Midnight memories
It's 30 years since Midnight Oil's
Australian breakthrough album, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2,
1, and 25 years since their international breakthrough,
Diesel and Dust. And although the band broke up more
than a decade ago, the Oils remain one of the most important and popular
bands from the golden age of Australian music.
Ahead of today's release of a
double-disc retrospective, we asked the band's founding member, songwriter
and drummer, Rob Hirst, to pull out some of their most memorable
moments.
These are his stories. They are
probably true.
BACKYARD DREAMING
Before Midnight Oil there was Farm,
which had future Oils members Jim Moginie, Andrew “Bear” James, Peter
Garrett, Hirst and a series of keyboard players. Formed while Moginie and
Hirst were still at high school and Garrett was just starting his law degree
in Canberra, Farm was a start.
“I
don't know if they were good but they were ambitious," Hirst says. "And
steeped in prog.” But even prog had its limits. One temporary player, Peter
Watson, "immediately alienated everybody else by unbuttoning his shirt to
expose his hairy chest and would shake his mane as he played Rick
Wakeman-esque keyboards," Hirst recalls. “This in front of an AC/DC and
Finch crowd, which went down very poorly.”
It
was a prog step too far?
“It's one thing to be prog, it's
another thing to be a wanker. Sorry Pete."
But Watson left his mark indelibly as,
when the band met to decide on a better name in 1976, it was his slip of
paper carrying the words Midnight Oil that was pulled from the
hat.
This while several of them were living
in "a Young Ones-esque” house at 77 Albert Avenue, Chatswood, having the
full Australian experience in the shade of a Hill's Hoist.
“We had a frangipani, a six-foot-high
fence, the asbestos garage, a lawn that was always three-foot high, Nigel's
bike in bits and pieces in the long grass. And Jim and I sat on the back
step and wrote Surfing With A Spoon, Dust
and Run By Night.”
'RIGHT, LET'S GET THE STRIPPERS BACK
ON'
It's 1980, by which time Midnight Oil
had "absorbed the energy of Radio Birdman, the Saints, the Pistols, the
Clash and the Damned” and were in their office on Kangaroo Street,
Manly.
“It was like this arrow came through
the window with a torn note on the end,” Hirst says, imitating the twang and
thwack of an arrow hitting the wall. “And it said [affecting a gruff and
no-nonsense voice] 'You will be appearing at the annual Broadford Hells
Angels concert, signed Ball Bearing'. Mr Bearing as we called
him.”
They drove down to country Victoria in
a couple of Commodores. “We came over the hill and it was like the final
scene in Apocalypse Now: fires burning, bodies hanging
from trees, and women, I think they were women, with chains crossing over
their shoulders. It looked like hell on earth, with the crowd we were
playing to behind wire mesh.”
They shared a "dressing room" with a
couple of the strippers who performed between the bands and “Mr Bearing
comes in, produces this dagger and offers us coke [to be snorted off the
blade]”, which was politely declined. He tells them to play until he
indicates time's up by a raised middle finger so now, thoroughly spooked,
they play every song as fast as possible with Hirst checking over his
shoulder at the end of every song for Mr Bearing's finger.
After 40 minutes, and possibly 20
songs, the finger was raised and they run straight from the stage into the
cars. "As we fishtailed out of there we could hear Mr Bearing on the PA
saying 'Reckon we got good value out of Midnight Oil? Right, let's get the
strippers back on.' ”
HOW DO WE SING WHEN OUR STAGE IS
BURNING
In
1983 the band is invited to perform on the late night TV show
Thicke of the Night, hosted by the Canadian actor and
comedian Alan Thicke.
"We didn't know what it was and we were
kind of pissed off to be on the show for reasons I can't remember, and this
was before our breakout success in America when we were doing mini tours,
but they said we could play live three songs.”
The trouble began when Hirst, a fan of
the Who's madman Keith Moon, remembered an infamous Who television
appearance where the drum kit was meant to explode but Moon talked a
stagehand into dramatically increasing the explosives. The resulting
explosion destroyed the drum kit, sent a cymbal into Roger Daltrey's arm and
damaged Pete Townshend's hearing permanently.
"I
remember thinking, we've got to make some kind of beau geste
[grand gesture] on the Alan Thicke show, something that people
will notice. We sent Gary [Morris, manager] out to suggest, for
Read About It, why don't we perform on a whole stage of
ripped up newspapers as a kind of raised middle finger to the quality of
news in general. As you do. They liked that but what they didn't know was
the liet motif behind, that was that we would then set fire to the scrunched
up newspapers, which Pete duly did.
"He produced a match and the fire
started burning quite vigorously by the time we finished the
song.
"The stagehands all rushed out with
fire extinguishers and the audience were absolutely aghast that they were
going to be incinerated. We retreated in triumph to the back but they were
not amused at all. No sense of humour."
You'll never work in this town again
etc? Actually, they did, but Thicke of The Night was
cancelled soon after.
TOILET HUMOUR
To
record the 1984 album Red Sails In the Sunset, the band
and producer Nick Launay, who had produced 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3,
2, 1 in London, moved to Tokyo precisely because "it was like
landing on another cultural planet ... We realised that the environment you
recorded in was almost as important as the songs you had."
They were the first "Western" band to
record a full album in this studio and their every move was noted and logged
by the studio engineers, with a view to replicating these new and sometimes
bizarre Launay techniques in the future.
Local brass band and string sections
were hired but initially the strings were too formal and polite, too good in
effect. "We got some of the finest sake, which was warmed up to just the
right temperature, and that was administered to all those musicians until
they started swaying. And then we got the take that we wanted."
For one song they recorded the drums in
the toilets, something which had never been done before and horrified the
studio manager. "I'm in the toilet, all miked up, and studio people are
coming and going, using the urinals and looking at me strangely. We start
this track and it's obviously going to be the one because it's a killer
take, I'm playing furiously when [the studio manager] comes bursting into
the studio waving his arms for me to stop. But I couldn't, I had to finish
even though it was so disrespectful.
“We found out later that an elderly
national treasure and his wife, a koto musician, were recording on the
ground floor when down the stairwell came this [imitates a cacophonous drum
sound] and they were in the middle of a silent piece, plucking these
strings, and they had to abandon the take because of this
racket.”
TRAGEDY IN RIO
"It's one of those tragedies that no
band hopes will ever happen to them,” says Hirst of a show they performed at
Rio de Janeiro's Macarana stadium in 1993, three days after massive storms
had caused landslides and damage across the city.
"The whole basement of the [stadium]
has completely filled up with dirty water but in typical Brazilian fashion,
that wasn't enough to cancel the gig. It just meant that they put these
barriers around the stairs leading down to the basement, the kind of flimsy
barrier you might put around a hole in the road to stop people falling into
it.
“They tried to pump as much water out
but there were some parts where they couldn't so they covered up this area
with chipboard, which as you know when it gets wet collapses. Thousands and
thousands of people are packed together to see Midnight Oil and what exactly
happened will always remain a mystery but essentially two young guys in
their late teens, cousins, were crushed together. And one of them, in order
to get somewhere else, jumped over one of these barriers while the band was
still playing and went straight through the wet chipboard and was
electrocuted immediately.
"The reason the pump hadn't worked to
get the water out of the basement was there were live wires underneath. His
cousin saw what had happened, went after him and was also electrocuted,
ending up in the muddy water below."
The memory still haunts and the deaths
had a long-lasting effect. "It certainly meant that Pete would regularly
stop the show when he saw people being crushed or whatever. And it might
happen multiple times. In the back of our minds we would always go back to
Rio."
SAVING GRACES
The 1996 album
Breathe was recorded half in Sydney and half in New
Orleans, where the producer Malcolm Burns had worked regularly with Daniel
Lanois. Burns was keen to show the band a full-on, high gospel church
service so one Sunday they piled into a couple of cars and headed off to
church. Unfortunately, the second car with Hirst in it got
separated.
"We took off roughly in the same
direction but not only did we get lost, we found ourselves – in a Tom Wolfe
moment – in a really bad area of New Orleans, where there was a protest
march happening. We weren't sure what the march was about but we were
certainly the only gringos there. We were wedged in, our car – an old Volvo
station wagon – wedged in by these very irate marchers.
“We were getting pretty anxious and
then lo and behold, these good Samaritans, two elderly women, amazingly
dressed for church as women in the south do, wound down their window and
said 'you look lost!' and we said, yeah, we are. 'Where you going?' We named
the church and they said 'oh, you are totally in the wrong area, follow us.'
We followed them through these extraordinary neighbourhoods, people glaring
at us, but we were with 'friends' so it was OK.”
The one thing to note about this?
Midnight Oil will join any protest, even when they don't know what they're
protesting about.
Essential Oils is out Friday.
the link also has video’s, one of
which is a 30 sec grab of run by night