This week sees the release of a film, Midnight Oil 1984, that captures the band seemingly at the height of its powers and simultaneously contemplating their end, as lead singer Peter Garrett stood for a senate seat as the Nuclear Disarmament Party candidate in NSW. He missed out – though only just – the band stayed together, and they made more stellar albums and important statements, political and social. However, as Wind Back Wednesday remembers, 18 years after that first ne

RED WINE WONDERLAND MIDNIGHT OIL Hope Estate, October 21 There is a point where you have to get past thinking these are blokes in their 60s and sounding stupidly good; that Rob Hirst doesn’t just look lethal (still, the bastard) in a cut-off shirt but plays with the same lethal power of decades back; that Martin Rotsey and Jim Moginie together remain like the one bifurcated guitar brain and, simultaneously, a pair of enjoyably combative siblings batting ideas back and forth;

There’s a new Beatles box set. Of course there’s a new Beatles box set. And that certainty is not just because it’s the 50th anniversary of the release of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Beatles fans are a licence to print money because we – yes, we: I’ve been buying Beatles reissues and box sets since 1985 and have all the albums in at least six iterations – not only have our numbers swell each generation but are eager to spend on new versions, including sets such as t

The sea was calm and so were the band members. No jokes about pouring (Midnight) oil on troubled waters to enable a world tour here for a self-described "catalogue act" who, said Peter Garrett, are still "brothers in agitation and music". Or even asking if the "out of town tryouts" in South America, the USA and Europe from (appropriately enough) April 25 were to make sure they could stand each other before the Australian shows which climax in the Domain in Sydney on (appropri