Midnight Oil

Rob Hirst: Feeling good, for 100 years or more

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Rob Hirst knows he’s dying, but he doesn’t let it get in the way of kicking back.

Hirst – for five decades the co-founder, drummer and driving force of Midnight Oil – is enjoying a sunny afternoon in Sydney, relaxing on an old-school banana lounge, soaking in Vitamin D.

But even when he’s putting his feet up, the songs don’t stop coming. “Especially now! More than ever now! They still ping around my brain all night,” he says.

Hirst’s role as one of the primary songwriters in the Oils has not always been properly appreciated, with attention gravitating towards the band’s frontman, Peter Garrett.

Yet most of the band’s long list of hits bear Hirst’s songwriting signature: Beds Are Burning, The Dead Heart, Blue Sky Mine, Power And The Passion, and too many more to mention.

The band finished up for good in 2022, signing off with a show lasting close to four hours at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, ploughing through a setlist Hirst likens to the Dead Sea scrolls.

Six months later, Hirst was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The prognosis was short: maybe another six months, if he was lucky.

No one around Hirst, as fit as a racehorse, ever saw that curve ball coming.… Read more..

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Liz Stringer: The Second High

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

During 2021 and 2022, Australian singer-songwriter Liz Stringer played to the sort of crowds some would say she had always deserved. Arenas of loud, passionate fans, 10,000 or more at a time, baying every last line back at her. Unfortunately, they weren’t her words: Stringer had been employed as a backing singer for Midnight Oil, as that band’s storied career finally drew to a close.

It helped cement Stringer’s reputation as a musician’s musician – someone other musicians admire and want to play with, rather than a star in her own right. Approaching the third decade of her career, she remains beloved by community radio, adored by a cult fanbase and all but ignored by the mainstream. The Second High, her seventh album, probably won’t change any of that, and that is a reflection on the myopia, ageism and sexism of the music industry.

But it’s also fair to say that while The Second High fits squarely into what used to be called adult contemporary, it is not exactly easy listening, either. Recorded in the UK with award-winning producer Beni Giles, the album presents polished, densely melodic, lush music, with Stringer’s vocals front and centre. From a rich lower register, she can vault into space or layer ambitious higher harmonies and counter-melodies.… Read more..

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Regurgitator: Invader

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

When a band that calls itself Regurgitator has managed to stay together for 30 years, you can’t really complain when they return to their own vomit. That’s just nominative determinism in action. So, a warning: their 11th full-length recording, Invader, may contain traces of their earlier work, especially Unit, their classic album from 1997.

Of course, this being Regurgitator, it’s done with a self-awareness and playfulness that heads off charges that the group are simply repeating themselves. Unit’s final track, Just Another Beautiful Story, contained a synthesised orchestral section that nodded towards the Beatles’ Penny Lane. Tsunami, which closes Invader, similarly quotes Dear Prudence.

A critical and commercial smash at the time, Unit has been so lionised over the years that it has overshadowed a rewarding and adventurous, if occasionally obtuse body of work. While sales may have slowed, Regurgitator still have a large and devoted live following. And most fans, it’s fair to say, like their old stuff better than their new stuff.

But Regurgitator still have more than enough new tricks to keep things interesting. They bring in new faces, too: Peaches makes a cameo on This Is Not A Pop Song (which, like Public Image Ltd’s This Is Not A Love Song, it most assuredly is), while Indigenous author Tyson Yunkaporta and rapper JK-47 make key contributions.… Read more..

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Radio Birdman: Reign in Blood

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Fifty years after their formation in Sydney, the vastly influential punk band Radio Birdman are preparing to call it a day, with a final series of Australian shows over winter culminating with a farewell gig in their home town.

But is this really goodbye? Songwriter and guitarist Deniz Tek isn’t making promises. “The rationale is to go out there and have at least one more Australian tour and say goodbye to the fans properly,” he says, but: “You never know for sure.” Singer Rob Younger isn’t much more definitive: “It’s supposed to be [the last tour], yeah. But, I mean, I wouldn’t want to sign anything in blood.”

Being in their early 70s doesn’t preclude Tek and Younger from going around again, but with years between shows – the band last performed in 2019 – it has to be unlikely.

Tek is calling via FaceTime from his home near Kona in Hawaii, where he and his wife, Ann, are spending their semi-retirement on a coffee and macadamia farm. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, he emigrated to Australia as a medical student in 1972.

He is, to say the least, a man of many talents. Previously, he was a flight surgeon for the US navy (Tek is sometimes claimed to be the inspiration behind Val Kilmer’s “Iceman” character in Top Gun – Iceman being Tek’s call sign).… Read more..

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You’re the voice. Vote yes

Australian Politics, Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Not many people would find John Farnham’s You’re The Voice a difficult song to understand. Borrowing from the chorus for a moment, it makes a noise and makes it clear: we all have a role to play in civil society. From its opening line, it’s an imperviously optimistic appeal to human nature’s better angels: “We have the chance to turn the pages over”.

Most people, fortunately, are not a desperate politician on the hustings. Responding to Farnham’s endorsement of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to parliament – and his offering of You’re The Voice to the yes campaign – the opposition leader, Peter Dutton’s take on the song was obtuse, to say the least.

“The key line in the lyrics there, ‘You’re the voice, try and understand it,’” he told Sky News. “I honestly don’t think most Australians understand it and they want to be informed.” Apart from Dutton’s apparent unwillingness to educate himself (much less inform anyone else), attempting to sow further confusion out of such an obvious song is breathtakingly cynical.

The use of You’re The Voice by the yes campaign, and the timing of Farnham’s intervention, is pivotal. The no side has been successful so far in capitalising on uncertainty with its own appeal to ignorance, via its “If you don’t know, vote no” messaging.… Read more..

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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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