Midnight Oil is calling it a day with one last-blast album and tour. Peter Garrett and Jim Moginie talk about the Australian group’s enduring trans-Tasman relations and the loss of Kiwi bassist Bones Hillman. By Russell Baillie
Midnight Oil first took on New Zealand in 1979. They may have spent the previous years ducking flying glassware in the pubs of Sydney, but Jim Moginie says their first trip across the Tasman was even more character-building.
"We did about 33 shows in like 28 days or something absolutely ridiculous like that, bouncing around the roads in a little eight-seater bus with no suspension. It was kind of brutal, but it was a good way of becoming a band. We could sort of survive anything after that. So thanks, New Zealand, you really toughened us up."
Early on that tour, Peter Garrett, future Australian Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, but then a man who danced like an escaped jackhammer, destroyed the stage at Auckland's Gluepot. That wrecking-ball reputation preceded them down country.
"I don't think it was just Pete," laughs the guitarist who has been the band's dominant songwriter throughout its nearly five decades. "I think other members were involved in the crime. I don't know what happened that night, but it followed us around New Zealand wherever we played. 'Midnight Oil to destroy the stage in Dunedin' in the headlines and people would come along and hope we'd destroy the stage. But that kind of auto-destruction, as Pete Townshend could tell you, can't be faked. It has to come from the heart."
Talking to the Listener the following day, Garrett has his own early New Zealand-campaign war stories. “Skating down the hill into Dunedin having completely run out of juice at two o’clock in the morning and nearly hitting a bunch of Mongrel Mob on the side of the road and thinking, ‘We’re gonna die’.”
The singer guesses the Oils were the first Aussie punk-era, pub-rock band to make the journey east and take the big noise to the provinces. "Well, we had no money. It wasn't like we were shoplifting Lemon & Paeroa, but it came close.
"Coming across the Ditch early meant that those experiences did indeed contribute to who we were as a band and how we were. And we found there was a healthy live music scene for a relatively small population. We were blown away by it. It was quite an exciting time."
They kept coming back. They stomped through the pubs almost every year, played the final Nambassa music festival in 1981 and headlined the Friday night at Sweetwaters in early 1983.
In the audience that night was this writer, then a teenager too young to have seen them on licensed premises and who had only heard the name via sniffy reviews in rock monthly Rip it Up. The band's fourth album, 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, with its polished political anthems Power and the Passion and US Forces, was just out.
But it was another song, Brave Faces, off their third album, Place Without a Postcard, that has stuck in the memory ever since. The moment the gear-crunching song throbbed into its big riff, a bassline that's part Edvard Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, part Al Green's Take Me to the River, while the guitars of Moginie and Martin Rotsey did angry, angular, very un-pub-rock things above, and Garrett danced like a berserk robot threatening to turn anything in his way into topiary, I became an Oils convert.
A cassette of 1984's Red Sails in the Sunset was the soundtrack of my last teenage summer. Their politics – something that was almost completely absent in New Zealand rock bands of the Muldoon era – helped.
Garrett is amused to hear about his interviewer's attachment to the song – co-written by him and Moginie – and he's soon enthusiastically vocalising that bassline down the phone ("dum-dum dum-dum dum").
"It's one of my favourites, and we still play it. You could say this about a lot of our material, but I think particularly the co-writes can end up being really interesting and have a character and a force to them that's a little bit unexpected. You take something like that – it's a classic Jim riff – and then you sort of throw yourself at it and start to build a song and figure out what it is we're trying to say. Then we take that out and just play it night after night with sweat dripping off us and the drums nailed to the floor and it ends up taking shape."
It was between Place Without a Postcard – recorded in England with producer Glyn Johns, recently seen looking groovy alongside the Beatles in Get Back – and 10,9,8 … that the band hit stride, musically and politically. The acoustic guitars, which helped unclutter and warm up the sound on subsequent records, first appeared on Postcard track Lucky Country. "I get chills when I hear that," says Moginie, "the strummy-chummy sound I call it."
Garrett soon took his stance, articulacy and charisma beyond the songs, standing unsuccessfully for the Australian Senate in late 1984 as a candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party, which, essentially, backed the position of the Lange Government, which had come under pressure to not upset the US by Australian Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
Early the following year, Garrett did an anti-nuke speaking tour of New Zealand universities, featuring music by the Topp Twins. Their first show at the University of Auckland generated my first student-journalism story in newsprint.
It was deeply earnest but mercifully brief. So was my Auckland Star review of 1987's Diesel and Dust. I suggested it might do quite well. The record took Midnight Oil global, waved a banner for Aboriginal rights and, for a while, made them the Outback's answer to U2.
Informed about his various roles in my career, again Garrett is amused, "Ha! You're kidding." He says he's had a lot of Australian interviewers reminding him of "that time when", too. That's because the new Resist album and tour will be Midnight Oil's last. It's a promise.
Garrett, who qualified as a lawyer before joining Midnight Oil, quit the band in 2002 and, standing as a Labor candidate, won the safe seat of Kingsford Smith around Sydney's airport in 2004. He quit politics in 2013 after having been Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts in the Rudd government and Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth under Julia Gillard. His parliamentary career gave his 2015 autobiography, Big Blue Sky, a unique split-personality combo of rock and political memoir. Oz rock might be tough, but Oz politics is tougher. Rudd probably isn't on his Christmas card list.
"The toughest part of it for me was sometimes being in a government that made decisions that I wouldn't have made if I had been sitting there by myself. But I accepted party loyalty. A lot of people don't get that part of politics."
After Garrett released his first solo album in 2016, the band reconvened for a reunion world tour. Many of the other members still played together in various guises while their singer was wearing a suit in Canberra.
"We were really surprised when people came out in 2017 and saw us," says Moginie. "I thought people had forgotten about us."
But that reunion came with a regret – no new music. However, in the past three years, there have been two new Midnight Oil albums. In 2020, came The Makarrata Project, a mini-album sequel of sorts to Diesel and Dust but featuring the band co-writing and recording with an array of Indigenous musicians. It topped the Australian charts and the track Gadigal Land won the APRA Song of the Year.
Now there's Resist, a full-throttle, placard-waving geography lesson that sounds as vital as anything they've done since Diesel and Dust but with the wisdom and regret that comes with age, along with the thought that, in the age of global warming and Extinction Rebellion, they sound like wise great-uncles who have been saying this stuff for quite some time.
On tracks such as Rising Seas, Reef and To the Ends of the Earth, there's a sense of telling off their fellow Boomers about leaving the place in a worse state than they found it.
Garrett: "Yeah, you're right in identifying a deep sense of frustration and anger that we ourselves have been part of this generation, which, for the most part in our country at least, has experienced pretty reasonable times – a fair amount of affluence and peace – and yet has allowed the planet to suffer the wrecking ball of climate change. So that's a part of it. But we're not without hope."
On songs such as The Barka-Darling River and Tarkine, with its references to the environmental destruction of the Murray-Darling basin in New South Wales and the Tasmanian rainforest area respectively, Garrett is singing about regions that were once part of his ministerial portfolio. Must feel a little odd?
"Yes, and no. When I was a minister, I actually listed the Tarkine for World Heritage consideration. And, of course, when our political opponents came along, once Abbott and Turnbull got into power, they threw that stuff out the window. So it's not so much the fact that I'm singing about things that I have an extremely intimate knowledge of and also wear some bruises from, it's also that I understand how crucial it is for us to understand that when governments that have ideologies that are not kind to nature take power, they kick it to death."
Talking of which, yes, Garrett did see the recent footage of Scott Morrison torturing Dragon's April Sun in Cuba, with his voice and a ukulele.
"It was sacrilegious on so many counts, wasn't it? It's all about the fact that this particular leader is one of the most empty, vacuous, cloth-eared and manipulative people that we've ever had with their hands on the levers of power."
While Midnight Oil's last stand might be a celebration of the band's music and legacy, there's a sadness underlining it. Bones Hillman, the band's Kiwi bassist who joined in the mid-80s, having done time in New Zealand groups the Swingers and Suburban Reptiles, died of cancer in late 2020. As well as his playing, his keening backing voice is prominent in the arrangements on the new album, which is dedicated to him.
"He was probably the best singer in the band. He's got one of these really sweet voices," says Garrett. "He was a serious musician but he was a light-hearted man. And he brought something to the band. He leavened us a bit, otherwise we were really an almost indigestible loaf of bread."
His passing was a catalyst for the last hurrah. "We're trying to go out with a joyful attitude," says Moginie. "When it is your last tour you are kind of at your best, right? You realise that it's a finite thing and life is a finite thing, and losing Bonesy, I think, was a big part of the decision.
"It's really hard to play this sort of music in your late sixties. We're doing it now and it's sounding amazing, but there's a line with bands. Quit while you're ahead, make the point, get in, get out and hand the torch on to the younger generation."
• Resist is now available to stream on CD and vinyl. Midnight Oil play at Christchurch Arena, May 7; TSB Arena, Wellington, May 10; and Spark Arena, Auckland, May 13.
