Midnight Oil’s Rob Hirst records with musician daughter Jay O’Shea
Rob Hirst and Jay O’Shea have locked into a happy rhythm as father and daughter – and musical collaborators.
About 500,000 people in 16 countries bought tickets when Midnight Oil began a 77-date world tour in 2017, and their reasons for wanting to be near the Sydney quintet were as varied as the dozens of songs the band had amassed across 11 albums.
Among the most common reasons: to remember the boozy, boisterous nights of their youth, when the domestic pub rock circuit was nascent and combustible. To hear the unique charisma of four superlative musicians and a singular vocalist. To dance wildly to some high-voltage rock ’n’ roll. To get up close and personal with the power and the passion with which the group has long been synonymous.
Or perhaps simply to satisfy one’s curiosity as to whether the five players — all aged 60 and above — could still plug in and summon the primal forces that had endeared them to a large audience in Australia and abroad from the mid-1980s onwards.
On a Thursday night in May 2017, when Jay O’Shea travelled to the Vic Theatre in Chicago, the award-winning country singer-songwriter carried with her a reason shared with none of the 1400 or so fans in attendance: she was there chiefly because she wanted to see her birth father, Rob Hirst, play the drums with his famous band for the very first time.
O’Shea was 43 then, but her true relationship with Hirst had been obscured for most of her life. She was raised in a loving home in Adelaide in the full knowledge that she was adopted. As an adult, though, those burning questions familiar to many adoptees began to grow in volume. Where did I come from? Who were my biological parents? Who am I?
After a fruitless and emotionally taxing decade and a half searching for answers, O’Shea eventually reconnected with Hirst in 2010 and began a tentative friendship that has since blossomed. At that time, Midnight Oil was an inactive entity: following the release of 11th album Capricornia in 2002, the quintet had downed tools and switched off its amplifiers, but for a couple of fundraising reunion concerts in Wave Aid (2005) and Sound Relief (2009).
The Chicago gig, then, was the first chance for O’Shea to experience something rare and remarkable that she had previously seen only on television and YouTube: her drumming birth father in full flight with his four bandmates. The Sydney group certainly turned it on that night, by selecting a 23-song setlist that began with a reading of its 1982 release — fourth album 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 — in its entirety.
“Midnight Oil selling out the modestly sized Vic was a foregone conclusion,” wrote Chicago Tribune critic Josh Klein. “But coming back from a 15-year break for a fiery set that felt like no time had passed at all? That was a welcome surprise.”
From a balcony vantage point, O’Shea watched as Hirst attacked the drum kit with the ardour of an adolescent. “It was just mind-blowing,” she recalls. “I was mesmerised; I couldn’t believe the energy and how good it was. The power and electricity coming off stage was really awe-inspiring.
“I feel so lucky that I actually got to see the band after all these years, because I didn’t grow up with Rob. I just felt very fortunate that I did get to see the band play together, and I did get to experience what that magic is like.”
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When O’Shea was born at the Memorial Hospital in North Adelaide on January 17, 1974, her teenage parents — under guidance from their respective parents — put the baby up for adoption. In the brutal manner of that era, the child was whisked away immediately after birth; neither mother nor father even knew her gender. Instead, they were advised to put the episode behind them and move on with their lives.
As a girl, Jay O’Shea — who then went by the name Kylie Smith — displayed an aptitude for and fascination with music that led to talent shows and performing in covers bands. She moved to Sydney at 19, and eventually signed a publishing deal with Warner Chappell London.
One of her biggest gigs was working as backing vocalist for the Jon Stevens-fronted iteration of INXS, before she married her musician husband Mark and put down roots in Nashville, Tennessee, where the pair record and perform as the Golden Guitar-winning country duo O’Shea.
After years of Jay asking questions of government organisations about her biological parents and being met with brick walls, her birth mother began a search of her own in 2010. Within four months, the pair were in contact. An initial 10-page email answered plenty of O’Shea’s questions, including the identity of her father — a name that jumped out immediately, as she and her husband had spent plenty of time in Nashville with a New Zealander named Bones Hillman, who happens to play bass in Midnight Oil.
Once she and Hirst met in Sydney, it was only natural that the two artists would begin making music together. Their first collaboration, released in 2016, was an O’Shea rearrangement of an earlier Hirst recording, The Truth Walks Slowly (In The Countryside). It was paired with a Golden Guitar award-winning music video that told the story of Queensland cotton farmer George Bender, who died by suicide after watching his family’s water bores dry up as a result of nearby coal seam gas mining activity.
“I love collaborations, and I love the feedback that you get from someone whose music you trust,” Hirst tells Review on a shared phone call with O’Shea. “It brings a whole different set of talents to the project. It must be very lonely for people doing it by themselves; it’s not something I’d want to do.”
His daughter agrees: “I never wanted to be a solo artist,” she says. “I love collaborating — more joy.”
Since the release of The Truth Walks Slowly, whenever the two would get together — when Hirst visited her family in Nashville, including his two grandchildren, or O’Shea returned to Australia for occasions such as hosting the Golden Guitar Awards in Tamworth with Mark in 2018 — they’d strum guitars and sing, contemplating their artistic chemistry and wondering whether they might record some music.
“Nothing was forced,” says O’Shea. “It happened very gradually and there were no parameters around what this record should be — we just started writing songs and before we knew it, we had 12 songs, and culled them down to 10. We thought, let’s get in the studio and record them, and see what comes out of this.
“You’ll find that the record’s quite eclectic: as Rob says, it’s a broad church. It spans from country to blues to atmos-pop. Every song has its own little space and its own story, and we treated every one differently.”
Their debut album, The Lost and the Found, contains songs written together and apart, and files sent between time zones — so that father could work on developing a track in Sydney while daughter slept in the States — before they booked a week at Benchmark Sound in Nashville to lay down tracks that were later finished at Oceanic Studio in Sydney, a space owned by Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie, who played guitar on three songs.
“We realise how lucky we are that this scenario of finding each other has worked, and that it’s been a joyous, wonderful gift to both of us and to both of our families,” says O’Shea. “I realise that it doesn’t always work out like that: unfortunately, a lot of adoptees and birth mothers and birth fathers find each other, and it just doesn’t work out for a gazillion reasons.
“We instantly had a very similar sense of humour and personality, I think because of the music.
“We’ve done music for our entire lives, and I think there’s a musicians’ mentality that just naturally happens. I find I tend to get along quite well with most musos. I felt like I was meeting a friend — and I often feel like I’m hanging out with my friend, which is really lovely.”
When Review asks Hirst for his response to hearing all those wonderful things his daughter just said, a few beats pass with nothing but silence audible on the other end. Then Hirst begins, “Well, actually, I’m …”
And then O’Shea kindly cuts back in on her father’s behalf. “He’s crying,” she says, smiling. “I’ve got to get my tissues out.”
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The only song on The Lost and the Found that directly addresses the two songwriters’ relationship and their shared history is saved for last, and was written from the perspective of the seeker who found her quarry. Named There You Are, its lyrics are coloured with precision and urgency, while O’Shea’s vocals are vulnerable and direct:
You were holding a bunch of hydrangeas
In a brown and turquoise shirt
A strangely familiar stranger
And here endeth the search
“It’s pretty literal; it’s not incredibly poetic,” says O’Shea. “I wanted to write a song that expressed how I felt, and I didn’t want it to be cheesy or cheap-sounding. I wondered how I’d attack that, and I went back to the journal that I was writing at the time that we met. I scribbled a few notes in among those days, and I read that and thought, ‘Why don’t I just try to tell the story, from my perspective, the way it was and the way I felt?’.”
I studied your face like a road map
So many similarities
That smile, that laugh, I knew that
We were the perfect symmetry
With a laugh, she recalls, “I wrote it and I held my breath and I sent it off to Rob, thinking, I hope he doesn’t hate this! I felt very childlike when I sent it off to him – and luckily, he came back and said, ‘I really like that song’.”
On hearing his daughter’s demo of There You Are for the first time, Hirst says: “My initial reaction was this was very heartfelt. And it’s true about the way we met. Jay’s great, the way she can take the minutiae of little conversations and incidents and actually put them in a poetic form.”
And I cried myself to sleep that night
I cried myself to sleep
It was one of the craziest days of my life
I cried myself to sleep
I found you after all this time
And you looked just like me
It was one of the happiest days of my life …
Raw emotion aside, the final track is also notable for its abundant use of Hirst’s most recognisable instrument. His kit is largely absent from the rest of the album, in favour of hand drums and more gentle percussion. But here, it felt right to let loose.
In responding to O’Shea’s plaintive request that forms the album’s last lyric — “I need to know everything about you” — the expansive playing that fills the final minute sounds like nothing so much as a gleeful, grateful father making up for lost time.
The Lost and the Found is out now via Sony Music Entertainment.