Farewell tours often have one eye on the past and the other on the cash register – but if Midnight Oil’s show in Launceston on Sunday was any indication, they’re not coasting to the finish line.
The first of four performances for Tasmania’s Mona Foma festival – the band will play in Launceston once more, then on to Hobart – marks the start of a tour billed as the Oils’ last ever live shows.
But it’s not the end: Midnight Oil are about to drop a new album, due 18 February, and may continue writing and recording. “We’ve played intensely physical gigs since our humble beginnings back in 1977, and we never want to take even the slightest risk of compromising that,” guitarist Jim Moginie wrote in a statement. With the death of longtime bassist Bones Hillman in November 2020, he explained, they felt at the “end of a cycle”.
The grassy waterside flat where the Esk and Tamar rivers meet makes for a nice, low-key way to start the band’s lap of stadiums and arenas, gently evoking the Sydney Harbour setting of their seminal 1985 concert film Oils on the Water.
The band might move a bit more gingerly than in 1985, but tracks like 1982’s Only The Strong still hit like a slap in the face. Moginie’s and Martin Rotsey’s guitars bring a pub rock fury that hasn’t been dulled by time or a pandemic, as the pair stand stoically on each side of the stage bookending the eternally flailing frontman Peter Garrett. Up the back, Rob Hirst pounds the drums with unyielding joy – no one, it seems, has more fun at a Midnight Oil show than him. When Hirst, bassist Adam Ventoura and guest backing singers Leah Flanagan and Liz Stringer add a stack of harmonies to Read About It, Short Memory and US Forces, it’s hard not to be swept up.
Midnight Oil have been coming to Tasmania for a long time and have the songs to show for it, from 1981’s chugging environmental anthem Burnie (“It’s a little cleaner now than it was when we were there, when this song was written,” Garret says of the city north-west of Launceston) to 1993’s Truganini.
Garrett says Burnie and Truganini are meant to “commemorate and inspire”, but on newer tracks from the forthcoming album, Resist, his tone is more urgent. A winding acoustic riff opens Tarkine, a tribute to the embattled forest in Tasmania’s north-west and the album’s second single. Its chorus is up there with some of the band’s best belters, but it’s also an opportunity for Garrett to vent – and all the time stuck at home over the past 18 months not mellowed him. “I am so pissed off and angry, I can’t tell you,” he says, pouring disappointed scorn on “parasites, layabouts and magic tongue merchants” who dominate the airwaves and the “highest office in the land”.
He then offers a word of caution to his fellow baby boomers, despairing at how, with cruel irony, Australia feels like a less egalitarian nation than when the band started. “This stuff can sneak up on you,” he laments. “Next thing you know, the best parts of it are gone – and the best parts are not nostalgia.” The reunion and farewell tour industry is usually geared towards indulging older, well-off fans, so to hear Garrett remonstrating such generational failure is arresting.
It adds a new edge to an anthem like Forgotten Years, but also drives home what they’re hanging up: sung live, there’s a mournful rage to the album’s climate change-inspired single Rising Seas that’s unmatched on the record. Garrett sings with the grief and frustration of a former Gillard government minister who has had to watch a legacy of climate action gleefully unpicked by their successors:
Every child, put down your toys
And come inside to sleep
We have to look you in the eye
And say, “We sold you cheap”
After two hours, the band have mined most corners of their back catalogue, from the skittish 90s beats of Redneck Wonderland to tracks from last year’s The Makarrata Project. But while Beds Are Burning squeaks in during the encore, a few other key tracks are left unplayed when the hard curfew sets in.
There is one big casualty: like Chekhov’s gun, the well-beaten corrugated iron water tank that sits behind Hirst’s kit suggests we’ll be treated to Power and the Passion (and its extended drum solo). But not tonight, and there’s something admirable in the band declining to cut any of the weighty new material, deep cuts or mid-set sermons to cram in more fan favourites. All the same, it’s an awful lot of metal to lug around for naught.
Instead, they close with a defiant refrain from 1987’s Diesel and Dust: “Sometimes you’re shaken to the core / Sometimes the face is gonna fall / But you don’t give in”. The band members leave the stage – and don’t look back.
• Midnight Oil play Launceston on 25 January and Hobart on 28 and 31 January, as part of Mona Foma festival. Their final tour runs until May, taking in city centres and regions around Australia and New Zealand. Walter Marsh travelled to Tasmania as a guest of Mona
This article was amended on 25 January. An earlier version incorrectly placed Tarkine in Tasmania’s north-east
