Midnight Oil go out in blaze of glory on final concert tour
After almost five decades together they’re on their final concert tour. And with a new album and new band members, Midnight Oil are still on fire.
It’s still daylight when five musicians file onto stage for a headline performance in Launceston on a Sunday in late January. A Covid-capacity crowd of about 1400 has gathered at Royal Park, alongside the north Tasmanian city’s Tamar River, for what’s probably the locals’ last chance to see this band in action. Without much more ceremony than a welcoming wave to the audience, the Midnight Oil members share eye contact with drummer and songwriter Rob Hirst, who counts them into the opening bars of a hard-rocking song called Progress. Released in 1985, it’s a deep cut from a broad and varied catalogue spanning more than 200 songs. The hardcore lifelong fans up against the front barrier are ecstatic but the more casual observers – who mostly know the band from its string of commercial radio staples now spanning four decades – are left scratching their heads.
“I won’t deny it / Can we survive?” sings Peter Garrett in the middle eight, before the arrangement breaks down into a call-and-response chant of the song’s title. At 68, Garrett’s idiosyncratic stage moves might have slowed a step, but the bald frontman still pulls focus like few others in this business. When he sings of survival, he could be singing of another remarkably long life. Most bands don’t stick together for six years, let alone 46, as Midnight Oil now has. It takes shared grit, mutual respect and extraordinary single-mindedness for any group to keep the wheels turning for so long.
“From the outset, the Oils had been different,” wrote the late NT-based journalist Andrew McMillan in his 1988 book Strict Rules. “Eschewing the clichéd excesses of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, they’d developed a low-key but strict code of behaviour. While many of their contemporaries were burning themselves out in two or three years, the Oils seemed to be working to a long-term plan. Circumstances changed, opportunities arose, tactics were altered and the Oils rolled on.”
There have been some periods of inactivity during their 46 years, but this Launceston gig is the first of 19 dates booked through to April, in what the band has dubbed its final Australian tour to coincide with the release of its 13th album, Resist. As night falls halfway through the two-hour set, a black-clad figure emerges from the crowd and slips past a security barrier in front of the sound desk. It’s Brian Ritchie, the US-born musician who co-founded the alternative rock trio Violent Femmes. The 61-year-old has called Tasmania home for 15 years and is a longtime friend and collaborator, chiefly as bassist in the surf instrumental act The Break, which features drummer Hirst and the Oils’ two guitarists, Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey. Here, though, he’s in the role of promoter, having booked Midnight Oil to headline four concerts for the Mona Foma festival.
Later, I ask Ritchie what he saw and heard at this first concert in Launceston. “I thought it was a very well-constructed set,” he replies. “They showed quite a bit of musical diversity. I was impressed with the way that the set just kept building and building. Peter’s voice is still strong, and he was hitting the high notes really well, which is not always the case with some musicians of that generation.” He has a blunt response when asked why he booked the group to headline his festival. “They’re the best band that ever came out of Australia – and as Oscar Wilde says, ‘My tastes are simple: the best is always good enough for me’.”
“They have the edge because they’re still doing it at peak form, and they were the first band that was truly, undeniably Australian in their presentation,” he says. “When I was growing up in Milwaukee, as great as AC/DC are, I didn’t know where they were from. There was nothing about their music that said where they were from – whereas as soon as you hear Midnight Oil, there’s no question that they’re Australian.”
Given the billing of the Resist tour, questions of finality, artistic influence and longevity are swirling through my head. Away from the main stage PA, I canvass these notions with Ritchie, and he humours me at some length – but as he gets up to leave, he shares an afterthought that sounds a note of caution. “Don’t let the article be an epitaph,” he says. “I think their legacy is going to go on, whether they’re touring or not. The album is going to have some impact; this tour is going to have a big impact. I think that they’re going to keep doing something – just not as much of it.”
Five years ago, the band signalled its awakeningfrom a 15-year slumber with a press conference held on Sydney Harbour. There, it announced a world tour that would eventually comprise 77 dates in 16 countries, and sell some 500,000 tickets along the way. The only other Australian band to better such a box office feat is AC/DC, the hard rock act whose sonic presence inside stadiums around the world is augmented by pyrotechnic blasts, giant bells and cannons.
Midnight Oil relied on no such production enhancements on its world tour, dubbed The Great Circle. Instead, the music was at the centre, and not only its “greatest hits”. “I think it was Jim who said, ‘We’re going to learn everything we ever recorded, including b-sides and outtakes’,” Hirst told me in 2018. “The first thing we noticed was that as soon as we plugged in and started playing, day one in the rehearsal room in Marrickville, it sounded like us: the band still pushes and pulls the rhythms in the same way it always used to.”
Backed by pristine sound and lighting technicians, the five musicians rocked and rolled, but the trip took its toll; by the time the run reached its end in November 2017, Hirst says they were “hollow men”. Determined not to be a nostalgia act, the band sought to continue only if new music was in the mix. After a European festival tour in 2019, it scheduled one last Australian concert in far western Queensland in July that year before heading to the recording studio for the first time since 2002. On the edge of the Simpson Desert, against the backdrop of a giant sand dune, it was the headline act at the Big Red Bash music festival before a pop-up town of about 10,000 campers known as “Bashville”. Before the show, Garrett grinned as he told me at the Birdsville Hotel, “You have moments where the stars are shining a little brighter in the night sky, where the pulse beats a little more quickly. It’ll be one of those nights.”
It was. The set began in the fading desert light with the incessant bass drum pulse of The Dead Heart, one of the essential Australian songs in a distinctly Australian locale. A truly once-in-a-lifetime experience, it remains perhaps the greatest concert I have ever witnessed, and I suspect a decent chunk of those in attendance would concur.
Nobody knew it then, but that outback gig was also the last time that bassist and backing vocalist Bones Hillman would ever perform on stage with the band. After hundreds of shows between 1987 and 2019, the final track they played together that night was One Country, a song of inclusion and community from 1990’s Blue Sky Mining that foregrounded Hillman’s beautiful falsetto. The group recorded material at Sydney’s Rancom Street and Oceanic Studios in late 2019, but by November 2020, Hillman – who was based in the US city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin – would be dead from cancer, aged 62. A few days after Hillman’s death, Hirst told me, “I think Bones was actually keeping a terrible secret from us. We think that Bonesy knew something was wrong a long time ago, but being the amazing, independent Kiwi that he is, he didn’t want to burden that with anyone else.”
Those 2019 recording sessions led to two albums worth of material: The Makarrata Project was issued in late 2020, shortly before Hillman’s death, while Resist arrives about 15 months later.
Fuelled by equal parts anger and hope, the songwriting of Midnight Oil stretches across the span of Australian history far and near, its abiding ethos perhaps summed up by a line from Hirst’s 2003 memoir Willie’s Bar and Grill: “It’s better to play complaint rock than compliant rock.”
All the way through, its lyrics and music have been chiefly composed by Hirst and Moginie, apart and together, with Garrett making amendments for his preferred vocal delivery or throwing in whole songs on occasion, as he does toward the end of Resist. “I managed to crowbar a few in,” says the singer with a grin.
Beyond his precision six-string work, both as a lead and rhythm player, Martin Rotsey has long acted in a judicial role of sorts, as an arbiter for truth, taste and the band’s overall character. Moginie says Midnight Oil’s previous manager, Gary Morris, used to compare Rotsey to a slow-release fertiliser: his thoughtful work often occurs out of view, but it results in a healthy plant that grows strong and upright. By far the quietest band member, he is the only one who declined to speak with me for this story. The only time we have spoken on the record was ahead of the release of 2020’s The Makarrata Project; he broke his media silence, as it were, because of the importance of speaking up about the issue of Indigenous reconciliation, which drove that collection of songs.
The sum of anything that moves from private discussions into the light of public view – be it new music, social activism or the appointment of a new band member – is filtered through these four brains. Even 46 years on from their formation, their unity and brotherhood remains a core value. “Bands are a very transitory thing; even the great bands just last a few years,” Rotsey told me in 2020. “But for some reason, something’s gone on that’s made this last for a long time. It must be part of that respect we’ve got for each other.”
The songs on Resist are rooted in subjects including climate change (first single Rising Seas), asylum seeker policy (Lost at Sea), conservation of the Great Barrier Reef (Reef) and Tasmania’s Tarkine region (Tarkine), water theft (The Barka- Darling River) and disillusionment with political leadership, a theme that runs through each of these issues (To the Ends of the Earth). Sounds like classic Midnight Oil, doesn’t it? If this were to be the final set of songs the group ever issued, it would serve as an overall mission statement for the 12 albums that came before it. There is a satisfying sense of coherence about this, and perhaps the band’s continued execution of such a long-running artistic vision is among its greatest achievements.
When I put this to Garrett, he says: “This material is very cohesive, but it’s also very broad. It’s reflecting the character of the band and the writers, but also our preoccupations, our visions, our obsessions, and our determination to say things.”
But as Moginie points out to me during a series of one-on-one conversations with the band members between the two Launceston shows, none of it works without harmony. “You can’t have the outspoken political thing without the music,” he tells me, while we share a shaded park bench outside a hotel south of the city centre. “If you had shit music that wasn’t melodic or memorable or had a great beat to it, I just can’t see how you could somehow get that message across the line sometimes.
“There’s a lot of anger in some of the performances: Nobody’s Child is one of the most ferocious things we’ve ever done,” says the guitarist and keyboardist. “There’s anger in Rising Seas, but there’s hope as well, because you can’t just have one without the other. You can’t have nihilism without any solution. That’s been the trick, I think, with our music: you have to offer some kind of solution or discussion or conversation. Otherwise, it’s just stamping your fist on the table.”
Written from the perspective of an asylum seeker sighting Australia for the first time from a boat, Lost at Sea – a Hirst/Moginie co-write – feels like a track that will, in time, come to be seen as one of the band’s greatest political statements. “And the coastline rose in front of us / Each one of us was moved to pray or yell,” sings Garrett in its second verse. “Then the sons of White Australia came with guns / And took us to an island hell.”
Later, sitting on the same park bench and looking towards the hills of west Launceston through sunglasses, Hirst talks slowly and reflectively. Having beaten the hell out of his drums for two hours the night before, the 66-year-old is enjoying a rest day. But when I ask about Lost at Sea, his voice grows urgent and impassioned as he speaks of his decision to write in the voice of an asylum seeker kept on an island – or in a Melbourne hotel – and left to languish for years on end, having committed no crime except seeking safety. “It’s Australia’s great shame,” says Hirst. “It just makes us in the band collectively angry and ashamed of this country. When everything’s said and done, it’ll be very interesting if there were lawsuits flying back at the people who illegally imprisoned these people, who have legally sought asylum and refugee status in this country. What will happen? It’ll be interesting to see who goes to jail.”
Hirst then posits a theory for their long life as a band, noting that the chemistry is as important as individual talents, particularly with men. “It’s possible that some blokey bands actually survive because of what’s unsaid. Because we’ve all said things in the past which have been hurtful, and I think you quickly learn that sometimes, it’s just better to retreat into yourself. I’m sure if you sat down with anyone with any kind of training in psychology, they would say the exact opposite – but I don’t think so. I think stony silence can be your best friend, and I think 50-odd years of Midnight Oil is a great testament to that,” he says with a laugh.
Into this complex four-way relationship have been thrust several new faces in the past 12 months. With the pandemic keeping an ailing Hillman at home in the US, the quartet recruited three new touring members to play his parts: Sydney-based bassist Adam Ventoura and backing vocalists Leah Flanagan and Liz Stringer. Ventoura is playing bass parts written and recorded by Hillman but also Andrew “Bear” James (1976-1980) and Peter “Giffo” Gifford, who left the band after they had finalised the recordings for Diesel & Dust in 1987.
While on a gentle walk around the block that inadvertently leads us up a steep hill behind the hotel, Ventoura exhibits a kind of Zen calm about the unusual set of circumstances that thrust him into one of the biggest Australian bands of all time after he had recorded at Moginie’s Oceanic Studio. It left a deep impression. (“I was just convinced straight away, really; there wasn’t any doubt in my mind,” Moginie told me.) The newest member recalls seeing the band for the first time when he clocked the music video for US Forces while sleeping over at a friend’s place when he was 10 years old in 1985. Now he’s in the band and playing that song with them most nights. “They’re amazing musicians, and it’s quite intense for someone who’s 20 years younger than those guys,” says Ventoura. “It’s a lot of songs to learn, and a big legacy and massive boots to fill. Not just Bonesy: any of the bass players, really. It’s a big deal.”
This sentiment is echoed by Flanagan and Stringer, both of whom are accomplished singer- songwriters. Flanagan appeared in recording sessions for The Makarrata Project, and when Moginie asked her to join the tour, she suggested her friend Stringer for an accompanying role. Backstage before the second Launceston show, they speak glowingly of being invited into the inner circle. Both grew up listening to the band but Flanagan feels deeply connected to its longstanding empathy for First Nations people. “Midnight Oil for me was the only kind of musical reference to my life as a kid growing up in Darwin,” she says. “They were the only band that I ever knew of that sang about the landscape where I come from, and the stories of mob in the Northern Territory. Not many popular bands ever really did that, especially balanda (white) bands.
“I believe in their music from those early days,” she says. “And being able to sing the lyrics to Beds Are Burning? Not only are we the only women that have ever sang these songs with them, but as an Aboriginal woman, when that song comes up, it feels like a spiritual experience.” What does it feel like to be on stage when Hirst counts into one of the band’s best-known tracks? “This music is part of people’s cultural DNA, and to be actually inside the songs is just phenomenal,” says Stringer, shaking her head. “At rehearsal, they’re sort of like a diesel engine: it starts revving a little bit, and then when they are at full rev, it’s f..king insane.”
The band’s second and final Launceston show isheld on January 25, the eve of Australia Day, and so the pointed 2020 track Change the Date – featuring the ethereal vocals of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, the acclaimed Indigenous musician who died in 2017, aged 46 – is a natural inclusion, while older rarities include Blossomand Blood (1985) and Stars of Warburton (1990). Over the first two nights, the band plays 32 different songs; by the time the 17 remaining dates on this national tour are completed, that number is likely to have doubled, or perhaps even trebled.
Standing on top of the heavy stone steps that face the Tamar River, I watch the encore unfold. As the band work through River Runs Red and then Beds Are Burning, some see and hear five ordinary blokes – and two women singers – making a hell of a racket. For others, it’s something as essential as the oxygen in their lungs and the blood pulsing in their veins.
Earlier, Garrett had told me, “No one and nothing has permanence in our world, and we’re as aware of that as anybody else is. We’ll just enjoy getting out and doing those songs, and hope they hit the mark.” Then the words of another great rock’n’roller come to mind: It’s better to burn out than to fade away, sang Neil Young in 1978, two years after Midnight Oil began performing and recording under that name.
At the end of the final show of this tour, the musicians will each give an appreciative wave to the crowd before walking out of sight backstage. The house lights will be raised, breaking the spell and signalling a return to the usual flow of life after two-plus hours spent deep inside a vast world of music spanning five decades and fuelled by a heady cocktail of anger and hope.
But not just yet. For now, what exists is the familiar drive, melody and message of Forgotten Years, whose powerful performance is living proof that this band are not going gently into that good night. Burn out or fade away? For Midnight Oil, it was never a choice, never even a discussion. Instead, it was one of those deeply felt things that went unspoken, like the telepathic connection that exists between the two guitarists, or the love and respect that exists between men who have spent thousands of nights together since they were teenagers.
Approaching its final bars, the song still burns with vivid clarity. Overhead in the night sky the stars of Launceston shine a little brighter, and the collective pulse beats a little more quickly.
Resist is out now via Sony Music. Midnight Oil’s final tour continues in Newcastle (Feb 23) and includes a headline appearance at Byron Bay Bluesfest (Apr 15) before ending in Sydney (Apr 21). The writer travelled to Launceston as a guest of Mona Foma.