WHAT COMES TO MIND … MIDNIGHT OIL AND THE FEAR OF THE KNOWN
- Bernard Zuel
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical. It might be short and brutal, long and precise. But it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, Rob Hirst, Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil, inevitably on stage.
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I WAS PERCHED on the level above the floor, pressed against the railing with no room to move and a sense that I was cooking in the heat from the inside out. Put some potatoes next to me and dinner was sorted.
Even so, I was feeling far far more in control than any of the bodies beneath me who were one heaving, surging, falling back and surging again amorphous mass. The only time individuals were discernible was when they sproinged up from the rest, like a popped pimple expelling squished matter. The popped matter would be carried one way or another and then the people pimple would open and reclaim the body. It was fascinating, horrifying, anything but clinical. And they were having fun!
Was I? Well, yes, though trepidation hadn’t quite dissipated. Not because of the bodies, or at least not exactly because of the bodies, but about what the bodies had once represented. And maybe still did in some part of my brain because once – a decade or so earlier – this gig I was remotely surfing from my elevated spot, was something I studiously avoided, even though it meant I missed seeing one of my favourite bands.
I loved Head Injuries (to the point of exhaustion, though it clearly prepared me for Redneck Wonderland 20 years later), Bird Noises and Place Without A Postcard, had succumbed heavily to 10-1 of course (Who didn’t? Who could have resisted in 1982-83?) and watched with some awe the footage from Wanda Beach and then Goat Island on the ABC. That Rob Hirst hit those things like he carried a grudge eh? Peter Garrett was waaaaay loose. How the hell did Peter Gifford do that?
Some older friends had seen Midnight Oil scores of times well back in the day in sweat pits like The Stagedoor Tavern or Narrabeen. Me? Nup. Mate, I still can’t tell you where to catch the bus to Bondi.
When I first interviewed Rob Hirst much later still, by which time I had seen his band a dozen times or more – it’s true that sometimes when a thousand voices tell you that you’re wrong, a saint in any form becomes a sinner all along – I told him why: I always figured, like Cold Chisel fans, that the kind of blokes who went to see Midnight Oil, drunk or less drunk, were the kind of blokes who would beat me like Hirst did those drums, pry me inadvisedly loose like Garrett. Pop me like a pimple. And it’s not like it was without cause.
(Or without precedence you might say. Hirst recalled a time in the pre-Oils version of the band, Farm, when a short-lived – for reasons which will become obvious – keyboard player at one gig "immediately alienated everybody else by unbuttoning his shirt to expose his hairy chest and would shake his mane as he played Rick Wakeman-esque keyboards. This in front of an AC/DC and Finch crowd, which went down very poorly.”)
The first time I walked through the beer garden at the front of Selina’s – I can’t remember who it was I was there for, and I can’t even say for sure that all of the blokes sinking beers were even there for the band rather than just hanging out at the Coogee Bay – I just looked around and thought none of you look like me, most of you seem twice as big as me, and all of you look way more pissed than me. No end to the hostility, now they want me to be somewhere else. “Who the fuck are you looking at westie?”
They didn’t say it, but what was I thinking? Fair to say I was thinking I won’t be back at Selina’s in a hurry. And bar the very occasional forced entry for a gig I had no other place to catch, and one news story (done during the day, with a sturdy photographer), that remained true. I don’t wanna be the one? Yep.
Hearing this, Hirst smiled with sympathy rather than derision. He reckoned I would have been fine, probably; argued that on the whole, Oils fans were not dickheads; and it was likely more damage would have been done by bodies in motion mid-song than fists or headbutts. But he recognised vestiges of that bundle of potent insecurity I was back then and let it pass.
What did make him laugh, a lot, was when I told him about a share house I had in the late 1980s where one of my friends was both a rabid Oils fan and the only ultraconservative in the village of Petersham. Political party line, don’t cross that floor.
(A house with a decent yard and trees, not hugely different to one Hirst remembered in Chatswood in the mid ‘70s, where he and bandmate and writing partner Jim Moginie lived, rehearsed and strategised "out in the backyard underneath the Hills Hoist” where “we had the frangipani, a six foot high fence, the asbestos, a lawn that was always three foot high, Nigel’s bike in bits and pieces in the long grass and Jim and I sat on the backstep and wrote Surfing With A Spoon, Dust and Run By Night.”)
This friend of mine, a lovely bloke who was married for a time to my not-yet-wife’s flatmate, travelled through Canada and US with us, and would soon join the family real estate business, thought the Hawke government unredeemable socialists and did not join in my lingering, if by now retrospective, heckling of the Fraser government. But he knew all the words to Oils songs, shouted them out at gigs or when heard on the radio, and insisted he supported the causes and ideals of the land rights-demanding, no nukes-advocating, US out of Pine Gap-arguing, capitalist-sceptical (at the very least) band.
I don’t know if we knew the phrase, and we certainly weren’t bandying it around, but, um, cognitive dissonance give the nod!
Hirst didn’t mind: his band would take them however they came, he said; we might change a few minds along the way, he added; don’t be such a narc, he probably thought; just be Australian, he might have added. Of course. The bloke always was a better than decent man.
It was more than fitting – indeed, it was like some or other god had planned it – that a few more years on from that interview, when Midnight Oil reformed and announced a world tour that would begin in South America (on Anzac Day) and end in Sydney (on Armistice Day), one of the warm up gigs they played was at Selina’s. And I was upstairs again, but this time eagerly, surrounded by people who were comparing notes from Manly Vale or Royal Antler or Lifesaver gigs.
And they, we, all quivered like school kids again when Midnight Oil played a long show that featured eight songs from Head Injuries as if I’d been in charge of the setlist. Hirst was killing it. Rotsey and Moginie – has there ever been a better two-pronged guitar hit in Australian music? – too. Bones did the business without fuss, and Garrett seemed elastic and sweaty and right in our faces, even from upstairs.
Bloody hell, don’t put them up on your bedroom wall, call them king of the mountain. Fifty years on and they could still do it.
A lot of this has been reinforced, or rubbed in, in the past week since Rob Hirst died. Regrets? I’ve had a few. I’d missed a lot over the years, stupid or too far away without a car or out of the orbit or scared or badly timed, but I didn’t miss this. Sing me songs of no denying.
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