Well-oiled machine resumes at Mundi Mundi Bash, as Midnight Oil nears end
Cliched talk of turning back the clock doesn’t cut the mustard with the Sydney rock act, whose four founding members are all in their 60s.
On a cold, clear night near the middle of nowhere earlier this week, Midnight Oil lit the fuse for a final bracket of shows on a tour that has seen the quintet on the road since January.
Cliched talk of turning back the clock doesn’t cut the mustard with the Sydney rock act, whose four founding members are all in their 60s.
By this point, it’s clear that crafting hard-hitting, expansive live sets featuring songs old and new is simply what they do, as about 8000 people at the Mundi Mundi Bash music festival discovered on Thursday night.
Finding firsts is hard to do for a band that’s been making a racket and leaving its mark for 46 years, but on the plains near Silverton in far west NSW there was an Oils guest vocalist on debut.
Pop singer-songwriter Missy Higgins rang in her 39th birthday by singing lead with Peter Garrett during One Country, and backing vocals on signature songs Power and the Passion and The Dead Heart.
A few hours before taking to the stage, the band members revisited the location where they filmed the music video for Beds Are Burning, the 1987 single that shot the group to global fame.
“When you think about it now, we can see it through the rear-vision with greater clarity: it was quite a pivotal moment for us to be out there, to film those sequences on the edge of the salt lakes,” Garrett, 69, told The Weekend Australian.
“Being out at Silverton is crystal clear to me,” he said. “What you see [in the video] is us really reacting to the landscape, the culture and to the song itself. When you do that, it might not be super sexy, but at least it’s real.”
This last run of shows – including rescheduled dates in Cairns, Darwin and Canberra – will end with an intimate hometown concert, dubbed “One for the road”, on October 3 at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney.
The band recently played its final shows in Europe and the US, with Garrett noting that “at no point in all the time that we’ve been working over there have we ever found the world in such a perilous state of disarray”.
Closer to home, the former Labor minister believes the new government is on the right track, particularly with Anthony Albanese placing a referendum for an Indigenous voice to parliament high on its agenda.
“I think it’s an absolutely necessary step for us to take as a nation to finally grow up, to own our history, to show that we can make amends, and to heal,” he said.
“It looks as though a majority of Australians are ready for it, which is an entirely positive thing,” he said. “We’re fair-minded people, if propositions and arguments are put to us in a way that appeals to our heads and our hearts, and I think that’s what’s happening here.”
On Tuesday in Sydney, Midnight Oil will be honoured with an excellence in the community award for its activism at a Music in the House fundraiser event for music charity Support Act.
The writer travelled to Broken Hill as a guest of Mundi Mundi Bash.
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