blue sky mine

Midnight Oil burned blue over ecology and equality, prayed for sense and reason, and sang it like it should be with this desperate and divided lyrical landslide.   The band gone from success in their native Australia with '10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1' and 'Red Sails in the Sunset'  to international acclaim with 'Diesel and Dust' , leading to a massive world tour.   Upon returning to Sydney, they began work on 'Blue Sky Mining' with producer Warne Livesey at Rhino Studios with Peter Garrett on lead vocals;  Robert Hirst on drums and vocals;  Jim Moginie on guitars, keyboards, and vocals;  Martin Rotsey on guitars and vocals;  and new bass player Bones Hillman adding vocals as well.  Warne Livesey provided additional keyboards;  with Jeremy Smith on French horn;  Phillip Hartl as String Leader;  and Glad and Carl doing the Horn Swells.  

It was while they were on tour promoting the new album that they hired a flatbed truck and played outside the Exxon offices in New York with a banner that read "Midnight Oil Makes You Dance, Exxon Oil Makes Us Sick", drawing more attention to the Exxon Valdez disaster.    Garrett would express at the time:   "The music speaks for itself.  The issues need to be spoken about...Within the next five to 10 years, children in some of the major cities may be going to school wearing masks.  That is obscene...We just can't go on treating the place like every square millimeter of it can be developed and used...[Midnight Oil is] something real, not prefabricated, market-driven or fame-obsessed...Here [in the United States], you probably have more issues because the corporations have the upper hand in influencing the government. ... America is very much a denial culture in terms of problems and those in power don't want people to become active and start to care again."


 'Blue Sky Mining' flew to number twenty-eight in the UK, twenty in the Netherlands and the US, thirteen in Austria, three in Sweden, two in Norway and Switzerland, and number one in Australia and New Zealand.  





http://www.midnightoil.com/






"Blue Sky Mine" was a top ten hit around the world, going to number one on the US modern rock and mainstream rock charts.  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofrqm6-LCqs


Hey, hey-hey hey
There'll be food on the table tonight
Hey, hey, hey hey
There'll be pay in your pocket tonight

My gut is wrenched out it is crunched up and broken
A life that is led is no more than a token
Who'll strike the flint upon the stone and tell me why
If I yell out at night there's a reply of bruised silence
The screen is no comfort I can't speak my sentence
They blew the lights at heaven's gate and I don't know why

But if I work all day at the blue sky mine
(There'll be food on the table tonight)
Still I walk up and down on the blue sky mine
(There'll be pay in your pocket tonight)

The candy store paupers lie to the share holders
They're crossing their fingers they pay the truth makers
The balance sheet is breaking up the sky
So I'm caught at the junction still waiting for medicine
The sweat of my brow keeps on feeding the engine
Hope the crumbs in my pocket can keep me for another night
And if the blue sky mining company won't come to my rescue
If the sugar refining company won't save me
Who's gonna save me?

But if I work all day...

And some have sailed from a distant shore
And the company takes what the company wants
And nothing's as precious, as a hole in the ground

Who's gonna save me?
I pray that sense and reason brings us in
Who's gonna save me?
We've got nothing to fear

In the end the rain comes down
Washes clean, the streets of a blue sky town





"Forgotten Years"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9eap_cKLP4





"King of the Mountain"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuC_k51NUqU






'Blue Sky Mining' 
full album:

https://myspace.com/midnightoil/music/album/blue-sky-mining-remastered-19433783

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhfcgexZdh5qbWrtaYELitl5p0gx30LMA

 
1. "Blue Sky Mine"   Garrett, Hillman, Hirst, Moginie, Rotsey 4:18
2. "Stars of Warburton"   Garrett, Moginie 4:43
3. "Bedlam Bridge"   Hirst 4:25
4. "Forgotten Years"   Hirst, Moginie 4:21
5. "Mountains of Burma"   Hirst 4:50
6. "King of the Mountain"   Hirst, Moginie 3:58
7. "River Runs Red"   Hirst, Moginie 5:28
8. "Shakers and Movers"   Garrett, Moginie 4:32
9. "One Country"   Garrett, Moginie 5:56
10. "Antarctica"   Garrett, Hirst, Moginie, Rotsey 4:22

bonus track
11. "You May Not Be Released**"   Moginie 3:38

red sails in the sunset

Midnight Oil went chasing history to find rumour in the ranking with this real world missionbeat doomsday ultimatum.  The band had finally broken through in Australia with their fourth album  '10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1' which had given the band the visibility to advance their political causes such as nuclear disarmament at benefit concerts like the Stop the Drop Nuclear Disarmament concert in 1983 which received a United Nations Media Peace Prize.  Also, lead singer Peter Garrett had been nominated by the Nuclear Disarmament Party to run for the Australian Senate.  As their label  CBS/Columbia was in the process of being acquired by Sony, the band was invited/encouraged to record their next album in Japan.  'Red Sails in the Sunset' was recorded during the summer of 1984 at Victor Aoyama Studio in Tokyo, Japan.  The band co-produced the sessions with Nick Launay, who also handled engineering (with Gary Fox) and mixing.  The album features  Peter Garrett on lead vocals (except tracks 1, 8);  Peter Gifford on bass guitar and backing vocals;  Rob Hirst on drums, percussion, backing vocals, and lead vocals (tracks 1, 8);  Jim Moginie on guitars, keyboards, and arrangements (brass, string);  and Martin Rotsey on guitars;    with Charlie McMahon on didgeridoo and Kazufumi Ohhama on arrangements (brass, string).  

Hirst would reflect:  "In the past few years we've done a bit of traveling.  We spent most of our time overseas wishing we were back in Sydney.  The song 'Best of Both Worlds' is about being in Sydney:  It's about what we have.  We went back and there wer more strikes on and the New South Wales government was exploding with corruption, but it seemed that - despite all these things - what was going on overseas was far, far worse, and we should just get our act together there and realize what we've got ... I was concerned about the future of the band because I felt a band that had to rehearse between Senate sittings might be a band that quickly folded in frustration.  At the same time, it was clear that this was something Pete had to do. It’s easy to forget how passionate Pete, and the band, and people in general were about the possibility of nuclear incineration...We felt that we were pushing every song into an area we hadn’t been before. We deliberately set out to put the quirkiest sounds on there, to make the most unusual album…We thought, ‘Let’s really throw ourselves at somewhere that has no reference points to where we’ve been.” 

Garrett considers:  “Lyrically the album’s bloody good, most of it, but with all respects to Nick, the production was all a bit overwrought. Apart from that I think it’s a very fine record ... Both roles [of artist and politician] require a commitment.  A politician, I think, is someone who genuinely seeks to serve his nation and not his own ego, who's prepared to listen, and who won't compromise on those important issues that people have elected him for.   A musician should be someone who values their music and their audience, their art and the process of inspiration, more highly than themselves or the size of their bank account or how big their house might be...Where greed and acquisition of money is placed as a highest priority, then evil prospers. It's a proverb, I suspect...We take the view that having the ability to continue to make records and make a living, just a standard living -- that is sufficient for us.  Any clear examination of why so much stuff has gone astray is because so many people are trying to get more than anybody else.   And you know, there are people starving in this country and people starving in the world. It's not the kind of thing I believe any of us can ignore.''


'Red Sails in the Sunset' reached one hundred and seventy-seven in the US, twenty in New Zealand, and number one in Australia.  It went on to sell over four million copies in their native land.  The album cover shows Sydney Harbor after a nuclear attack.  It was designed by Yasutaka Kato and done by artist Tsunehisa Kimura.

http://www.midnightoil.com/

http://www.midnightoil.com/music/red-sails-sunset






"Best of Both Worlds"  
Hirst:   "It's been told before but still worth another spin. The one in which my drumkit is set up in the men's bathroom on floor 3 of the JVC Victor Studios in Tokyo - much to the baffled amusement of engineers Shig and Yoshi - to get a loud, live drum sound. I'm then umbilically connected to the rest of the band and producer Nick Launay by headphones, and get halfway through the definitive take of 'Best of Both Worlds'. Then I'm interrupted by studio manager Hashiguchi-san, who bursts into the bathroom desperately waving his hands, signalling for me to cease and desist. But I can't just stop - after all, we're in the middle of THE take! So I plough on, risking a serious diplomatic rift in Australian/Japanese relations. When the song is secured, I'm soberly informed that an elderly National Treasure and his wife were attempting to capture pristine recordings of koto and shamisen in the studio downstairs, when my kit noise came thundering down the stairwell. As punishment, Hashiguchi-san's afternoon gifts of ice-u cream-u to the band are suspended for 48 hours."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtMOMUt-GU





"Kosciusko"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF_OTEJd3iI





"When the Generals Talk" 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMGBRKxw49k









'Red Sails in the Sunset' 
full album:
https://myspace.com/midnightoil/music/album/red-sails-in-the-sunset-13834182




1. "When the Generals Talk"   Garrett, Hirst, Moginie 3:32
2. "Best of Both Worlds"   Hirst, Moginie 4:05
3. "Sleep"   Garrett, Hirst, Moginie 5:09
4. "Minutes to Midnight"   Garrett, Moginie 3:20
5. "Jimmy Sharman's Boxers"   Hirst, Moginie 7:10
6. "Bakerman"   Hirst 0:52
7. "Who Can Stand in the Way"   Garrett, Moginie 4:33
8. "Kosciusko"   Hirst, Moginie 4:47
9. "Helps Me Helps You"   Hirst, Moginie 3:44
10. "Harrisburg"   Moginie, Denis Kevans 3:46
11. "Bells and Horns in the Back of Beyond"   Garrett, Gifford, Hirst, Moginie, Rotsey 3:30
12. "Shipyards of New Zealand"   Garrett, Moginie 5:53

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Midnight Oil counted down to international success with the studio experimentation and radical politics of this dark and artful tour de force.   '10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1' was recorded in London at the Town House studio with producer Nick Launay with  Rob Hirst on drums and vocals; Martin Rotsey on guitar; Peter Garrett on lead vocals; Jim Moginie on guitar, keyboards, and vocals, and Peter Gifford on bass.  

Hirst considers:  "The songwriting process with Midnight Oil is a lot more organic and usually more non-tangential and chaotic than it appears at the end of the day, even though it might appear that we pick up The Age or Sydney Morning Herald and say 'Oh, let's write a Hollingsworth song'. Originally the songs come from Jim and myself and then take on this Midnight Oil process with Pete coming in with extra lyrics. Then they go on this torturous process with Martin and Bonesy stepping back from the songs to get that extra distance and then the songs change and become Midnight Oil songs. And the songs can take on completely different meanings to how they were originally conceived. It's the maturity of quite a torturous process and can be quite difficult, particularly for the writer who had a particular idea about the way it was going and it's become something else. Ultimately that's the strength of a band. You get people coming in who's ideas and talent you respect, unlike a solo artist who has to rely on himself and whoever he's playing it to at home. Everyone's pulling on this idea and it goes through this unspoken tortuous process ending up with a song. Most of the time it's stronger than the original. Sometimes it's not."

Moginie recalls:  "In the early days of the band, there was that young man’s sense of 'kicking against the pricks', which sometimes is aimed at no one in particular, or everyone at the same time. Later on, Pete especially became much more about engagement…putting together two opposites at a conference table to hammer out a result, which is more constructive than 'us vs. them'. That’s the politics of adulthood...In terms of trade, Australia has always had an uphill battle because of our distance from the big market places of the world. We used to be part of the EU, but got kicked out of that when the walls went up there. The alliance with the U.S. has become critical to our survival...I think we ended up loving America, but the first times we played there we were kind of blown out of the water by the size of it, the politics of Reagan and the nuclear stuff, and the thirty different types of milk in the supermarket aisle. In Australia, you’d get just one if you were lucky."



Garrett expounds:  "The fact is, fashion hasn't had much to do with this either, which would mean that we haven't been that concerned with how we've looked or how we've sounded at any particular time, because we've always existed to complement ourselves and our relationship in the band, just as musicians and performers, and maybe some of the peripheral shit that was going on that tends to influence one, influenced us a little less. We came out of a very acute, particular area and we came through with quite a strange way of doing things. We all just seem to be similar, just sort of drifted together. I don't think that the subject matter that we sing about is particularly unique…. I don't ever find that there is anything we're singing that is out of the ordinary. To me, it's quite normal stuff...Well, I think it's because we're the only ones who are doing songs that have got something to do with those things that have never been addressed to the kids. There wasn't a tradition of student leaders, there wasn't a radical clique. I'm told that in Australia through the Seventies, once Vietnam came and went, Aussie radical bands all disappeared completely...This band can help provide a rallying point for people. Most people find it very difficult to move on their own, make a stand on their own. We see ourselves as a band that goes about writing songs about things that we know other people maybe have a concern about. And we're mirroring that concern. You don't discover that you're horrified of that nuclear round you realize it when you think about it...Music does serve that purpose, and I wish a lot more musicians would write about those things."

 '10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1' AKA 'Ten-to-One' spent more than two years on the Australian album chart, peaking at number three.  In the US, it charted at number one hundred and seventy-eight and received considerable college airplay.  The combination of synthesizers and sound effects with their ferocious live energy makes for their most ambitious sound yet; utilizing acoustic and electric instrumentation in a cutting edge pastiche that is truly unique. 









https://www.midnightoil.com/



















"Power and the Passion" went to number eight in Australia.


People, wasting away in paradise 
Going backward, once in a while 
Moving ahead, falling behind 
What do you believe 
What do you believe 
What do you believe is true 
Nothing they say makes a difference this way 
'Cos nothing they say will do 
Take all the trouble that you can afford 
At least you won't have time to be bored 
Oh the power and the passion 
Oh the temper of the time 
Oh the power and the passion 
Sometimes you've got to take the hardest line 
I see sunburnt faces around 
With skin so brown 
Smiling zinc cream and crows 
Sundays the beach never a cloud 
Breathing eucalypt, pushing panelvans, stuff 
And munch junk food 
Laughing at the truth, 'cos 
Gough was tough till he hit the rough 
Uncle Sam and John were quite enough 
Too much of sunshine too much of sky 
It's enough to make you wanna cry 
I see buildings, clothing the sky in paradise 
Sydney, where the nights are warm 
Daytime telly, blue rinse dawn 
Dad's so bad he lives in a pub, 
Underarms and football clubs 
Flat chat, Pin Gap in every home a Big Mac 
And no one goes back, that's that 
You take what you get and get what you please 
It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pKPNnk-JhE




"Read About It" 

The rich get richer, the poor get the picture
The bombs never hit you when you're down so low
Some got pollution, some revolution
There must be some solution but I just don't know
The bosses want decisions, the workers need ambitions
There won't be no collisions when they move so slow
Nothing ever happens, nothing really matters
No one ever tells me so what am I to know
You wouldn't read about it, read about it
Just another incredible scene, there's no doubt about it
Hammer and the sickle, the news is at a trickle
The commissars are fickle but the stockpile grows
Bombers keep acoming, engines softly humming
The stars and stripes are running for their own big show
Another little flare up, storm brewed in a tea cup
Imagine any mix up and the lot would go
Nothing ever happens...
You wouldn't read about it, read about it
One unjust ridiculous steal, ain't no doubt about it
You wouldn't read about it, read about it
Just another particular deal, there's no doubt about it


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QzH4KOf9Bs






"US Forces"  hit number twenty on the Australian singles chart.

US forces give the nod 
It's a setback for your country 
Bombs and trenches all in rows 
Bombs and threats still ask for more 
Divided world the CIA 
Who controls the issue 
You leave us with no time to talk 
You can write your own assessment 
Sing me songs of no denying 
Seems to me too many trying 
Waiting for the next big thing 
Will you know it when you see it 
High risk children dogs of war 
Now market movements call the shots 
Business deals in parking lots 
Waiting for the meat of tomorrow 
Everyone is too stoned to start emission 
People too scared to go to prison 
We're unable to make decisions 
Political party line don't cross that floor 
L. Ron Hubbard can't save your life 
Superboy takes a plutonium wife 
In the shadows of Ban the Bomb we live 
Sing me songs of no denying 
Seems to me too many trying 
Waiting for the next big thing








"Short Memory" 

Conquistador of Mexico, the Zulu and the Navaho
The Belgians in the Congo short memory
Plantation in Virginia, the Raj in British India
The deadline in South Africa short memory
The story of El Salvador, the silence of Hiroshima
Destruction of Cambodia short memory
Short memory, must have a, short memory
The sight of hotels by the Nile, the designated Hilton style
With running water specially bought short memory
A smallish man Afghanistan, a watch dog in a nervous land
They're only there to lend a hand short memory
The friendly five a dusty smile 
Wake up in sweat at dead of night
And in the tents new rifles hey short memory
If you read the history books you'll see the same things happen again and again
Repeat repeat short memory they've all got it
When are we going to play it again
Got a short, got a short, got a short, got a short
They've got a short must have a short they've got a short aah
Short memory, they've got a.

full album:




1. "Outside World"   Moginie 4:24
2. "Only the Strong"   Hirst, Moginie 4:31
3. "Short Memory"   Garrett, Hirst, Moginie 3:52
4. "Read About It"   Garrett, Hirst, Moginie 3:52
5. "Scream in Blue"   Garrett, Moginie, Rotsey 6:22
6. "US Forces"   Garrett, Moginie 4:06
7. "Power and the Passion"   Garrett, Hirst, Moginie 5:39
8. "Maralinga"   Garrett, Moginie 4:44
9. "Tin Legs and Tin Mines"   Garrett, Moginie, Rotsey 4:28
10. "Somebody's Trying to Tell Me Something"   Garrett, Gifford, Hirst, Moginie, Rotsey 3:58