Power and the Passion
Midnight Oil. Live!
If those words don’t make your heart beat a little faster, your body start to rock back and forth, your arm shoot up with the hand opened wide – then you weren’t there. You’ve never been there. And for that, I feel a little sorry for you.
I’ve been there, many times, but not enough. And I’m still keen to be there again.
Everyone knows of Midnight Oil, everyone has an opinion, which is typically one of;
I can’t stand Garrett
I don’t mind them, they’re OK I guess
I remember at the …. (insert place of concert). The memories evoked by the mention of the Oils are not accompanied by the misting of the eyes, but a stomping of the feet and a swaying of the body and a shaking of the head.
We’re coming up to the one year anniversary of the Midnight Oil concerts in the Domain, Sydney, and Midnight Oil are releasing a DVD of the concert. I’ve already ordered my copy, and maybe after you read my take on their concerts you might too. Problem for me is, we’re on the road, and won’t be home for at least a month after the box is delivered. You would think I have enough to keep me going during that time – with all their songs with us in the van – but no, I’m already missing that DVD and I don’t even have it yet.
11th November 2017
It was great!!! Age has not wearied them.
The girls really enjoyed it. I realised during the night, that to truly understand, to like, ‘to get’, Midnight Oil, you need to see them live. The girls have heard a fair bit of Midnight Oil over the years, and like them. Of course, the Oils will never be one of ‘their’ bands, having been introduced to them by us, but they like them. Now, after being blown away on Saturday night, they really like them.
The Oils were always about performing. All of their music is first played live, and then recorded. The stories of their early days are legendary. Full on, high energy performances, and every concert since has been the same – including Saturday. So to ‘get’ Midnight Oil you have to experience the energy, the passion, the protest that is every concert.
I would have preferred the acoustics of an indoor concert but there is something to be said for standing with 20,000 other people, in the Domain on a nice spring night, and singing yourself hoarse to the Oils. You need to go to their facebook page and have a look at the photo, taken looking across the crowd to the city. The singing from the crowd was great: every Midnight Oil concert is a participation event. You don’t go to watch them, you go to join them.
What was so special about this concert was that it happened at all. At a concert in Melbourne the week before this concert during the last song (before an encore), Jim Mogine (the guitarist & keyboard player) fell over on stage. And, get this, tore his hamstring tendon off his bone. OUCH!!! He continued playing, on his knees, right through until the end of the song. Don’t think they came out for an encore though. So for Saturday, he sat on a chair during the whole show – being wheeled on and off in a wheel chair.
The first song? Well, remember, Saturday was the 11th of November, so the first song was Armistice Day. I like this song, but I often skip it because it doesn’t have the clean guitar sounds that I like from their other songs, it has that reverberation sound that they played around with on the Place Without a Postcard album. But, played live, it sounds incredible. The imagery was simple, poetic. Garret standing on the end of the stage that jutted into the crowd like a sentinel. At the end of the song a bugle player played a memorial, the Reveille I think. Just brilliant!
In the days afterwards I remarked to the girls that to attend a Midnight Oil concert is to attend a political protest. Like most concerts there were many issues to be covered, starting with the anti domestic violence themes prominent on his clothing, to the rant against Adnani.
My favourite was the treatment of the treatment of the front page article in the Sydney Morning Herald that appeared on Saturday morning quoting Paul Keating, an ex Prime Minister of Australia, complaining that the Domain should not be used for these concerts because it involves fencing off, and therefore excluding people, from a part of the park for about 2 weeks. Keating’s view is that the Domain is a park for the people, and therefore people should not be excluded from it. But two concerts of 20,000 each is a bit different to an exclusive corporate event.
Keating, who before politics was a manager of a rock band (among other things), is famous for listening to classical music, lives not far from the Domain, so no doubt would have been able to hear the concert. Read About It was one of the first songs played, and Garrett changed the lyrics a bit … and then a number of times had a go at Keating for what he said - “turn down your Mahler, open your windows, and listen to some Australian music”. My summary makes it seem a bit juvenile but Garrett’s version was funny and cutting.
We had good position, about a 1/4 the way back from the stage, far enough to create a bit of space so Pam could see. I lost Pam during the night though, she was somewhere off in front of me, dancing with a stack of people. I formed part of the choir …. surrounded as I was by the diehards. There is always an eclectic mix of people at an Oil’s concert; the beer fuelled yobbos, the (ageing) surfers, the hippies and at this one, they were all there … but this time – with their kids.
Over too soon, encore done, we trudge out with the masses, a few humming the closing refrain to ‘Now or Never Land’: “heyah heyah heyah woahwoah, it’s now or never land”.
The day after, we madly tried to get tickets to the next show. You remember that when we bought tickets we thought we were buying tickets to the last show of their world tour: and then they added three more – narked me a little because I specially wanted to go to the last concert of the tour. They added one in Wollongong, another in Melbourne, and then one in Sydney on Friday night. We failed to get tickets on Sunday so Pam & I decided we would go into town for dinner on Friday night, and then just hang around outside the concert and listen to it. But then Pam found some tickets for sale from someone in Windsor – Cinderella is off to the ball.
17th November, 2017
Back again to the Domain, this time just Pam & I, like the old days, and 20 odd thousand of our closest friends …. and a few idiots we’ve never really been friends with.
And then it starts – but this time it’s a bit of a let-down for me – they started with Redneck Wonderland, the title song off the album: neither the song nor album I listen to much. So I didn’t actually recognise the song at the start nor know any of the words. Made up for it with the 2nd – Read About It.
Just another great concert!
The downside to the night: the people around us. At the start, there were two blokes standing right behind me talking constantly through all the songs – loudly. I continually turned and glared at them, but they were the sort of blokes I didn’t feel comfortable telling them to shut up … so eventually we moved.
Then, just as the Oils start into ‘The Dead Heart’, a whole stack of idiots in front of me started holding up their phones to take videos. The lighting on the stage for the song was brilliant – different shades of red. But my near perfect view was almost completely blocked by the mobile phones. I allowed what I considered to be a reasonable period of time to pass and then, in a VERY loud voice with a Garrett like lecturing tone yelled out,
“I think it’s time to put your phones away now’, and as one, they lowered their phones to about head height, but then I had to follow it up with,
“Put your f#$%ing phones away’
No more phones. I didn’t have much choice – Oils playing one of the best songs on the night, stage looking great, crowd jumping, and I’m staring at series of glaring mobile phone screens.
It happened again during ‘Beds are Burning’, so again I waited a reasonable time and then encouraged them to put them away.
Oh, and Garret threw some people out. It was during ‘When the Generals Talk’, he had just started singing one of the verses, standing on the runway into the crowd, half crouched, his hand shielding his eyes from the glare of the lights, looking into the crowd when he turned to the band, mid sentence in the song
‘stop it, turn it down, stop’
turns back to crowd
‘can we get a spotlight on here please’
‘yes you, we don’t act like that at Midnight Oil concerts, everyone is entitled to come here and have a good time, so I think it is time for you to leave. No shirt on, that’s a dead giveaway, and where’s your friend with the long hair’
Continues to look into the crowd,
‘there he is, hey you, how about you make a dignified exit’
‘Can we get someone down here to assist these gentlemen out please’
Meanwhile, the band has been looping through the bit of music that was the lead up to the verse he was singing,
Switching from looking at the crowd, to being back with the band
‘now, where were we?’
And off into the verse again that had been interrupted.
Crowd control just like the old days.
During the night they played a song called Treaty. This was a hit in the ‘80s for an aboriginal band called Yothu Yindi. A review of an Oil’s concert years ago said that even though the Oils sing a lot about aborigines, you wouldn’t want to be one at their concert. Well, I disagreed with that when it was written, and I still do now. Sure, there are a few sozzled yobbos doing their best to remind us what the ‘70s were like: there’s always a few in every crowd. But the majority is not silent at an Oils concert, so there was a huge cheer from the crowd when we realised which song it was – and that is the strongest statement about the sentiment of the crowd.
The first song in the encore was the instrumental ‘Wedding Cake Island’ off the Bird Noises EP. They had played this at Melbourne, and my friend really wanted it to be played last Saturday night, but to be honest, I wasn’t bothered either way. How wrong can I be? Hearing Wedding Cake Island played live is enough, almost, to bring a grown man to tears.
Another great night. Another reminder that Midnight Oil are one of the best rock bands of all time – I accept no arguments on this point – you weren’t there.
