Midnight Oils & Christianity
Rick Cameron
I'm a bit unsure as to whether or not I should post this. It's an article
that I picked up off of the Midnight Oil mailing list a while back. I don't
think the author would mind me posting it here. I mailed it out to a number
of you a while back.
In short, Peter Garrett (the lead singer) is a Christian, as is their
manager, Gary Morris.
The following article has been taken from the Powderworks mailing list for
Midnight Oil. The article is enclosed between the '===' signs as it was
posted. This is actually two posts concatenated.
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From: IN%"o...@camelot.bradley.edu" "The Natemeister" 6-APR-1993 15:54:22.92
To: IN%"powde...@boulder.colorado.edu"
CC:
Subj: part one of that articls
**a friend of mine in Tasmania scanned this in from a newspaper article..
Oil Change
Can it really be that Australia's hardest-hitting rockgroup is softening
its tone? Is its saintly leader bent on doing more talking and less
singing. On location filming with them,Susan Chenery gets a rare close-up
of Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil.
AS THUNDER RUMBLES ACROSS the Indian Ocean and explodes into the desert,
the last light pours celestially through moody pink, blue and orange
clouds. Palm trees sag dejectedly in the rain, waves surge onto beaches,
hurling towers of mist into the air. Nightfall in the West's rainy season
is an elemental electric light show. As we disembark from the 747 from
Darwin, even the pilot is sweating and shaken. Later, on the red roads of
Broome, episodic lightening illuminates the horizon, jagging around the
van. Even for Midnight Oil and Peter Garrett, whose relationship with God
and Nature is passionate, it's an ostentatious welcome to town.
We have come to Broome to film a video for the group's new album, Earth and
Sun and Moon, and the storm seems to be announcing the arrival of a
modern-day prophet. You want a sign? Crash, flash, rumble, roar. Clouds
part, heavens move, lightning strikes. Except that when this prophet
sermonises from the Mount, you can dance to it. And thousands of young
people pay to hear Garrett's rallying, roaring polemics on record and in
stadiums all over the world. The band's drummer, one of its principal
songwriters and its linchpin, Rob Hirst, remembers playing for 65,000 in
Belgium: "You see this sort of Mexican wave as the sound system travels
through this large area of space. My snare drum and kick drum arrive at
those people at different times. So you see this thing like a big boa
constrictor all sort of clapping at different times. It is so mesmerising
you can actually get out of time yourself" Says Garrett: "It looks like a
wave, you want to surf it."
With his chiselled, marmoreal head, startling blue eyes under a veranda-ed
forehead and gangling body in loose, flapping clothes, Garrett more often
resembles some ancient high priest than a radical rock singer. And, as with
any prophet, he can't walk more than a few metres without being accosted:
an Aboriginal woman desperate for help on a land rights case, a drunk
taking him to task for his campaign against the Australia Card,
battle-scarred battlers from old campaigns who've come in from the bush to
shoot the breeze, his old friends, the Aboriginal Scrap Metal Band, the
camel man from Broome with Sid Vicious, his cattle dog, strangers in the
street. He is charisma incarnate. In his book Strict Rules, an account of
the 1986 Blackfella/Whitefella tour of remote Aboriginal communities in the
Northern Territory, Andrew McMillan described Garrett as "a man without a
party ... on his way to becoming a popular figure on the political scene.
He's a lawyer who's never practised at the Bar, a political campaigner
who's never won an election, a singer who some critics are keen to point
out cannot sing" Yet on several fronts as president of the Australian
Conservation Foundation, within the music industry, as an anti-nuclear
campaigner or on the constitutional reform committee his influence is
immense. With a ready-made constituency dancing as fast as it can, the
juggernaut that is Midnight Oil (record sales more than six million) has
thrown up a consummate politician who refers to himself as a "pub rocker"
who will kick heads to ensure our rivers run clear and pure. He's always
busy, busy, busy, lobbying, backroom operating, making deals on the phone.
Given all this, it's surprising to find him in person gentle and diffident.
Midnight Oil is your conscience speaking. Its unequivocal anthems such as
Power and the Passion, US Forces and Beds are Burning have become sewn into
the fabric of the Australian heartland. In them you can smell the poverty
and fear of the disadvantaged, the aching, cracked red earth, blood,
eucalyptus and wattle, the lament of the Aboriginal people. "A lot of it
has been real knee-jerk reaction to what has been going on at the time",
says songwriter Jim Moginie, the band's acknowledged musical genius. "We
play strong music,' says Hirst, 'because we come from the pubs of
Australia. If we didn't play strong music, the middy glasses would start to
fly past your right earhole " Their songs are strident, guitar riffed
protests about conservation, land rights, nuclear disarmament, militarism;
rhetoric about the biosphere and the fragile earth. "Possibly no popular
artist, working in any medium, anywhere in the world blurred the lines
between entertainment and 'message' as much as Midnight Oil,' said Rolling
Stone in 1991. But although they have an all-singing, all-dancing political
agenda, their popularity rests on a core of truth and authenticity that is
anti-fashion, anti-pop and in a straight line of descent from the protest
singers of the sixties and earlier. They are just louder. Powerhouse
louder. The politics appear to be unreconstructed Left, but like everything
else about the Oils, it is slightly more complicated than that. "We're just
a bunch of over-educated lefties,' says Moginie. Says Hirst: "Some people
could call it classic Fabian socialist Left, but I don't think those terms
have any place in the nineties" And Garrett, who considers himself
"primarily an activist', describes himself as "a social and ecological
localist. Local in the sense that global derives from local and not the
other way round. I genuinely believe in serving the community but I also
believe that things aren't inevitable. The so-called fabric of society
needs a lot of sewing together"
The Oils do their bit of sewing by putting their money where their Iyrics
are. The band has given away millions of dollars, mainly through benefit
concerts, to worthy causes philanthropy they refuse point-blank to discuss
in any detail. Others are not so reticent: McMillan told me that up until
1986, "they had donated about a million to various causes, non-political
peace and disarmament organisations, the campaign to save Jervis Bay, the
proceeds of Species Deceases went into a trust fund for Greenpeace,
royalties from the hit single Dead Heart go to the Department of Aboriginal
Affairs, they do benefit concerts for Open Family Foundation, the homeless,
youth refuges. They let people use their resources There is always someone
working in their office, on some Greenpeace project or something like that.
We move languidly in the compressed heat, the air so thick seems to move
with you. Corrugated-iron Broome, where the dessert stops abruptly at the
sea, everything - pitched roofs, ancient mango trees, earth roads and
sudden patches of vivid green - is listless and covered in red dust. At the
town beach, a sign warns of a recently sighted crocodile. The tide is out,
and we skid and slosh across the mud flats to mangrove swamp to shoot. The
camera settles slowly into the mud. Acoustic guitar music shimmies across
the water and out sea. Garrett, shiny head thrown back, lip syncs as he
dances crazily, laughing in self parody as he sinks further and further
into the mud: "I just want to lose myself in the primeval world of a rock
band again"
Earth and Sun and Moon is their first studio album in nearly four years,
and its sharp swerve in direction for a band whose previous albums have
been confrontational and issue-related. It's introspective, personal and,
well, uncharacteristically pretty. For these Angry Young Men it's an out
break of love as the title of one of the songs announces "I was getting
tired of writing about war,' says Moginie. I wanted to do us a love song,
and I wanted it to be a dark love song" In wondering, as Moginie puts it,
"what trousers to wear to fit the decade" the Oils seem to have come out
strongly in favour of optimism. The new album is a collection of quirky,
pared-down songs with a psychedelic sixties feel While the message is still
one of protest on songs such as Truganini, with its chorus about flag,
republicanism and the last Tasmanian Aborigine, the planet, it would
appear, is going to make it:
"Earth and Sun and Moon, human tribe, one thin blue line, Earth and Sun and
Moon will survive, will survive, we will survive" The Oils are searching
closer to home for meaning. Maybe it's because many of the battles have
been fought and won, although, says Garrett, "the jury is still out on
disarmament Certainly many of the causes they have put their weight and
money behind have seen significant progress. And now they've reached the
point where they don't want to make big statements. "We've said that stuff
very strongly,' says Moginie. "The other albums were issue-related - Blue
Sky Mining was about the environment, Diesel and Dust was about Aboriginal
people. Now we have had a year off and are getting a more personal view.
We're just writing songs that seem very real to us" The big themes are
being experienced on a personal scale. "It's a comfortable space between
the deep, deep roots of the sixties and seventies with no refinements or
gloss,' says Garrett. "It's primal, organic and very good to move around
to. It is a hybrid of places we are at now with those things in the past
that have struck deep chords . . . it's real songs, a human record.
We were never going to be rushed into making love songs or whatever just
because the world wanted love songs. We had to feel the things ourselves"
In the Valley, the song Garrett is dancing to in the mud, is particularly
revealing. Uncharacteristically, he has laid his personal life open.
"People who think we are some kind of loud polemic who grunt and savage the
powers-that-be will see we've got a heart, which emerges in a song like
this. Wherever you are, you still think about your mother or your father or
your grandfather or whatever At the time you lose them, it really hurts
you especially if you are young, as I was, and it's quite painful for you.
It just requires distance so that it doesn't hurt so much when you write it
down"
In The Valley is about the death of his parents. "My father went down, with
the curse of big cities,/ traffic jams and deadlines took him to his
peace./ My mother went down with the stiff arm of Hades" . . . Garrett's
father, a company executive, died of "overload"; his mother when the family
home burned to the ground. Garrett was 23 when his mother died. In the past
he has denied that this fuelled his evangelistic desire to stop the rest of
the world from burning up, but it was only a few years later, in 1984, that
he embraced Christianity.
As Hirst told David Leser in HQ magazine in 1990, "Peter became a Christian
in that year and became a very different person in subsequent months. Most
people who become Christian, or have some spiritual revelation, go through
a very tortured period and he did, I believe, as well" In what must have
been a watershed year, Garrett in 1984 also declared himself a candidate
for the Australian Senate at the head of the Nuclear Disarmament Party.
Although he won 9 per cent of the vote (some 300,000 votes), he was not
elected because the Labor Party fearing, perhaps, a loose-canon subversive
in the Senate gave its preferences to the Liberals. "I never thought I was
going to be elected,' Garrett says now. "I knew very early on that Labor
had exchanged preferences. But the size of the popular vote was so high it
made it seem like I would get in. The media got very excited and there was
always a very slight chance. I'm deeply thankful now that the morally
bankrupt strategies of the Liberal and Labor parties kept me out . . . they
kept me away from tedium, odium and emerging senility, which may or may not
come upon me at a later date"
Next month Garrett's political interests take another step when his green
extremism goes global. He will leave Australia for a year to take up a
position on the board of Greenpeace International in Amsterdam, from where
he will join the band on its seven-month tour of America and Europe. "It is
early days yet to know what is at stake and how it's going to work,' he
says of his new position. "It's subject to the Oils' work, but it will be
to do with setting medium and long-term strategies, trying to make sure
campaigns are focused, approving budgets and making sure the organisation
stays reasonably solvent. It will be very interesting for me coming from
Australia to know what is going on in places like Latin America"
In the past, Garrett, 39, has said he wouldn't say no to high political
office. For the moment he seems to have his eye on the international stage.
With his forays into the public arena to denounce the CIA, US bases in
Australia, asbestos mining and genetic engineering, he has parlayed music
into politics, idealism into publicity. Where exactly is he headed? Can he
keep dancing around forever? "One day at a time,' he says. "I don't know
what the next five years hold. I always try to make sure that motivation is
there and real"
While the band shares his lofty ideals, the Christian commitment is his
alone. Apart from manager Gary Morris, who is characterised by many as
Bible-thumping and volatile, Garrett is the only Christian in the band.
Pro-life and pro-family, he is a devoted family man with three small
daughters. "His is a pure Christianity,' says an old friend, when asked if
socialism, rock'n'roll and Christianity are mutually compatible "It is pure
humanism. He lives by a Christian ethic, with the idea of forgiveness as a
central theme and nurturing and caring for those around us. He doesn't talk
about it publicly because he has a desire not to preach. He would
vehemently deny he is some kind of latter-day prophet" The music
writer/historian Glenn A. Baker is more equivocal. "Garrett,' he says, "has
a deep and abiding love for humanity it's just people he can't stand. I
have seen him being unpleasant to people, including one of my children. He
tends to think in the big picture in good deeds and noble intentions, but
has trouble with the small".
Prophet or not, Garrett is part of a band that has been described as
elitist, inaccessible and arrogant. "They have set up their own little cosa
nostra," says one industry insider. "I guess we are control freaks,' agrees
Moginie "But it is our thing, our music you can't let that go too much" And
none of them has forgotten the early days of sweating it out in the pubs,
unable to get a recording contract. "Record company people would come to
see us,' says Garrett, "and say 'the songs are all right, the band isn't
bad but the singer is terrible he can't sing. Maybe if we put him in a
silver suit and put make-up on him' " "The longer you've been in the busi-
ness,' says Hirst, "the easier it is to become incredibly cynical. We tend
to close ranks, which is perhaps why the Oils invoke bitter frustration and
anger. We do it for survival. We get to a point where we appear to be
reasonable and open and do all the right things. But eventually you've got
to close ranks, go back in the garage and say 'who are we?' We were this
band that crawled out of this garage in Chatswood [a Sydney suburb].
Fundamentally we haven't changed but we have things to say and we want to
say them responsibly and with research and intelligence"
"A shared sensibility helps,' agrees Garrett who joined the band after
answering an ad in a local newspaper. But, he says, "we were drawn together
because we just wanted to be in a rock band. We didn't want to be in suits.
We wanted to have a lot of fun and play on the beaches, meet pretty girls
and emulate our heroes. The social conscience thing and the cause and that
stuff tends to get more emphasis than it probably deserves" The music
writer Ed St John once wrote that the Oils had "fostered more distrust,
loathing and hatred than any other band in the music business" This he now
puts down to the careless arrogance of a youthful Midnight Oil. "It
certainly isn't applicable today.
A decade ago, their wilful perversity and the sometimes obscure ways they
carried out day-to-day activities caused people to see them as upstarts.
They refused to go on Countdown, refused to do commercial radio interviews,
didn't follow industry rules. They never, never compromise" The management
techniques of Morris, considered by the band as "the sixth Oil', have not
helped their reputation. As he told David Leser, "you have to be a prick to
get the job done for any kind of band that has a single-minded vision like
Midnight Oil" From the beginning 15 years ago, the band was ruggedly
independent and went into debt rather than be indentured to a
multi-national record company. Says Hirst: "The only difference between us
and other bands who are still paying back their record companies after 10
years is that we came out of the debt spiral. We were fortunate. I was
parking cars for a while there. We used to play at the Chatswood Charles
pub in winter. The barmaid used to have her radiator plugged into the power
point we used. When she got cold, she'd unplug the band mid-song so she
could warm her toes up. I think that was the beginning of our angry young
men stage"
In Broome, there are no artistic tantrums despite the heat, the mud and the
flies. After all, they are basically middle- class university graduates,
family men, some married to the girls who came to their first gigs. Wives
and children will accompany them on the world tour, which begins next
month. "If you want to get them talking,' St John had advised me, "talk
about babies they've all got them "
Fame and power, of course, are a conundrum for ideologists There are always
charges of hypocrisy, contradictory behaviour, corrupted values. With each
record selling in the millions, the Oils could live very well indeed if
they wanted. None lives ostentatiously, and all drive second-hand cars.
Nevertheless, the success of their Diesel and Dust album changed their
lives forever. It also taught them the downside of fame. While the album
raised the banner of Aboriginal rights all over the world, particularly in
the US, where it sold more than a million copies, there were still charges
raised against them that they were exploiting the Aboriginal people.
Midnight Oil contributed $95,000 of their own money and borrowed $80,000
from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs to take the Warumpi Band with
them. The gist of the complaints says Hirst, "was how dare middle-class
boys from the cities of Sydney or Melbourne pretend to write about the not
inconsiderable problems of native Australians But the impression we got
and we were told this time and time again was that most Aboriginal folk,
particularly those that are politicised and in a position of some authority
or influence, were very glad a band with the exposure and track record of
the Oils spoke on their behalf. "I know we're the kings of the beau geste,
but not even a twisted cynic could honestly say that with a track record of
15 years of fundamentally saying the same thing and playing all those
benefits and being consistent on a variety of themes, that if we had just
been in it for a quick buck that we would still be doing it. I am prepared
to debate that with anyone anytime"
It is a velvet black night down at Broome's Roehampton Hotel when the Oils
take to the stage at the invitation of the Scrap Metal Band The punters
have not been warned this would happen - they start roaring and hopping
around. US Forces blasts out into the night This is the real thing.
Sweat-covered blokes on the dance floor screaming out the lyrics Garrett
stands in the tropical night, arms outstretched, palms out in a favoured,
Christ-like pose. "Why' - I'd asked Moginie earlier, "do you play here in a
pub for a hundred people when you can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars
playing stadiums?" He'd looked at me as if I was mad. "Because it's fun".
D. Nathan Hood - o...@camelot.bradley.edu - Harper 521 - x1358
Love and do what you will -St. Augustine
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Hope you enjoy it.
Rick Cameron
David Gileff
that name came to Canada (British Columbia) to play at a site where
environmentalists were blocking loggers' access to a controversial area.
Of course the environmentalists hailed the band's arrival with enthusiasm,
whereas many other people were offended that a band from Australia would
come and meddle in the internal affairs of British Columbia. Is this the
same band, or is it just a giant coincidence.
--
David Gileff (gil...@sfu.ca)
"I...saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
Andrew William Easton
>Is this the Midnight Oil band from Australia. Not too long ago, a band by
>that name came to Canada (British Columbia) to play at a site where
>environmentalists were blocking loggers' access to a controversial area.
>Of course the environmentalists hailed the band's arrival with enthusiasm,
>whereas many other people were offended that a band from Australia would
>come and meddle in the internal affairs of British Columbia. Is this the
>same band, or is it just a giant coincidence.
If it's not, they're doing a good job of impersinating the original!!!
The UNbearded 0ne.....looking for a new nickname!
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