The Hardest Line

You know a band has accrued a great catalogue when they put together a 36-track career overview and you can list a dozen songs off the top of your head that you wish made the cut, but can understand why they haven't. Such is the case with Midnight Oil's new collection Essential Oils, the first compilation covering the iconic band's entire recording career from 1976 to 2002 and their full eleven albums – and even they concede that putting the tracklist together was a lot easier said than done.

“In the end we looked at what was on the set lists night after night and thought, 'Well these must be essential',” laughs affable drummer Rob Hirst. “They must have been because we played them so much. Obviously, everyone had their own songs that they would have liked to shoehorn onto the album, but we ran out of space in the end.

“I think there were somewhere between 160 and 180 songs that the Oils recorded, so we had our work cut out for us – there were the obvious ones where no one disagreed, then we thought that it should be chronological, and then we should have at least one song from each album, so that helped us along. A few songs were ditched – there was a bit of lobbying from the left and from the right, and a few hand grenades thrown in, and non-sequiturs and red herrings – and then eventually in confusion we all sort of struggled to the surface and realised that we had a pretty good album. When I listened to it from beginning to end I got all tired and emotional – it's kind of like the soundtrack to your life really, and I'd never done that before. It was quite incredible to hear the different stages and the way the songs were recorded and what the band was singing or yelling about at any given time and where we recorded it and the people who helped us, the producers, the cities we were in, the issues that were happening at the time – it's all there really if you kind of read between the lines.”

Because of the Oils' commercial victories they're often considered to be a mainstream act, but Hirst recalls that in the early years they were influenced by bands such as Radio Birdman and The Saints, who are rarely considered to be of the same lineage.

“We were this weird surfing prog band from the northern beaches, and we were still doing covers by Jethro Tull and Yes and Genesis and Focus, who had fallen out of favour by the late-'70s when the English punk thing hit – it was really uncool to like those bands,” he reflects. “We always had that element in the band – that kind of musicianship and stretching things out, a long jammy thing like Cream used to do as well, there was a bluesy element – but we also then realised, 'Oh my God, there's this fantastic music being made by Birdman and The Saints and The Hitmen' and all these bands who were playing in the inner suburbs of Sydney, just up the road from where we were playing really. So we picked up on all this energy, and if you listen to the first album [1978's Midnight Oil] it's this weird mix of the prog background that we had plus the energy of English punk, plus also the kind of survival sounds of the bands in the Australian pubs – we were feeding off our contemporaries like Acca Dacca, the Angels, Chisel and Rose Tattoo.”

Back then, the thriving Aussie pub circuit gave the Oils a solid grounding, a far cry from the expectation of instant success that young bands are often burdened with today.

“That's exactly right; they form, get some songs together, and next thing you know they're on some festival playing in front of a lot of people,” Hirst continues. “We didn't do it at all like that – we hit the road and played hundreds of shows, because there were hundreds of shows that you could play. And they were big gigs – 1500 here, 2500 here, big RSLs, pubs, clubs – it seemed like an endless supply of them, and it was such a good testing ground for the band and for the songs that we were writing, because if songs were tanking you could see it in the faces of people right in front of you as they glazed over. We always used to think, 'If we can survive this we can take our music anywhere' and it turned out that way – we never felt intimidated anywhere in the world after those early years in the Australian pubs.”

When Midnight Oil did eventually conquer the world with their topical and thought-provoking music, at times the inherent message of their lyrics – and the undeniable charisma of frontman Pater Garrett – overshadowed the uniformly powerful music.

“Here's the thing, I think early on we realised that if we were going to be one of those 'message bands' – a band saying something or, dare I say it, a 'political band', which we didn't think of ourselves as – then the only way anyone of our audiences in sweaty pubs with their shirts off drinking vast quantities of amber ale were going to get the message at all was with a big boot up the ass,” Hirst smiles. “So the songs as a result had big sing-along choruses and massive beats behind them – if you went below about 85bpm people started throwing things at you, so the early songs really kicked along – so I guess it was message by stealth. We wanted to write about those things, but we knew that if it was going to be a 'touchy-feely, drifting off in a pink cloud like Monkee Magic and chewing on mung beans at Byron' kind of thing it wasn't going to go down at all well in front of a punky, pharmaceutically-enhanced late-'70s audience, and I think we were right about that. But we just put it out there and sometimes people got it and sometimes they didn't – sometimes they got it intravenously without even realising.

“It always seemed to us that the bands that we were always compared to where a good guide about how to do things. The Clash, for example, were always so cool, and they had a message but it was put over by Strummer in such a fantastic way, with such sincerity. Even U2 are much-maligned, but the way that they put together message songs with brilliant melodies is undeniable – they were passionate people at a time when it was really cool not to be passionate about everything, or passionate only about ripping stuff down. The same thing happened a decade later with the grunge invasion – any band that wasn't ironic in what they said was thought to be so uncool. But we were never like that – we were one of those bands that were passionate about what we said, and publish and be damned.”

Essential Oils is available now.