Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie on auditioning Peter Garrett, missed Kylie moment and causing outrage at the Olympics

A ‘snarling’, long-haired Peter Garrett terrified his Midnight Oil bandmates at their first meeting – but what happened next launched their journey into Aussie rock legend.

Midnight Oil rocker JIM MOGINIE’s new memoir, The Silver River, charts his extraordinary adventures with the iconic Aussie band, set against his deeply personal story of searching for the parents who gave him up for adoption at birth.

This exclusive edited extract follows Jim’s rock journey from shy teen guitar hopeful to meeting Kylie Minogue and THAT Olympics moment seen around the world.

‘I WAS TERRIFIED AT OUR FIRST GIG’

Lads are learning … Jim Moginie and Midnight Oil bandmate Rob Hirst started out as Schwampy Moose, became FARM (this image is from their first gig as, er, farmers) then turned into Midnight Oil; and a new chapter in Aussie rock history began. Image from memoir The Silver River by Jim Moginie, published March 2024.

When Rob Hirst joined we became a real band; the whole thing lifted. Previously, anyone would join in on our jams. Neighbours would yelp into crappy PA systems, friends would ride around the room on bicycles. But now it was starting to sound good and everything else became peripheral.

Rob became singer and drummer and bass player Bear had an angelic voice for harmonies. I was terrified at our first gig – a small party in a house in Turramurra, Sydney. By now the three of us were all between fifteen and sixteen years old. I thought everyone was gawking at me and that my ears were too big. But I was thrilled with the experience of playing in a band more than I was embarrassed by it. There was something monastic and deep about the whole thing. It wasn’t about being an entertainer; I felt needed, part of something. Being in a band meant belonging.

Rob was good at getting us work and, calling ourselves Schwampy Moose, we played a few school dances. We did a lunchtime concert at the assembly hall at my school, Shore, and the boys seemed to like it, but during our version of The Beatles’ ‘I’m a Loser’, the headmaster ran up onstage and turned off the power to our amps, then ran back off as fast as he could. He didn’t say anything. It must have been a silent protest of some kind.

MEET PETE

These should not be forgotten years … gigging at Martini’s in Melbourne in the late 1970s. Left to right: Jim Moginie, Peter Garrett, Rob Hirst and Martin Rotsey. Image from The Silver River by Jim Moginie, published March 2024.

Rob’s alma mater, Sydney Grammar School, was less averse to rock than my school. and we were granted permission to do the occasional concert or rehearsal in their Science auditorium. Late in 1973, that is where we first set eyes on Pete (Peter Garrett), while auditioning for a singer.

Three years our senior, Pete had long since left school. He sat in the audience at a safe distance while we fiddled around with our amps. He looked intimidating, his gangly limbs draped over a couple of seats, long white Johnny Winter hair, monstrously tall with piercing eyes under a heavy brow. He appeared to be snarling, and I thought he was going to kill us.

We launched into a couple of songs and he sang along in a kind of high-pitched voice, one leg thrust forward. If we were expecting John Fogerty, this wasn’t it. A kind of trilly stream-of-consciousness improvisation emanated when he couldn’t remember the words to Locomotive Breath. However, when we embarked on a free-form blues he was clearly in his element, rapping and improvising convincingly over the top.

‘He appeared to be snarling’ … Peter Garrett years later at an anti-French nuclear protest in Sydney, 1995.

Afterwards, Rob and I went behind the curtain.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘It’s unusual, I guess. Maybe he’s got something.’

Pete was in. He was the sole applicant, and he conveniently owned a large white PA system. I don’t think we thought about it for more than a few seconds, but those few seconds were the beginning of an odyssey and countless years on the road together.

CANCELLED BY COUNTDOWN

While someone fawned at royal feet … Molly Meldrum interviews Prince Charles on Countdown in 1977. The Oils were not fans of such things, as made clear later in In The Valley.

The feeling in the band at that time was that we were ‘Five Against the World’. Everything around us in the business was lightweight and poppy and we were anything but. We were a flesh-and-blood, live-rock juggernaut in the act of creating itself.

We were booked to appear on Countdown. Our manager Gary Vasicek and the band had some thoughts about changing our presentation to distinguish us from the other bands that would appear on Countdown’s flashing plastic dance floor, with shampooed hair as long as their scarves and white satin or lycra trousers highlighting their well-proportioned bottoms.

They would mime their latest single to a mob of psychotic teenage girls who screamed on cue. Above them a chocolate box of lights would flash on and off, and every band, no matter who, became the Bay City Rollers in a sea of hair dryers. This was not what we wanted at all. No one had told Countdown about the arrival of punk.

‘Yellow belly black snake, sleeping on a red rock’ … actually it’s an olive python resting on Oils manager Gary Vasicek in the NT, 1986. From The Silver River by Jim Moginie, published March 2024.

The night before taping, we played at the Bondi Lifesaver supporting Rose Tattoo. We got out of there at 3am and were booked on a 6am flight to Melbourne. Gary went in to Countdown ahead of us. Our request for special presentation didn’t help win any ABC hearts and minds so the gatekeepers of pop cancelled our slot. Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum was the host. We saw him as the devil incarnate, with his stammered introductions, his embarrassing and unwatchable interview with the then Prince Charles, and his kingmaker status in the industry.

That night, all slightly relieved and blearily nonplussed by the rejection, we played a show where we were rained on with spit from the audience, who got the idea somewhere that we were punks. As nasty as that was, it felt closer to where we wanted to be.

BEDS, BOOZE AND BONES

‘A record we could share with the world’ … Midnight Oil in Ghent, Belgium, May 1988. L-R Rob Hirst, Peter Garrett, Martin Rotsey, Bones Hillman, Jim Moginie.

I always say my life is divided into two parts, the part before the 1986 Western Desert/Top End tour and the part after. Those intense three weeks, whether witnessing sacred objects or being trusted to spread the word of Aboriginal people’s plight, also gave us an album, a record we made to unpack what we had seen and felt in Aboriginal Australia. A record we could share with the world.

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By 1988, ‘Beds Are Burning’ had been a worldwide hit, selling hundreds of thousands of records. We’d had some recognition on previous tours, but this time we really had the song and the album to break through in America.

The size of the response was infinitely bigger than anything else we had previously experienced overseas. After a show to nearly 3000 people in Seattle, we were ushered into a cavernous green room full of overwhelmed radio contest winners and people who wanted to meet us. The door opened and they applauded madly, grinning and screaming, ‘Oh my god! It’s them!’

How can we dance? … Easily, with hits like this. Diesel And Dust, the album containing Beds Are Burning, spent six weeks at No 1 and took the band to new levels of global fame.

America! We were a product that they loved and wanted, and scrutinised both collectively and individually. Look what happened to Elvis with all of that sweet adoration. It was claustrophobic, and my reaction was immediate. I turned and headed straight back to the sanctuary of the dressing room. Willie McIness, our American tour manager, followed me.

“It’s okay, Jimmy,” he said. “I know what to do.” He filled a large dixie cup with ice, poured a big slug of whiskey into it and thrust it into my hand. “You’ll be all right.”

Things calmed down in the green room and so did I, thanks to the drop of “truth serum”, as Willie called it. It made me loquacious and seemingly witty, relaxing every muscle in my body so I could do my duty and “work the room”. It was almost pleasant.

That was the beginning of my love affair with truth serum.

As soon as our international career took off, alcohol was everywhere – in tubs full of ice in dressing rooms after the show, on the tour bus, in mini bars in the hotels, when carousing with the record label or in bars on our nights off. The business is awash with it. I veered away from alcoholism – self-preservation would kick in – but drinking became a coping mechanism.

Power and the prankster … Peter Garrett and the late Bones Hillman, still rocking but not unsettling American diners, at Adelaide Oval in 2017.

There’s a line I was treading between feeling good and becoming a rock cliché, but it wasn’t possible to perform our music high on anything: I was playing guitar and keyboards simultaneously like an octopus to replicate the more layered sound of our recent records and would never allow myself to miss a cue. For me, it was a deeply mental and physical gig that required every brain cell. The band was like a sports team with performance indices. We were expected to play hard and well – by our crew, our fans and, most of all, one another.

And we had a new bass player, Bones Hillman. He was just what we needed at that point, a ray of sunshine, and someone who was born to tour. I also discovered he had a wicked alter ego. On more than one occasion he dropped his trousers while descending in an atrium elevator in an American hotel, so everyone eating their flapjacks in the bistro below could see his arse approaching at high speed.

‘THIS WAS OIL’

‘Mission accomplished’ … with their secret Sorry suits on, the band rocked the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony in more ways than one. Picture: Nathan Edwards.

We had been invited to play at the Sydney Olympics. The theme was ‘Iconic Australia’ with Elle Macpherson, Kylie Minogue, Slim Dusty, INXS, Yothu Yindi and Christine Anu.

Various ideas about what we should do were thrown around, but it was Gary, in that environment that had meant so much and done so much for all of us, who suggested the song ‘Beds Are Burning’ to make the point that Prime Minister John Howard had done nothing, and was going to do nothing, about reconciliation, and had made no apology to the traditional people on whose sovereign country we were now standing for the stealing of their land, for the lack of a treaty and the genocide of their people. So we decided we would make the apology for him, with ‘Sorry’ written on our clothes, and send that message to the whole world. It was a moment of inspired clarity. We were going to give this dog-and-pony show some balls. This was Oil.

Of course, it all had to be planned in secret. It was a protest that had the potential to alienate sponsors, committees and stakeholders. We could be sued. I prepared a track at Alberts Studio to mime to, as nothing could go wrong at such a massive scale. Only Pete’s vocal would be live.

What a night-mayor … Jim’s moment with Kylie was ruined by a politician. Ms Minogue sings 'Dancing Queen' during the Olympics closing ceremony.

KYLIE MINOGUE MOMENT MARRED BY POLITICIAN

I was staying with Mum at the time, and on the morning of the show I ironed my ‘Sorry’ suit inside out so even she wouldn’t see the ‘Sorry’. We had to wait around for most of the day in a nondescript green room high up in the stadium where we could watch the live audience of over 110,000 take their seats. It was good to chat to Slim Dusty, who talked about growing up on the land and his lifelong habit of rising at dawn. I was about to chat to Kylie when the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Frank Sartor, cut in on me.

The event seemed to be running smoothly and, as our turn came, we put plain black overalls over our ‘Sorry’ suits to make the long walk around the stadium to the arena. We were beyond overwhelmed with the emotion of it, like we were astronauts about to board an Apollo mission.

We took off the black overalls at the base of the stairs to the stage. A mighty roar came up from the crowd as we appeared, and everyone stood up and started running towards us as the three-chord volley that introduces the song thundered around the stadium.

It was over so quickly. Bones jumped into the crowd to party with some Canadian athletes. As the event was televised in parks, hotels, houses, even around the Opera House, people all over the country were dancing to the song, celebrating what it meant to be Australian. Apparently John Howard and his party were the only ones not to rise to their feet.

Merging rock adventures with a moving personal story … The Silver River by Jim Moginie.

The next day the shock jocks went into hyperdrive, blasting through their anti – Midnight Oil monologues, saying how disrespectful and un-Australian we were with the Sorry message as they waxed lyrical into golden microphones on radio stations they were now part-owners of. That was good too; they would place themselves firmly on the wrong side of history.

This moment connected the dots in the band’s mission statement.

My feeling was that this was the real Everest of our career, not record sales or world domination. We had made our point on the international stage, all the way from our humble beginnings at the Royal Antler Hotel, with a song that we wrote to seek justice for those without a voice in Parliament, in a moment that was both political, cultural and musical. People could dance to it as well as get the message. By the year 2000, we had become good at that.

I felt like our mission was, in one way or another, accomplished.

‘We had become good at that’ … from rocker to author, Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie has many stories to tell. Picture: Robert Hambling

The Silver River by Jim Moginie will be published by HarperCollins on March 6 and is available to order now. Jim will be touring from March, full details here.