Forty-four years ago, my first assignment for Rolling Stone was to interview Rob Hirst of Midnight Oil. Now, in the next century, I re-posed my first question to him: where are all the Midnight Oil love songs? A few boy-girl romance numbers would have shifted a lot more records.
“Well, it would have been easier if we hadn’t alienated all the music industry,” the drummer says, once he stops laughing. “It would have been easier if we got on Countdown. It would have been easy if we accepted a headline position on the first Lollapalooza. It would have been easier if we turned up to that Grammy nomination, but we didn’t do any of those things. And we got through regardless. That’s why it’s called The Hardest Line.”
Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line is the title of a feature-length documentary about the band. Directed by Paul Clarke, the film has been five years or more in the making. Midnight Oil is, in Monty Python’s phrase, “more of an autonomous collective”. For that reason, dealing with Midnight Oil can be infuriating. But their staunch solidarity has kept them together in the face of enormous pressure and their crusade has woven them into Australian history unlike any other artist.
The chemistry was the making and the breaking of the band. For Jim Moginie making music was the only way he felt normal. I saw Rob Hirst play in his high school garage band and even then he had the showmanship, the flair and the beats. Martin Rotsey was born with a guitar on his hip.
The focus of Midnight Oil was always going to be its large, bald frontman. At 198cm (6ft 6), or thereabouts, Peter Garrett is big in every way. He is incredibly generous and open-hearted. Tireless. Smart and warm in person. He can also be tough as nails when he wants to be, especially about controlling the narrative of his life. For a person in public life, Garrett is intensely private; in interviews he deftly deflects discussion about family, the band, his emotions or his spiritual beliefs.
Sources close to the band described the division in the group as “the politicians” and “the musicians’’. Hirst and Garrett were at different times leaders and, as Moginie wrote in his recent memoir, they didn’t always see eye to eye. In the middle, guitarist Rotsey was, according to Sony’s Chris Moss, “the cool one” who usually had the final say on most things
