Big Blue Sky Read online

  The state government panicked and the police took out an injunction to prevent the show from going ahead. By a strange twist of fate, my North Shore background came in handy when, at the eleventh hour, the judge, Michael Helsham, whose wife had been at uni with my mum, dismissed the case on the grounds that he knew my family (true), and he was confident that ‘Mr Garrett would do no such thing’ (sort of true).

  The tabloid press and Sydney radio were all over the story and by evening thousands had gathered in the street and on the steps that led down to the Stagedoor entrance. The authorities didn’t take the judge’s decision too well and armed up. Paddy wagons materialised from nowhere, and the riot squad took up position in the forecourt while others lurked in side streets. To cap things off, a phalanx of mounted police were watching from the park opposite.

  As promoters were wont to do, Jay took the opportunity to maximise his swan song and packed the room to overflowing and beyond. It felt hotter than anything we’d previously experienced, if that was possible, and the mood was wild and dangerous.

  Music solid as granite would be needed to assuage the multitude of raging spirits, as well as some cautionary remarks about confronting those outside. After we finished the set, I duly destroyed the wooden stage—cheaply built, prone to the wobbles and the subject of numerous complaints because of its condition—with a steel microphone stand; it was time for some spectacle, I figured, and Pat Jay wasn’t likely to take the makeshift infrastructure with him. We then staggered off what was left of the stage, drenched in sweat and completely drained, stumbling over bodies slumped in the narrow passage that led to a grotty dressing room. The air was on fire; it felt like all the available oxygen had been vacuumed out of the room, and I wasn’t faring well.

  A decision was taken to get out quick via the fire escape, but it had been locked and chained by Jay to stop anyone getting in, and now we couldn’t get out. There was no hope of getting through the crowd, densely packed and wound up tight. Slumped on the floor, feeling faint and numb, I pressed my lips to a small crack at the bottom of the door and sucked desperately. I can still taste that cool nectar. Outside was a concrete stairwell littered with building rubble, empty beer cans, cigarette butts and condoms, and reeking of vomit—but nothing since has ever tasted as good as that sweet air.

  9

  LIFT-OFF

  WE HAD ALWAYS been grateful for the growing crowd that kept us alive, but by 1982, six years in—or ten, if you counted Farm’s first forays—the rollercoaster ride was becoming a rutted road. It was increasingly obvious a circuit-breaker was needed.

  We’d spilled our guts in so many intimate settings that most fans had favourite songs and a definite idea of our style, and they assumed we would stick to it. These expectations were winging into cafes where we’d stop to have breakfast, barking back at us when we pulled up for fuel—and they would be sure to feed into the studio if we chose to record at home. We were three albums in and needed to push down the fence and graze in a bigger paddock. So it was back to England’s green and pleasant land: first to a big house in St John’s Wood in London for rehearsal time, and then to the Townhouse Studios in Shepherd’s Bush for the serious business. Part of the Oils’ working method was to react to what had come before, to learn from the experience, and then to throw the dice and head in another direction. I’d liked the natural spirit of Postcard, but the recording experience had been unsatisfying as the opportunity to really explore where songs could be taken had been limited. And for the players, itchy to expand their palette, there was a strong sense that we needed to go the other way and find the missing link—technology as a sixth instrument.

  So we picked a studio we knew could cook a sound, and went left field, as far from Glyn Johns and our previous old-school producers as we could get. We chose a young engineer/producer, Nick Launay, who had a handful of non-mainstream singles but only one album—by English new wavers the Gang of Four—under his belt. Nick had a refreshing approach to knob twiddling (namely, ‘Can’t we make this sound more extreme?’), and with Jim working up all kinds of noises to insert throughout the album, he had a willing ally. And there was no rule he didn’t want to break. At the same time, he was smart; he’d seen Midnight Oil in full flight. We were co-producers and he wasn’t going to let any fits of indulgence get in the way.

  The Townhouse turned out to be a choice location. With Van Morrison in one studio, Hall and Oates in another, engineers staying back late to mix a new Clash track and, just outside the studio door, a constant procession of international acts coming through London, you just had to get infected. Plus it had a special configuration that produced a big, whacking drum sound (later made famous by Phil Collins on songs like ‘In the Air Tonight’), which would be amply used by Rob once the sessions were underway.

  On the street, London was grumpy and jittery. Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and had begun to dismantle the welfare state brick by brick. The Labour Opposition, in full shop-steward mode, were sticking by their cardigans and socialist values, but picking and losing all the wrong fights. They weren’t helped by a hysterical English press, chafing at the bit to demonise Labour at the behest of proprietors like Rupert Murdoch.

  Meanwhile, the political situation in Northern Ireland was boiling over and the Irish Republican Army had stepped up their guerrilla activities in England’s capital, setting off bombs and generally terrorising the populace.

  We woke one morning to a large cracking sound, followed by a long period of silence and then sirens. A bomb had been detonated under a bandstand in Regent’s Park, not far from where we were staying; at least one soldier had been killed and a number injured.

  It seemed unreal, and was a vast remove from the placid suburbs of Sydney, but daily life didn’t pause on the high street. Sure, the mood was a bit nervous, but the red double-decker buses kept careering around Trafalgar Square, people still crowded into the tiny corner pubs for a slurp of warm beer; the only noticeable change was the tooled-up soldiers patrolling the streets. On hard days like this, when people were entitled to feel put upon, you had to credit their stoicism.

  At the Townhouse, we weren’t to be distracted. To save money we’d moved into the first floor of the studio, sharing a couple of tatty rooms still undergoing renovation. The builders’ jackhammers started early, so there was no straying from the task. We had to put the time in to make the music add up, pushing against the grain, using the technology in our quest for a sharper, wilder, more atmospheric sound.

  It helped that there was a bundle of good songs—Jim and Rob were hitting their stride. The ideas were solid; we just had to doggedly pursue each one to the end point, where justice was done to the lyric and the music. If that meant throwing out some of the tried and true ways of working, then so be it.

  We no longer thought of the studio as just a stage where you play your songs and record the moment. It could also serve as a laboratory for experimentation, a way of working that was initially hard for me to grasp. I’d always liked the immediacy of live performance, and trying to capture the sound of the band going off was never easy. In the case of 10–1, as it became known, the massive Solid State Logic mixing desk with its myriad knobs and buttons, the rows of instruments and effects machines, both high- and low-tech, and a willingness to try anything meant there was a fresh kind of alchemy—and at last it was going to tape. The trick was not to drift too far away from the core of the band. In our case, this meant not losing the energy that made Midnight Oil a pungent rush of sound, and movement, with word play to match.

  The preliminary writing and working out of tunes took place in a bog-standard live-rehearsal complex on the outskirts of London. It had the typical grimy vibe of rehearsal rooms worldwide, with a procession of heavy-metal acts tooling in and out to remind you what a circus rock can be. We knew the stakes were high—a fact that caused Rob, with his long-time ambition for the band, no end of grief. He ended up coming close to a nervous breakdown, and then played the best d
rums of his life on ‘Only the Strong’.

  Start the album with a bed of low strings and keyboards, followed by ricochet drum punctuations before you hear a word in Jim’s ‘Outside World’ and let the rest follow. For ‘US Forces’ use a sea of acoustics and dobro guitars and an isolated snare drum to set the song up. In ‘Power and the Passion’, lay up a drum click track, sing the verses in rap mode—a precursor of things to come—and finish with a steaming brass section outro; pasty-faced London session players with their cheeks puffed bright red and the mixing desk melting down.

  Lo and behold it worked—we were now a very long way from pub rock.

  The day after recording finished, the band took off for home. I stayed behind with Nick to round some vocals off and mix the tracks—each one distinctive, zinging at last—and then jumped a jumbo for Sydney.

  We’d been going all day and most of the night for months, but it didn’t matter. A g’day from the Qantas crew perked me up and I must have listened to the finished album at least ten times on the way back.

  It sounded good at all hours: looking down at the sharp peaks of the Himalayas shimmering white in the crystal air, and later at the scattered villages of Asia nestled in tiny green fields.

  10–1 stayed in the Australian charts for over two years and got a decent run on college radio in the States. The critics fell in love too.

  Success was like a drought breaking, and the passage of the album changed our lives in more ways than one.

  At last we were out of debt, so we could properly settle into family life, buying new cars or guitars, and our own homes. Our local ANZ bank manager, who, unbeknown to his superiors, had backed us with an overdraft that was never called in, could finally sleep at night. We salute you, Mr Willis.

  And we could at last buy some relief from the never-ending touring, which meant freedom to experiment, and time to get deeper into issues and give them a nudge. We didn’t always have to worry about the dollars if we wanted to give something a go.

  We’d finally proved to ourselves, and a loyal band of supporters, that we could pull it off in the studio. And now the foundation had been laid for a longer career, if we wanted it. While no one could ever mistake where the Oils came from, we’d gone international on parts of 10–1, the lyrics picking up on such topics as the prospect of a nuclear war, and this would resonate with music fans across the globe.

  …

  Nuclear proliferation was an issue increasingly on our minds. At the time we were writing and recording the album, the world as we knew it had gone mad; literally, as it turned out, in the case of the military doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD).

  The world’s two super powers, the US and the USSR, were faced off against one another, with thousands of the most destructive weapons on earth—nuclear bombs—aimed directly at population centres in both countries. The MAD doctrine maintained that these weapons would never actually be used, because to do so would invite blanket retaliation, thus guaranteeing the annihilation of both nations, with some nasty spillover to the rest of the world. The logic was perverse; who could possibly know where things might end if even one shot was fired in anger or by mistake?

  Since the deliberate use of the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945, quickly followed by a second days later at Nagasaki, the number and destructive force of these weapons had grown inexorably. Notwithstanding a raft of accidents and false alarms, in which nuclear weapons had come perilously close to being used, the main efforts around nukes had been so-called ‘improvements’ that made them more lethal and accurate. One of the consequences of this continual refinement was the emergence of the military doctrine of first strike. This new strategy advocated shooting first and asking questions later; in other words, the super powers were now prepared to launch a pre-emptive strike. It sounded like the Wild West, but it promised Armageddon.

  The placement of nukes in Western Europe—in Germany in particular—was vehemently opposed by people living in those countries, and demonstrations protesting the build-up of weapons had escalated dramatically.

  Then there was the issue of their huge cost—an obscenity by any measure. US president Ronald Reagan encouraged a new Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed ‘Star Wars’, which involved the technical impossibility of shooting down nuclear weapons from space to counter any launch by the Soviets. It would certainly have sped up Soviet bankruptcy, with estimated costs on the American side of more than $500 billion in 1980 figures (no, that’s not a misprint), to be spent on unproven technology—money that could have been put to better use addressing such issues as poverty, the environment and education.

  In Australia, we contributed to the nuclearisation of the globe by hosting American communication bases that would relay information and be used by the US in the event of any nuclear conflict. We also welcomed US nuclear submarines into our ports, the practice being that the Americans would neither confirm nor deny they were carrying nuclear missiles. Really?

  It wasn’t as if we in Australia didn’t have our own painful experience of nuclear damage. We’d already suffered the disadvantage of empire when Australian soldiers were used as guinea pigs in early experiments by the United Kingdom, in concert with the Australian government at the time. Primitive atomic devices were tested in the desert at Maralinga in South Australia and on the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia in the 1950s. The authorities had failed to adequately warn Aboriginal people living in the area. Some had been rounded up and moved away from the fallout, but others were exposed; illness and suffering, especially for people in the Pitjantjatjara lands on the border of South Australia and the Northern Territory, and for some servicemen involved in the tests, were a dreadful consequence of this time.

  The Oils attacked this history on 10–1 with songs like ‘Maralinga’. When we toured the album, a public phone box was installed on the stage and in the middle of the show I’d put in calls to the White House or, closer to home, Parliament House to put the case. Usually there’d be a recorded message or I’d swap a few words with a receptionist, but one evening I was put straight through to Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s office and had a tense conversation with a staffer about nuclear policy, broadcast live to an audience 16,000 strong.

  We put on benefit concerts to raise money for the cause, including Stop the Drop at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne with INXS and folk rockers Redgum. The mood backstage was unanimous; we were outraged that a mushroom cloud was hanging over our future. The younger generation was being held hostage by a system that seemed to have lost its way.

  We would need to search out ways to fight the madness. Turning swords into ploughshares wasn’t going to happen overnight. Throwing up our hands or throwing things at the television wouldn’t do. I could sense the ferment, and I wasn’t the only one. It was as if the cosmos was willing something to happen; people were scanning the skies for some real action and my inner voice was getting louder, saying, ‘Why don’t you get out and do something concrete, now?’

  10

  BIG MOVES

  IN THE MIDST of this craziness I’d fallen for a beautiful German girl, Doris Ricono, whom I’d met out of the blue at a friend’s place one night. After spending some time in Australia, she was moving back to Germany to live.

  Doris had no real idea who I was and what I was up to, and neither did I have a bearing on her—but I was smitten (I still am), heart pounding like a kettledrum as I struggled, after being solo for so long, to adjust to the arrival of a person with whom I might share my life.

  In fact, meeting my soul mate transformed my world. From our first date—fish and chips at Doyles in Watsons Bay—we knew we wanted to be together. But this proved to be harder than expected. First Doris had to spend time in Germany. Then, once she’d returned and moved into the boatshed at Lavender Bay where I’d set up camp (Doddo having moved on), I promptly headed out on tour again.

  I owe a great deal to this incredible woman who became my w
ife. She took the huge step of making Australia her home, so we could be together. And on top of this, she committed herself to a wandering musician and activist, who would be away from home for long periods of time, forever jumping on a white charger and disappearing out the door. We’ve always had a deep bond, but her willingness to hang in through my many absences was based on an absolute conviction that we were meant to be together. This was the invisible thread that bound us tight and I’ve been amazed and thankful for it ever since.

  …

  Before heading back to the studio to record the next album, which would end up as Red Sails in the Sunset, I’d started reaching to the outside world in a different way. The extended silent grieving for my mum had run its course, and I was deeply in love. Despite pouring everything I had into the Oils for as long as I could remember, I felt recharged and re-energised, ready to go out and get stuck into issues that were important to me.

  Along with a couple of friends, including Richard Morecroft, originally from Adelaide and now reading the news for the ABC in Sydney, and film director John Duigan, Doris and I had formed Nuclear Disarmament Projects to raise the alarm about the nuclear madness we feared was infecting the world.

  We enlisted the help of Joanne Langenberg, a Canberra expat, and set up a small office in Kirribilli (right next to Michael Hutchence’s mum’s beauty salon, as it turned out). Here we put together a series of ads and designed media campaigns to mobilise the public, while catching up on news of INXS’s progress overseas. It was small beer but a start, though the rush of ideas we were generating was limited in the end by our dwindling resources.