
Photos by Rick Clifford
Now firmly in their 60s, Midnight Oil have reunited for a worldwide tour – the Canadian leg of which was joined by national treasure Matthew Good and punkabillies The Living End. Having quickly sold out the Danforth Music Hall in May, the band made their welcome return to the Budweiser Stage for a late-summer run through their very dense catalog.
Now I hate to be that guy but if Midnight Oil are after your time, or you just didn’t get into them in their heyday, you owe it to yourself to dig up their old records and put them into your rotation. Here is a band that dedicated their entire catalog to the pillaging of the environment, to the corporate theft of natural resources and to the sickening treatment of Aboriginal people; in their home country of Australia and the world over.
As the crowd (decisively from Midnight Oil’s time) trickled in, Melbourne punk/rockabilly legends the Living End drank, screamed and pounced across the stage, playing a wealth of songs from their 23-plus year career, including “Second Solution”, “Raise the Alarm” and “West End Riot”.
Then came Juno-winner and all-around legend Matthew Good for a staggeringly well-preserved reminder of Canadian rock’s apex. Through his hour-long set, every second or third song was a torch-bearer, either from his Matthew Good Band days, or from his more recent, solo work. Good, a touring veteran, knew well enough when to call on the crowd to chant along during classics like “Load Me Up”, “Hello Time Bomb” “the Future is X-rated”, but then rapt at attention for ballads “Strange Days” and “Apparitions”. May every, current Canadian rock act age as well and stay in as many hearts and minds as Matthew Good.
And with all the optimism a decade in Australian Parliament can bestow, Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett proclaimed “Summer is NOT OVER, Toronto” to kick off the band’s sprawling set. Garrett, as spry and jangly a dancer as he was back in the eighties, stalked the stage, belting every lyric as though he just got through writing them. And so this was the tour’s theme; rock stars, shockingly undiminished by time.
And what a feat that is for the 63-year old Garrett. Why did the band split up to begin with? Well, around the beginning of the aughts, Garrett decided that, while he may have given a platform to his activism as a rock star, he could probably accomplish more as a member of Parliament. And so he’d spend 2003 through 2013 as (respectively) Member of the Australian Parliament for Kingsford Smith, Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts and finally Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth.
Despite this lengthy hiatus, and generations of musician coming and going in that time, the breadth of their work has new relevance in this time. Be it in the face of a global resurgence of violent nationalism (“My Country Right or Wrong”), of dictatorships (When the Generals Talk”) the erosion of the middle class (“Blue Sky Mining”) or the ongoing theft of land from indigenous people (“Beds are Burning”).
Given what a long time away and/or a career in politics typically does to a person, it was a testament to Garrett and the band how seamless their stage chops still were. Moreover, this was a band who never lost or abandoned the activism that drove them. Indeed, when they performed their 1993 single “Truganini” (about the namesake and last surviving member of an Aboriginal Tasmanian tribe decimated by the British), Garrett roared “LET IT BURN” in response to one of the song’s last lines “I see / the Union Jack’s in flames”.
Which is to say, even after almost 20 years away from his artform and a decade in the government of a British Commonwealth, this is a band that goes into the twilight of their careers and lives still railing as hard as they ever did against injustice, man-made environmental ruin and apathy.