Big Blue Sky Page 9

  We worked on a backlog of songs including ‘Blue December’, ‘Getting Gone’ and ‘Your Funeral’, but at the end of the day none made the final cut. This was the region of poppy musicality versus feel that would remerge on and off as contested ground in the future. The challenge of playing complex pieces of music appealed to the players in the band, but as the new frontman I felt we needed a tougher, pushing sound, with punchy songs that would stir people, and in time they came.

  At this stage, though, the first task was to settle the line-up, which until now had been floating, and sort out the issue of who would play keyboards. A wild, Cream-style three-piece was an option—we’d toured the previous summer in that format, and it gave the band plenty of space to wig out—but the music that was emerging needed extra texture. While Jim could play anything from a tin whistle to a Moog synthesiser, guitar was his first instrument, and the off-the-wall emotes from his gold Les Paul were already a signature sound, so there was an ongoing search for the right keyboardist. People would look the part but not be able to play, or could play Chopin and boogie-woogie blindfolded but look like a fish out of water. We wanted to bring a bit of yin into the dominant yang make-up, so we tried to find a female keyboardist, but we had no luck.

  For a while we were hitting a sweet spot with multi-instrumentalist Murray Cook, who could also play bass if Andrew ‘Bear’ James was unwell. Murray went on to serve in various outfits, including Mental As Anything, and was a keen surfer—which appealed to me, as no one else in the band had much interest in waves of any size. He made a welcome reappearance in my life at a NAIDOC concert and barbecue in July 2011 at Long Bay jail. By this time Murray had become a marine scientist and taught music to the prisoners in his spare time. He was one of the many gods of small things making a difference for people in a tangible way: a spark of hope in a landscape of gloom.

  But the band’s sound wasn’t surging the way we felt it should, especially with Rob’s drumming propelling the tempo. The solution was ultimately found by recruiting Martin Rotsey to play guitar. Martin was another product of the schoolboy band scene the boys had inhabited, and had also filled in on bass a couple of times when Bear couldn’t make it. With a similar slim build to Jim, he too was quiet until he picked up his instrument and then watch out. Martin could partner Jim on guitar, but if Jim went across to keyboards, Martin could step in and play solo till the sun came up. Theirs was a partnership based on mutual respect for each other’s playing, with an instrument both loved dearly, and it has lasted to this day. It didn’t hurt that Martin always looked the part, initially with flowing locks and bell-bottomed jeans, and later with a cigarette clenched between his lips, tight jeans and a black shirt. He was the personification of a mean guitar slinger and we were a tougher-looking and tougher-sounding unit with him on board.

  We sought out places to perform, all the while sweating it out in the garage, note by note and line by line. Once Martin had settled in, the songs tightened up and it started to sound right. We were set to go—now all we needed was an audience. But where to find it? Other than a few inner-city nightspots and the club circuit, there were hardly any places to play. Cover bands performed the hits of the day and yesterday’s heroes the hits of the past, but there was little space for bands fermenting sounds for tomorrow unless you were lucky and scored a university gig.

  There was an established career route: signed by the record company for peanuts, pushed to commercial radio, thrust onto TV via Countdown, then, with a few well-attended national tours under your belt, shoot off to England or the States to make it—overnight, of course. In the majority of cases, bands would be defeated by the experience, strangers in semi-strange lands, easy prey for the Aussie-bashing English press or simply minnows in the much bigger pond that was the US. Inevitably there was the silent return with their tail between their legs. All through this rollercoaster ride their fans and the public, blissfully unaware of the actual progress of the Aussie hopefuls, were fed endless hype about how successful they had been.

  The agents who booked the local venues ruled with an iron fist. The shop was closed to new bands unless you signed with an agent who, in turn, had a direct relationship with the venues. In some cases the record company and the booking agency were in cahoots as well, as was the case with Mushroom Records and Premier Artists. In the search for new talent, the record companies were constantly looking over their shoulder for fresh faces who could replicate the sound that had just succeeded. It was a set-up that favoured mediocrity and copycats; no originals need apply.

  As the ‘unemployed, hyperactive truck driver’—according to Bear’s diary notes of a year with the band, which he circulated on his departure—my role, as I saw it then, was to get better at what I was doing and to help think our way out of the stuffy rehearsal room and permanently onto stage.

  Some of the early songs had been written in difficult keys, so I decided to take some singing lessons to get on top of the material. I rang John Forrest, one of Sydney’s leading singing teachers at the time, to make an appointment, found out the cost—high, more part-time work needed—and months later booked a lesson in which the secrets of vocal mastery would be revealed.

  On the appointed day, Forrest ushered me into his studio and, after ascertaining that I was a ‘rock singer’, started by playing sets of scales on the piano and inviting me to follow.

  It was an inglorious journey. So much so that after five minutes of clear single piano notes followed by my howling responses he politely, but firmly, suggested that I might like to think of an alternative occupation. It was clear, to him at least, that I couldn’t sing.

  He wasn’t alone in this assessment. A set of early demos was hawked around to record companies to be met with, ‘Why don’t you get another singer?’, or, ‘Maybe if he wears a Silver Surfers suit . . .?’

  I wasn’t deterred. The only jury I cared about was in the street, and one thing churning it out in Canberra had taught me was that people responded to effort, to the sweat of a real performance. Still, this view of me as unconventional, and the combination of members as an odd fit, was common enough among some of those close to us and parts of the music industry for years after. We were a weird mob, with a visible fault line between the energetic performers—the gangly, dancing singer and the effervescent showman drummer—and the rest of the band (with Martin in the middle somewhere), who appeared introverted, interested solely in their instruments and the sounds they were making. This lack of a unified look and a united approach to performing meant people were ambivalent about the band. They could hear something happening, but when they opened their eyes it looked out of whack—the visual clues were confusing because they appeared contradictory.

  In fact, what was happening on stage was just a reflection of the personalities who made up the young band. And there wasn’t any Kiss make-up to mask the difference. It was enough to raise the question in people’s minds—how far could this outfit go? According to some, the answer was not very far at all.

  This kind of scepticism quickly morphs into knocking, in the form of ‘What makes you think you’re so good?’, that is lodged deep in the Australian psyche. At the lighter end of the spectrum, it’s about not taking yourself too seriously, where ribbing mates helps grease the social wheels, and it accounts for Australians’ lack of pretension. At the darker end it shows up as a relentless antipathy towards anyone’s desire for success, as well as success itself. It’s a national trait that anyone who aspires to be the best, be they sportsperson, entrepreneur, creative artist or local builder, must confront. It helps to have a tough hide, and ego cannot be a dirty word if you’re going to defy the detractors and survive.

  ‘Just don’t give up your day job, mate,’ was a common refrain, better in some ways than the boozy indifference of the pubs we encountered in the early years, because it was clear that the heckler hadn’t thought it through. We didn’t have a day job at that stage and we never expected to have one—that was the point! In fact, all the
negative chatter did was strengthen our determination to break through or bust—there was no middle ground. And the more emphatic the rejection, the stronger our resolve, and the more certain I was that we would succeed in striking out on our own path. Not for fame or fortune, whatever that might actually mean, but simply to wrestle an amorphous bunch of different individuals into a blazing aural experience, a band with something to say that couldn’t be ignored.

  Meanwhile punk was in the wings and Australian groups were at the forefront—another kind of ‘golden’ age was dawning. Here was the great irony of the flowering of the Australian music scene: when it came to the punk/new-wave revolution, we got there first. The defining date when staid and pretty gave way to bold and brutal is usually identified as the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols in London in October 1977. In reality, punk as a term, and the music that embodied the attitude—nihilistic, anti-establishment, no frills and extreme—had been bubbling along in the US for some time. Think Iggy Pop and the Stooges, MC5, the Ramones, James Dean even.

  In the UK, the impact of the Sex Pistols was so great that overnight the music world changed. It helped that the Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, was a master manipulator whose partner, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, created the clothes worn by the pioneers of the new movement. In one fell swoop a trifecta of cultural change—novel fashion, raw attitude and even rawer sounds—was happening in your face and on the street, and it arrived with a bang. The media were sucked in by the pretend anarchy and the old guard was pushed aside, if not altogether, certainly out to the bleachers for a while.

  Yet Brisbane band the Saints recorded their first single, the very punkish ‘(I’m) Stranded’, in June of that year. In Sydney, Radio Birdman had been performing their meld of Stooges-like Detroit rock and surf music to increasingly manic crowds at the Oxford Funhouse at Taylor Square since mid-1976. I went in early to see them play: the sound was laser-bright and ferocious, and frontman Rob Younger was riveting, stalking the tiny stage with a leonine fury. The audience wrestled with each other and went berserk as the songs sped ever faster. Somehow the coolest of the crowd managed to keep their sunglasses on—chic and white-noise mayhem, another neat combination.

  In Adelaide, two outfits—one the chugging, charging Angels, the other the bluesy swing band Cold Chisel—had already started out. The attitude, especially Chisel’s, was punkish, even if their musical roots were in the blues.

  In Melbourne, Lobby Loyde and the Coloured Balls had been playing since the early 1970s, loud and fast and hard, with a skinhead audience and utter disdain for success. Lobby’s bass player, Ian Rilen, then came up to Sydney and, with Steve Lucas on vocals, formed X, red-blood raw with the menace of heroin lurking in every distorted note they played.

  Later on, Rose Tattoo, with pint-sized, ink-covered Angry Anderson up front, ate new-wave posers for breakfast. And what was Billy Thorpe—the pop singer turned rock god playing at blistering volume at the Sunbury Festival in 1973, with his cry of ‘Suck more piss’—if not an archetypal Australian punk?

  And there were plenty of others.

  Call it the butterfly effect—sure, songs and hair were getting shorter, but it wasn’t just that: a changing mindset that would shake up the music industry was beginning to take hold.

  Farm started to crawl out of its cocoon and into this energy, settling the line-up, turning into the iron butterfly that was Midnight Oil. We can thank a temporary keyboard player, Peter Watson, for the name, which was drawn out of a hat in Chatswood one afternoon. Everyone put in a couple of suggestions; mine included Television and Southern Cross, Rob offered Sparta and Schwampy Moose. But Peter put in Midnight Oil. It came out first and it stuck.

  I shaved my head, in part so I could take surf photos from the water—a hobby I shared with my brother Andrew—without strands of hair getting stuck on the lens, but it was also a signal to all and sundry that we were serious. As Abba-style white slacks and hippie gear gave way to black jeans and runners, we got louder and faster. As music surplus to requirements was jettisoned, a lean and hungry beast emerged.

  Towards the end of 1976 and through early 1977 we’d started playing occasional gigs at a wine bar on Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, called French’s, and on weekends at a northern beaches pub called the Royal Antler, in Narrabeen. It was increasingly slash and burn, playing all the songs we had, taking them as far as we could, as the sweat of the audience condensed on the roof and returned to the stage as smelly rain.

  We were hot-wired by the instinctive attitude of punk. It wasn’t the sneering cliché of being anti-everything (although Johnny Rotten’s sneering at the Queen was endearing), but, instead, the do-it-yourself ethic that rang true. With a pair of scissors, a spray can and a couple of safety pins you had a ready-made wardrobe. Why wait for the record company to see the light when you could start your own label? Just load the gear into a cheap studio and lay down whatever you wanted.

  A wild-eyed local surfer-cum-real-estate salesman called Gary Morris had presented himself as manager in waiting. He’d even turned up at intermission when I’d headed out to the movies mid-week to outline his plans for success. I was taken by his single-minded determination and we accepted his hand in a marriage that would last, on and off, for the life of the band.

  Together we were the antithesis of most emerging groups chasing success, and shaping their look and sound to get there. In time, years of thinking about the music scene and hundreds of hours of playing live saw us develop a hybrid model that included democratic decision-making, fair treatment of fans, management as part of the band, taking as much control of the process of touring as possible and not giving way on our music or views. It was about crafting songs that had the musical bones to get us moving, the riffs and chorus rushes to take us over the top, welded by performances that could work anywhere.

  These were the elements that would mark out Midnight Oil’s career as we strapped in for a wild ride that lasted a quarter of a century. The only constant was perpetual motion. We were always on the move, driven by a desire to keep it as pure as possible, and so on top of the road work, we scheduled endless meetings in which we thrashed out the finer details and turned our precocious vision into reality.

  It was at the Antler that we first sought to control our environment, advocating for reasonable ticket prices. When the promoter reneged, we went out on strike—unheard of before or since—but the lines of punters waiting to get in just grew and grew.

  It was at the Antler that Rob and I got into the habit of pushing our bodies as far as we could. I learned to keep at it even when dark spots appeared at the edges of my vision and things went a bit erky, as all the fresh air was sucked out of the room. Legend has it that one night it got so hot all the windows and glass doors in the hotel misted over. This torrent of condensation dripped onto the floor, already awash with spilled beer and sweat pouring off the crowd. As people down the front passed out, I leapt from the stage and tore across the road to grab a night-time surf. It’s true, and the Pacific Ocean held me in her cool embrace until I could see again. Head clearer and body cooled, I ran back to the pub and up onto the stage to finish the night.

  Once the crowds got too big we put on entertainment—clowns and buskers—in the hotel car park for those who were queuing up or who got turned away.

  It was at the Antler that Gary Morris saw a band called the Farriss Brothers taking the stage with long hair and blue jeans. He ordered new clothes, renamed them and put them out on the road with the Oils so they could hone their craft with a fresh look. It was obvious even then that Michael Hutchence could reach right into the audience and take them along for the ride.

  Gary showed up one morning at the share house I was living in, as he was wont to do. By this time the habit of applying nicknames to all and sundry was in full swing, and mine, given I was always willing us to play faster and harder on stage, was—predictably—Rock, and later Uncle Rock.

  ‘Rock.’


  ‘Yes, Gary, what is it?’

  ‘I know what the Farriss Brothers should be called.’

  Me: ‘Oh yeah, and what’s that, mate?’

  Gary: ‘INXS.’

  Me, incredulous: ‘INXS?’

  ‘I was at the supermarket with all the cans of IXL fruit and jam,’ he said, ‘and I saw that slogan, “I excel in everything I do”, and then I knew—INXS. Get it?’

  Me: ‘What about X, X-Ray Spex, XL Capris? Have another think, Gary; there are way too many bands with X in their name already. It’ll never work.’

  Later, it was at the Antler that we introduced the Warumpi Band to an unsuspecting crowd of blond surfers and their girlfriends. As the lights came up to reveal the band on stage I can still hear singer George Rrurrambu delivering his opening words to a wide-eyed audience that had fallen quiet. Most of them would never have seen an Aboriginal man in person before, let alone in tight black jeans and a Prince-style jacket. ‘Don’t be shy just because I’m black,’ he said. Funny man, George. Here he was channelling James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, whose ‘Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud’ had topped the American R&B charts and become an anthem for black America a decade earlier.

  All along we kept plugging away, fronting up to any dive that would put on a band and treating each gig like it was the last night on earth. Fixated on our music and figuring out the Oils way of doing things, we were getting ready to take on the world.