Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line

[audience cheering, applauding faintly]

Oils, Oils!

Oils! Oils!

Oils, Oils!

Oils! Oils!

- - Oils, Oils!

- - Oils, Oils!

Oils! Oils!

Oils, Oils!

It's life.

- It's politics. -

Why don't you talk to us?

It's music. It's action.

It's boisterous. It's sometimes provocative.

It's Midnight Oil.

You need to lend your voice to things.

You can't stay silent.

Hey, we buy your shit!

Let's run the risk of being knocked down a bit.

Lend your voice. More people need to do that.

The Prime Minister again refused to make

an official apology for the Stolen Generation.

Sometimes you've got to take the hardest line.

If someone said to do something,

we say, "Well, no, we're not going to do that."

- -

And I think that was part of us

being a difficult bunch of bastards.

The band is constantly curious,

constantly moving.

Not always in favour.

Not always delivering the message

that people want to hear.

We wanted to write material

that hits you right in the face and say,

"This is the truth.

"We're not skirting the truth here."

The people of Australia go to the polls today

to elect a new federal government.

About six and a half million electors are entitled to vote...

- -

If you were a kid

in Australia in the early '70s,

it seemed like you were living in paradise.

People said it was "the lucky country".

- And maybe it was. -

- - But somehow

we could feel the bullshit behind that line.

It was like the whole the country

was creaking under the weight of all the things

that weren't being said.

- -

We knew something wasn't being told to us

and we really wanted to hear someone say it.

Kicking the establishment!

We want jobs!

We want jobs! We want jobs!

I was at school with Rob.

I didn't know that many people that played music

in those days,

so you'd seek those people out.

He had a band.

It was just Rob, Andrew James and Jim...

...and I think they were called Swampy Moose.

I remember I was just blown away.

I just loved the sound that they were making.

- Swampy Moose! -

I was about ten or 11 and I was told I was adopted.

Sounding great, Martin!

It was a bit of a shock, as it always is with people,

and I kind of lost my way a bit at that point

because I thought everything

was a certain way, but actually

it just wasn't any more.

And then the music came along

and that was my saving grace, really.

Repeat!

And we're done!

There'd never be any Midnight Oil music at all

had Jim not been guiding it.

We just kind of hit it off immediately

and actually almost, on day one,

started writing songs together.

- -

We loved that whole sort of surf culture

and a lot of it sort of came from that.

Bands like Tamam Shud and guitar bands.

Daddy Cool, I mean, I thought

they were a fantastic guitar band.

I was singing behind the drums.

It was... was horrendous,

and it was clear that, you know, singing and playing

behind the kit wasn't cutting it for much longer.

So we held auditions in the...

...in the science auditorium at Grammar.

The only person who actually answered the ad

was this fellow

who was a couple of years older than us,

who had long blond hair and was already driving.

He turned up in an old Peugeot 404.

- -

And he walked in the room

and saw these young guys on stage

fiddling with their instruments

and plugging their amps in.

And I think he thought

we were all just a bunch of teenage wankers

from the North Shore, which I think we were, probably.

My musical life starts as a roadie cum student

who felt that he could do a little bit better

than whoever was up there.

They were very different kinds of people from me,

and I think they felt the same way about me,

that I was kind of remote and just surfing

and turning up and singing and jumping around a bit.

Jim and I had a chat afterwards and thought

no-one would ever forget him.

He seemed much more grown up

than the rest of us, I think, and probably still does.

They are a band of brothers.

You know, they feel incredibly collectively responsible

to the band and each other.

Rob is literally the beating heart

of Midnight Oil.

Jim is like the artist in residence.

A lot of the music starts with Jim.

But Rob writes a beautiful melody

and Jim has a brilliant turn of phrase.

It's the way they work together.

Martin is the ultimate gatekeeper of the band.

The bullshit detector, if you like.

He's the glue in lots of ways.

- -

Pete's the chief activist.

Without his fine-tuning of the message,

without his visceral response to what's happening

with the musicians around him,

there's no Midnight Oil.

But there's a chemistry at work between those guys

that even they probably can't explain.

The bottom line is that Midnight Oil is much more

than the sum of its parts.

It's like a body with four heads.

- -

We basically formed as a kind of a prog-surf band,

but discovering the energy of punk

and then kind of surfing that energy on stage

and becoming, first and foremost,

a really strong live band.

There was something about the period

of the Australian pubs in the late '70s

that was like some Darwinian,

natural selection experiment

that forced bands to get really good,

or go home.

So that's when we started

playing French's Tavern,

just down the road from where people like

Radio Birdman were playing

with all this energy and anger.

And so we toughened up our sound.

Midnight Oil was a do-it-yourself band.

And at the time, do it yourself

was the only way that you could survive.

["Back on the Borderline" playing]