Midnight Oil and friends on song in debut Makarrata Live show
The first outdoor concert on its Makarrata Live tour accompanied by indigenous collaborators contained several firsts for the Sydney-born rock quintet.
After more than four decades of making music under the name Midnight Oil, it tends to be pretty hard for this well-travelled band to find new ground to tread, yet the first outdoor concert on its Makarrata Live tour managed to contain several firsts for the Sydney-born rock quintet.
Following a pair of recent warm-up shows before a hometown crowd – one club-sized, the other at the refurbished Enmore Theatre – the Sunday night concert at Sirromet Winery, 31km southeast of Brisbane, marked the debut of its full-scale touring production before several thousand people in support of The Makaratta Project, the band’s 12th album, released last year.
Stylistically, its seven tracks range from propulsive, upbeat rockers to slower, spacier arrangements, all lyrically centred on matters related to the serious, unfinished business of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.
It was always going to be a challenge to locate and deliver these songs within the live context, and the way the band settled on solving that issue was to play them back to back, but not quite in the album’s running order. This approach worked well, and got the message across in one giant hit of about 30 minutes rather than stringing it out across the two-plus-hour running time.
A handful of moments from these songs stood out, all of them centred on the range of guest vocalists the band brought along to do justice to the recordings. First single Gadigal Land hit much harder on stage than it does on record, and seemed to speed up in tempo and temperature as the end neared. Dan Sultan’s searing, emotive voice cut through, adding new textures and tenors never before heard among this musical melange.
Similarly, in First Nation, hip-hop artist Tasman Keith swaggered onto stage to deliver a verse wherein his percussive vocals locked into the rhythm section like it was simply meant to be. It was always a risk to introduce a rapper within the context of one of Australia’s greatest rock bands. At a guess, at least of half Midnight Oil’s audience has no interest in hip-hop, yet it speaks directly to the band’s drive and adventurousness that bringing the rapper into the fold not only worked, but the intra-genre interloper fit right in.
The other memorable Makarrata moment was on Terror Australia, where the band all but gave up the stage so that a young woman, Alice Skye, could take lead vocals. She sang with beauty and vulnerability, accompanied only by Jim Moginie on keyboard and Martin Rotsey on guitar; what a bold move it was to serve that opportunity up to Skye, and what a pure joy it was to see her completely own the occasion with poise and power.
Returning to the notion of firsts: the Sirromet Winery show marked the first time the band had played that particular venue, and there can’t be too many viable halls, amphitheatres or festival paddocks the group has yet to visit in this country. The last time it played in Queensland, however, was its headline set at the Big Red Bash music festival in the state’s far west. Unknown to all, that July 2019 concert was also to be the final time that longtime bassist and backing vocalist Bones Hillman would play with the band: he died of cancer in November last year, aged 62, having kept his illness secret from all but a few close to him.
Only a few weeks ago did his four grieving bandmates announce Hillman’s replacement, Adam Ventoura, a fixture of Sydney’s live music scene and a well-respected player whose CV includes gigs with artists such as Delta Goodrem, Kate Ceberano and Guy Sebastian. In his Instagram bio, Ventoura describes himself as “2% human, 98% Fender bass”, a gag that neatly captures his humour and the seriousness with which he took on this role. Completely solid in tone, fingerwork and voice, he stayed rooted to the stage just to the left of Rob Hirst’s drum kit and did a great job without drawing attention to himself.
Outside of the Makarrata bracket, the 24-strong setlist covered an impressive range of the band’s deep catalogue, going as far back as set opener No Time For Games (1980) through to comparatively recent works Redneck Wonderland (1998) and Luritja Way (2002). Five from Diesel and Dust were aired: not only the three you’d probably expect to hear, but also lesser-played gems Gunbarrel Highway and Warakurna, the latter particularly exquisite.
Through it all, hyperactive frontman Peter Garrett drew focus in his inimitable way, while Hirst drove the band like a Mack truck from his perch up the back. Moginie and Rotsey traded riffs and chords like twins speaking in code; in the history of Australian rock ‘n’ roll, has there been a more perfect pairing of guitarists other than those who share the surname Young?
Between those four core members, the sheer quantity and quality of sounds, styles and ideas they get through in a night’s work remains breathtaking. With Ventoura in the mix, having quickly found his feet in a tough gig, the band remains incomparable when in full flight.
The real point of difference of these Makarrata Live shows, though, was the rare chance to bring a cohort of indigenous collaborators along to sing these songs and spread the word about the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the movement toward a First Nations voice to parliament protected by the constitution. The text of that document was displayed in full in a huge banner behind the band, while on the big screens flanking the stage, Garrett encouraged fans to scan perhaps the world’s biggest QR code with their phones to put their support behind it.
By the time the encore arrived, there were 12 performers on stage, a mix of men and women, indigenous and non-indigenous, all facing the same direction in agreement. That is the intent of the Statement From the Heart: for our population to unite and move forward as one.
The three-song encore featured One Country – with Leah Flanagan and Liz Stringer taking up the high vocal parts that once belonged to Hillman, and country singer-songwriter Troy Cassar-Daley at centre stage – as well as The Dead Heart and Beds Are Burning. It was in the final song that one last surprise arrived: blindsiding everyone, Tasman Keith returned to stage mid-song to detonate a smart bomb of a verse filled with potent imagery which breathed new life into a well-travelled arrangement.
All up, the rapper was on stage for barely five minutes all night, but that was all it took for him to steal the show. His second and final appearance was so astonishing that it seemed to cause Garrett to fluff the following verse, to the amusement of his bandmates and their guests. It’s not often that has happened in the hundreds of times Midnight Oil has performed that song across the decades – but it was that kind of show.
Midnight Oil. Sirromet Wines, Mount Cotton, Queensland. Sunday, February 28 2021. The Makarrata Live tour continues in Adelaide (March 6 and 8), Hunter Valley (March 13), Canberra (March 17) and Geelong (March 20).