Peter Garrett

Midnight Oil: sorted

Music / / 9 minutes of reading

In his memoir Big Blue Sky, Peter Garrett cites an iron law of rock (and Regurgitator): fans will always tell you that they like your old stuff better than your new stuff. That’s because, for any band that has a long career, songs are associated with the memories that we attach to them when we were growing up.

I grew up with Midnight Oil. They were the first band I ever saw in concert, I’ve seen them more than most, and I was immensely privileged to write liner notes for their Overflow Tank boxset. In compiling this list, I’ve tried to bear in mind that my memories are no measure of a song’s quality, much less cultural impact.

Even so, in this inevitably subjective list, I’ve succumbed to the iron law. By my reckoning, Midnight Oil have released three outright classic albums. Those are Head Injuries, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (usually abbreviated as 10–1) and Diesel And Dust. Ten songs here are drawn from the last two alone. They were impossible to leave out.

But those 10 songs don’t adequately tell the story of Midnight Oil’s career. I’ve tried to do that in this list.… Read more..

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Midnight Oil’s Resist: “We mean it, man!”

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

When Midnight Oil announced their final tour last November – a once-more-with-feeling run of dates around the country to support their 13th studio album, Resist – founding guitarist Jim Moginie was typically met with three responses. The first was a scoff of disbelief, usually with a reference to John Farnham’s never-ending farewell shows. The second, more humorous, was that the group should have quit while they were ahead in 1981 – “and that was from some of my friends,” Moginie says.

But the third response was a shrug of acceptance. Moginie, 66 in May, is the youngest surviving member of the band; the eldest, singer Peter Garrett, is 69 in April. There will be no long goodbyes.

“We’re more like Johnny Rotten [than Johnny Farnham] — we mean it, man!” Garrett says, invoking a line from the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen. In their early years, tour handbills promised “The Oils are coming”. Now, 50 years after their rough beginnings, they’re leaving: the stage, at least.

More than any other band, Midnight Oil have remained part of Australia’s cultural conversation. Their breakthrough classic from 1982, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 – with its indelible hits Power And The Passion and US Forces – spent 177 consecutive weeks on the Australian charts.… Read more..

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Troy Cassar-Daley’s reckoning

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

On 1 April 2019, singer and songwriter Troy Cassar-Daley was finishing up a song with Cold Chisel guitarist Ian Moss when he took a phone call. His father, who had been depressed and in poor health following a stroke, had taken his own life. The song’s chorus – “watching it all go south” – took on a too-real darker hue.

As 2019 stretched into the pandemic of 2020, Cassar-Daley entered a downward spiral. His long-standing marriage to broadcaster Laurel Edwards, with whom he has two adult children, was suffering. The son of a Bundjalung woman from Grafton in north-eastern New South Wales, he tried to escape back to country, seeking his grandmother’s counsel.

Cassar-Daley’s grandparents are long deceased, but he still talks to them. “I consult with them a lot when I’m sitting by myself on the river where I grew up, and I distinctly felt my grandmother say to me, ‘Your problems aren’t here. I think you know where the problems are; you have to go back,’” he says.

Cassar-Daley is part of the firmament of Australian country music, the winner of 37 Golden Guitar Awards, on top of numerous ARIA and Deadly gongs. On Friday, he released his 13th studio album, The World Today.… Read more..

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Bones Hillman 1958-2020

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

The first time I saw Wayne Stevens – better known by his stage name Bones Hillman – was at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on 26 September 1987, making his debut as Midnight Oil’s new bass player. Tall and upright, he was standing to the left of the band’s even taller singer, Peter Garrett, who introduced him as “the next best thing in the stratosphere” to the man Hillman replaced, Peter Gifford.

It was true that Hillman didn’t drive the Oils quite as hard as Gifford, an ex-carpenter who wore overalls on stage and played bass like a competition woodchopper. Hillman took over as the Oils were hitting their commercial peak, for the Diesel And Dust tour, and with his pitch-perfect singing and nimble fingers, he was the man for the more melodic and mature phase of the band that followed.

Yesterday, via a tweet, the band announced Hillman’s passing from cancer at his home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, aged 62: “He was the bassist with the beautiful voice, the band member with the wicked sense of humour, and our brilliant musical comrade.” Hillman had played on every Midnight Oil recording from Blue Sky Mining (1990) to their just-released The Makarrata Project, which debuted at No.… Read more..

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Australian musicians band together to invest in solar

Environment, Music / / 5 minutes of reading

In the spring of 2017, immediately after the release of the Australian band Cloud Control’s third album, Zone, the band’s keyboard player, Heidi Lenffer, was contemplating what the their upcoming tour would cost. But this time she wasn’t just thinking about the money; she was thinking about emissions. Independent bands are used to running on a shoestring budget – a carbon-conscious Lenffer wanted Cloud Control to run a more environmentally efficient operation, too.

She began asking climate scientists in the field, and connected with Dr Chris Dey from Areté Sustainability. Dey crunched the numbers for Cloud Control’s two-week tour, playing 15 clubs and theatres from Byron Bay to Perth.

He found that it would produce about 28 tonnes of emissions – roughly equivalent to what an average household produces in a year. And that was just the national leg of an album tour that would take the band to the US three times.

“I had suspected that all of this flying, and all of the energy that goes into tours, can’t be very good for the environment – but there was no solution that existed beyond carbon offsetting,” Lenffer says.

Offsetting is essentially an attempt at equalisation: when you offset your flights, you try to compensate for your carbon footprint by donating to a program to suck it out of the atmosphere, via tree planting or sequestration somewhere else.… Read more..

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Kev Carmody: Pillars Of Society at 30

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

Kev Carmody’s debut album, Pillars Of Society, recorded as a conceptual excoriation of the Australian bicentenary in 1988, is now 30 years old. On release, it was described by critic Bruce Elder as “the best album ever released by an Aboriginal musician and arguably the best protest album ever made in Australia”.

There have been many brilliant records made by Aboriginal musicians since but with the exception of AB Original, none of them has produced such a sustained polemic, and only Archie Roach rivals him for poetic eloquence.

Born in 1946, Carmody grew up on the Darling Downs, west of Brisbane, born to an Aboriginal mother and Irish-Australian father. He is a member of the Stolen Generations, taken along with his brother from his parents when he was 10. Emerging from school illiterate, he now has a PhD in history and is a member of the Aria Hall of Fame.

His first public musical exposure was on the Murri Radio program of Brisbane community broadcaster 4ZZZ. His song Thou Shalt Not Steal, which brought him to national attention, contained the following portrait of black life in Brisbane:

Well Job and me and Jesus, sittin’ underneath that Indooroopilly bridge
Watching that blazin’ sun go down beneath the tall-treed mountain ridge
The land’s our heritage and spirit here, the rightful culture’s black
And we’re sitting here just wonderin’ – when we gonna get that land back?… Read more..

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