Oh, oh, the power and the passion, sometimes you’ve got to take the hardest line……
Across their 45-year career, MIDNIGHT OIL helped shape modern Australia with anthems like The Power and the Passion, US Forces, Beds Are Burning, Blue Sky Mine and Redneck Wonderland.
Just how much this extraordinary band shaped the last half century is dynamically, dramatically and divinely depicted in MIDNIGHT OIL: THE HARDEST LINE from music documentary majordomo, Paul Clarke.
Clarke was the co-writer and executive producer of the AACTA Award winning documentary feature John Farnham: Finding the Voice which smashed Australian box office records in 2023.
Featuring exclusive interviews with every band member, unseen live and studio footage, alongside signature moments like the outback tour with Warumpi Band, their Exxon protest gig in New York and those famous “Sorry” suits at the Sydney Olympics, MIDNIGHT OIL: THE HARDEST LINE traces the singularly sensational journey of Australia’s quintessential rock band.
Fifty years packed into a thrilling 105 minutes, the film is a chronicle of a colossus of musical comrades that began when Rob Hirst (drums, vocals) and Jim Moginie (guitars, keys and vocals) started making music together at school in 1972, with singer Peter Garrett joining in 1975 and Martin Rotsey (guitar) coming on board the following year.
From the beginning, the band challenged concepts of business as usual, forging their own fame in pubs and campus gigs, refusing to appear on popular TV shows like Countdown and shunning all the music biz norms.
Hard work, persistence, and a strong political will saw them survive and thrive, although not without some individual burnout and subsequent change of line up.
In 1982, their fourth album 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 turned everything on its head. The band deconstructed their sound and reassembled it into complex rock anthems like Power And The Passion and US Forces. As ‘The Oils’ expanded their creative ambitions they also expanded their audience. The album was a monster success, staying in the Australian charts for over 200 weeks.
Red Sails in the Sunset came next. Recorded in Japan, it took sonic experimentation and polemics to new and extreme levels. It loomed large on the charts through 1984 against the backdrop of singer Peter Garrett making a run for the Australian Senate on a Nuclear Disarmament platform.
In 1986 Midnight Oil was invited to tour through some of Australia’s most remote communities with legendary Aboriginal group Warumpi Band. The Blackfella/Whitefella tour was a transformative experience that exposed the band to the austere beauty of the desert landscape, the inspiring creativity of the Indigenous people and the deplorable conditions in which so many of those people existed. The band returned to Sydney and created their global breakthrough Diesel and Dust. Singles from that classic album like The Dead Heart, Put Down That Weapon, Dreamworld and, of course, Beds Are Burning brought Midnight Oil to new audiences around the globe. While touring the US after the album’s release, the band drew attention to the environmental disaster caused by an Exxon oil tanker that ran aground in Alaska. They hired a flatbed truck and played a blistering guerrilla set outside the Exxon offices in New York, stopping traffic and putting the issue on front pages worldwide.
In 2000, the band performed to an audience of over a billion people at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games revealing clothing emblazoned with the word, SORRY; thereby provoking global discussion about the apology due to Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families between the 1890s and 1970s.
In December 2002 Peter Garrett left the band to pursue a full-time political career. Nonetheless in 2005 ‘The Oils’ regrouped to headline the Waveaid tsunami benefit at the SCG, and in 2009 they topped a massive bill for Sound Relief at the MCG where over 80,000 fans joined them in raising millions for victims of Australian fires and floods.
2020 saw the band release their first new music in nearly two decades – The Makarrata Project – on which all the songs shared a strong lyrical focus on Indigenous reconciliation, and featured collaborations with First Nations friends. This extra chapter of their career came to a close in 2022 with the release of those tracks on a new album and final world tour both aptly titled Resist.
Resistance to this film is futile. A whirlwind, world winding awe inspiring exhilaration, MIDNIGHT OIL: THE HARDEST LINE needs to be seen in a cinema or mosh pit. Your feet will be dancing in your seat.
