[Derek K. Miller]

Saturday night at the Commodore Ballroom. Two encores. I don't remember the
exact running order or (maybe) all songs, but I recall:

Have I Been Away Too Long
Too Much Sunshine
Read About It
Drums of Heaven
Luritja Way (acoustic)
Tin Legs and Tin Mines (acoustic)
Now or Never Land (acoustic)
U.S. Forces
Say Your Prayers
Redneck Wonderland
Concrete
Golden Age
King of the Mountain
River Runs Red
The Dead Heart
Forgotten Years

Poets and Slaves
Blue Sky Mine
Beds Are Burning

Sometimes

Peter Garrett seemed a little unfocused in his commentary and rants -- not
as on-target as I remember when I last saw the Oils here in 1993. No
problems with the performance, though!

=====

Here's my review, also posted at http://www.penmachine.com :

The secret of rock 'n' roll

A great rock 'n' roll band doesn't just have a great rhythm section -- they
are a great rhythm section, and Midnight Oil proved it last night here in
Vancouver.

Over their 25-year career, the Oils have learned to be one big, fat,
thundering rhythm machine, like a Down Under post-British Invasion version
of James Brown's JBs. Lead vocalist Peter Garrett isn't much of a singer,
but he can scream and croak and rant incomprehensibly better than anyone.
When he bent his towering bald frame down at the front of the Commodore
stage on Saturday night, wailing out a psychotic babble while his four
bandmates unleashed a sustained explosion behind and over him, you couldn't
ask for much more in a rock show.

These guys aren't youngsters -- they're as old or older than Sting, the guys
in U2, or the members of R.E.M. They reached back twenty years to play songs
like "Read About It" that still ring true today ("The rich get richer/The
poor get the picture/The bombs never hit you/When you're down so low"). Yet
they also managed to make new tracks from their Capricornia album like "Say
Your Prayers" and "Luritja Way" roar with the same
train-running-off-the-rails intensity -- even when they were playing
acoustically with drummer Rob Hirst standing up at a mini-kit at the edge of
the stage.

They played pretty melodies ("Tin Legs and Tin Mines" from the early '80s)
and harsh, atonal punk-metal ("Concrete," from 1998). They sweated and
leaped around the stage with enough energy to put bands three decades
younger to shame. They played hits and obscurities.

Think of the best rock performances, the ones that carry you away: "Mystery
Train" by Elvis Presley, "I Saw Her Standing There" by the Beatles, "Black
Dog" by Led Zeppelin, the Who's "Live at Leeds" album, "I Wanna Be Sedated"
by the Ramones, "I Will Follow" by U2, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana,
and on. Each one is propulsive, and somewhere each one fuses guitars, bass,
drums, and voice into a single rhythm.

Midnight Oil have a whole bunch of songs like that. At the end of the night,
for their second encore, after they'd already played "Beds are Burning" and
seemed to have exhausted any possibility of going out on a higher note, they
let the lid off of "Sometimes," the last track on 1988's Diesel and Dust
album ("Sometimes you're beaten to the floor/Sometimes you're taken to the
wall/But you don't give in"). The pedal was on the floor. Garrett was
frightening. They were loud, tight, blazing, full bore. Couldn't get any
better, I thought.

And then they kicked in the afterburners, like the final, desperate
self-destruction of a fireworks display. Boom. Wow.

--
Derek K. Miller - dkmiller@pobox.com
Writer, Editor, Web Guy, Drummer, Dad
Vancouver, BC, Canada  | http://www.penmachine.com
The Neurotics fab rock | http://www.TheNeurotics.com

"Gabba gabba hey." - Ramones