Womadelaide Day 4 – Midnight Oil’s Makarrata Live, Teskey Brothers, Siberian Tiger | Adelaide Festival 2021 review
This was the culmination of the Oils’ relationship with Indigenous Australia, and a collaboration with the artists who inspire it.
Adelaide Festival
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Womadelaide
March 8
King Rodney Park / Ityamai-itpina
It was a very different show that Midnight Oil brought, along with some musical friends, to the Womadelaide stage on Monday night – and it was all the more special for it.
Makarrata Live may have shared a handful of songs with the greatest hits package the band had performed at the festival two days earlier, but that was where the similarities ended.
This was the culmination of more than 30 years of the Oils’ relationship with Indigenous Australia, and a collaboration with the artists who continue to inspire it.
Set against a blood red and black backdrop of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the concert opened with the hammering crunch and blunt message of Redneck Wonderland, as if throwing down the gauntlet to White Australia.
It was also a much colder night, and the crowd wasn’t as quick to its feet, but that didn’t stop scarfed singer Peter Garrett from letting roar with a tremendous, prolonged note over the urgent throb and jagged guitars of Truganini.
The band dug deeper still for the brutal punch of Jimmy Sharman’s Boxers with its bitter refrain, “it’s no better if you win”.
That set the scene for the live incarnation of The Makarrata Project mini-album, which has become a multimedia experience. While recorded narration of the Uluru Statement played, time-lapse footage brought painted portraits of Indigenous identities to life before our eyes.
Almost imperceptibly at first, the band began to play along, soon to be joined by Troy Cassar-Daley on guitar and South Australia’s Bunna Lawrie tapping and singing in time for Come On Down – probably the most country-flavoured, joyous hoedown in the Oils’ repertoire.
Dan Sultan joined the vocal throng for Gadigal Land, a classic Oils rocker with its list of things the Aboriginal people never asked for or wanted from European invaders.
Rapper Tasman Keith delivered his fast and furious prose on First Nation, while singer Leah Donovan stepped in to match the lines recorded by Jessica Mauboy on the album.
The late Gurrumul’s unmistakeable voice rings out in a previously unreleased recording, accompanied by footage of flying cockatoos – like those which had earlier flocked overhead – to lead into Change The Day, with Sultan once again adding haunting, high harmonies which built into an impassioned plea.
Garrett handed the microphone over entirely to Alice Skye for Terror Australia, on which her distinctive intonation sounds both beautifully ethereal and entirely Aussie. It’s a voice you’ll want to hear more of.
Frank Yamma made a rare appearance alongside Cassar-Daley for Desert Man, Desert Woman, before the sweeping, uplifting Wind In My Head brought the new material to an end.
Luritja Way, from 2002’s Capricornia album, was an unexpected gem before the blistering final bracket of Kosciusko, Best of Both Worlds and Power and the Passion, and an all-in encore of Beds Are Burning – this time with an added Tasman Keith political rap.
Earlier, crowd pleasers the Teskey Brothers brought their 1960s-style, rhythm’n’blues and soul revival sound to the stage, fleshed out to seven players with the addition of Hammond organ, trumpet and trombone.
They mine, mimic and mash up all the tropes of the genre so brilliantly that you could be forgiven for listening to Let Me Let You Down or Carry You and spending half the time trying to work out which Sam Cooke or Otis Redding song they’re playing. Say You’ll Do is like early James Brown, with a bit of Walk On By thrown in for good measure.
It’s hard to say whether this is another type of cultural appropriation, but it’s certainly more Mississippi or Memphis than Melbourne.
The Teskeys even got away with crooning a cover of INXS’s Never Tear Us Apart. They’re like an earthier version of The Badloves, and it’s actually the more pop-rock flavour of So Caught Up that stands out for its catchy tune and plinking piano.
Adelaide opening act Siberian Tiger is not a metal band, like its name might suggest, but a mellow duo which also expanded on this occasion to include a three-piece string section, plus a second guitar, drums and double bass.
Guitarist Chris Panousakis channels the late Jeff Buckley in his vocals, while partner on and off stage Bree Tranter not only plays keys and shares the singing but brings the flute back into a band for the first time since … Jethro Tull?
Their ambient strains pick up to almost mid-tempo for Call On Me, which has a bit of a South Pacific swing, while new tune Blue Sky Moon (not Mine, Oils fans) fuses a Roy Orbison style of country-rock with some almost Beatlesque psychedelia.
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