't necessarily fit into current Australian radio play, which is very narrow compared to European and American, but it was the record we wanted to make. I think there were some really good songs and the band really expanded their potential on that record.

For the upcoming album you have gone with producer Magoo. Why?
We did it with him over five trips to Melbourne. We met Magoo on foreign territory. He's from Queensland, we're from New South Wales, so we made a record in Victoria for the first time. It turned out very good. He brought a real freshness to the band. One thing Midnight Oil tend to do is that after making so many records it tends to double think. Often that is the worst thing you can do I think Magoo brought a naivet to it, plus a lot of experience from the records he has made with Powderfinger and Regurgitator and others.

Does that double think come because you appear to be a real band where every member has something of an equal say in what happens and it is harder to reach agreement?
It is actually. The dilemma is the more you know about recording, songwriting, playing live, the whole business, it opens up too many possibilities and your head can spin. Whereas in a way I think Midnight Oil is at its best when it just goes in and charges. It's the energy as well as the passion, I think, which comes through on 20,000 Watts. A lot of those songs we have chosen, particularly Best Of Both Worlds, Kosciuszko and Don't Wanna be The One, were recorded in a spirit of "heads down, see you at the end of the song." It is one of the things we can do very well.

The new songs don't sound like that. Is maturity coming to you? The songs from the Magoo album?
Hah, that is real tough. The closest it comes to in spirit is Head Injuries, with more of a contemporary feel to it. It has a lot of Jim Moginie's tough riffs and a lot of fast and furious drumming. The new record, Redneck Wonderland, I'm more excited about it than I have been for quite some time. Really. It's really my sort of thing.

Lots of drums?
Yeah. And you end every take bathed in sweat. It's a hard day's work.

How much of that is the producer?
You always have somebody else there.

Assuming you know what you are doing, why do you still want an outside voice after all these years?

The secret is to pick someone whose work you trust Normally we listen to a bunch of records and say whoever did this, did well. Sometimes it is hard to know what the band has done and what the producer has done, but generally a theme emerges. We have a short list of producers and hopefully it becomes a mutual admiration society where everyone is pulling towards the same thing. Sometimes it has been less than successful.

Was there much debate over which songs would make the cut for the compilation?
Yeah, there was. We wanted to make it a double for a while but we didn't want to make it like an anthology because that's "what bands do when they break-up." We have this new record coming and the band is really charging at the moment, so why don't we just put out one with some of our favourite songs. We could only have 1 because of the time, so we ended with 11 favourites. There are a couple of glaring omissions. It is not a chronological thing. Jim did a lot of work making sure the songs segued nicely into each other and each song sounded like something that should be there, rather than something that was thrown together by a third party. I had to dig through the attic for all the old photos dusted them off and tried to make something worthwhile.

I remember an old picture from RAM Magazine when you were still called the Farm and Peter had hair You didn't get that one out.
[Laughs] Some of them have dated more than others. We went through the process.

Using Tim Winton to do the notes, it seems you guys have distanced yourselves from this record. Would I be right?
It is hard to write about yourself.

I can see that but who would have been better to give a run down on those songs from over all those years? A bit of a blurb?
Yeah, but if you do that you can end up on what producer and town it was written etc. There are so many stories to be told.

Exactly. Some of those stories are told on a companion video coming-out.

There are no musician credits on the album Is that a case of you assuming that people who buy it will already have all the others?
Not necessarily, but experience has shown that if people like the album they will seek out the whole story.

Do you have any handle on what is a Midnight Oil fan?
It's that guy or girl in the front row screaming at me for Powderworks. It doesn't matter what language it is. In France, Germany, Canada, Brazil, United States or South Africa, it's the same.

From X-Press, by Polly Coufos

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