Stand In Line

Manly – the hub of Sydney's Northern Beaches, where iconic Australian outfit Midnight Oil cut their teeth in the late '70s and early '80s – is hosting The Making Of Midnight Oil, tracing the seismic musical and societal imprint the band made on our nation.

“The Northern Beaches of Sydney is where the Oils first pulled a crowd, at the Royal Antler Hotel,” drummer Rob Hirst recalls. “About three years ago I started pulling stuff out of my attic, and in there were all these posters dating back to when the band was first called Farm ­– there were posters and badges and lyrics and stickers and God knows what. So I was walking past Manly Art Gallery and just on a whim I went in and spoke to them about the exhibition, and they said, 'Yeah, we're going to do it!'

“It's grown over the last two years, and [we've] been able to pull in all of this stuff including the Exxon banner [featured in new DVD, Black Rain Falls] and an amazing amount of stage clobber and footage that Bonesy [bassist Bones Hillman] shot of the band backstage that has never been shown, and a new documentary that Rob Hambling made about the making of Ten-To-One [1982 album 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1], and I've even tried to recreate what it was like in 1979 at the Royal Antler Hotel with sticky carpet and sharp elbows!”

Recently, the Oils have also released the bulk of their catalogue in physical remastered form and given Black Rain Falls a long-awaited DVD release. It documents the guerilla protest gig Midnight Oil played in inner-Manhattan in 1990, bemoaning the lack of contrition shown by the Exxon Corporation following the ecological disaster that one of their tankers has caused in Alaska the previous year.

“We were dragged out of bed at about 11am having rehearsed the night before on the flat-bed truck, which was set up in a big wharf down on the Hudson River, and that was just wheeled out into Manhattan traffic just before midday. The cops knew about it – I think we'd donated to the Policemen's Ball or something, everybody had been paid off – and a huge traffic jam formed.

“We managed to get six or seven songs, which was great because halfway through the big banner, which read, 'Midnight Oil makes you dance, Exxon Oil make us sick' was unfurled, then thousands of people began streaming out of the Rockefeller Centre and the Exxon Building and all of the skyscrapers directly above us at midday, so our small crowd suddenly became a 10,000 people crowd and they started to dance and laugh.”