FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Midnight Oil – Diesel and Dust
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AS Midnight Oil’s…
IN THIS PHOTO: Midnight Oil on 29th May, 1988 in Ghent, Belgium (from left: Rob Hirst, Peter Garrett, Martin Rotsey, Bones Hillman and Jim Moginie/PHOTO CREDIT: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images
sixth studio album, Diesel and Dust, turns thirty-five on 2nd August, I am featuring it here in Vinyl Corner. You can buy it here. I would recommend that you do pick up a copy, as it is a classic album that everyone needs to hear! The Australian band (Peter Garrett – vocals, Peter Gifford – bass, vocals, Robert Hirst – drums, vocals, Jim Moginie – guitars, keyboards, vocals, string arrangements and Martin Rotsey – guitars) delivered a hugely important work. Diesel and Dust is a concept album about the struggles of Indigenous Australians and environmental causes. These issues were very important to the band. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for the mighty and supreme Diesel and Dust. Undoubtedly one of the greatest albums ever, it will soon celebrate its thirty-fifth anniversary. HAPPY wrote an article last year as to why Diesel and Dust matters:
“The band sacrificed nuance yet maintained authenticity, so social concerns like the government’s mistreatment of Indigenous Australians could spark conversation. This is exactly what they achieved on Diesel and Dust, also fulfilling drummer Rob Hirst’s vision to “write Australian music that people overseas could get into and understand, which would enlarge their whole vision of Australia past Vegemite sandwiches and kangaroo hops”.
The LP kicks off with the band’s biggest track to date, Beds Are Burning, a song that was colossal in every conceivable way. The jarring subject matter, the percussive, metallic instrumentation, the silhouetted film clip, Garret’s sporadic dance moves.
The track saw the band break their way into the US charts, an incredible feat for any Australian act at the time, especially one that didn’t pander. From the opening brass to the chugging bassline, a sense of urgency engulfs the listener, perfectly soundtracking Garret’s plea: “It belongs to them. Let’s give it back.”
The anthem’s lyrics have become unanimous with First Australian land rights. Sovereignty is yet to be seeded. The Oils didn’t shroud these lyrics in mysticism, like other political performers of the past, such as Dylan. Instead, they made their intentions crystal clear, performing the hit at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, donning shirts spelling out the cardinal word John Howard wouldn’t say: “Sorry”.
The Dead Heart was another huge moment for the Oils. Its guitar/vocal call and response was pop hook magic, grabbing ears all around the globe. They were commissioned to pen the track for a documentary about Uluru being handed back to the local Pitjantjatjara Aboriginals.
Once more, the band used their musical talents to raise awareness of Australia’s Stolen Generation. The ethereal gallop of Dreamworld was another standout on the record, as the band mourned the loss of Cloudland Dance Hall, a Queensland cultural hotspot that was demolished in favour of an apartment complex.
What do all these tracks (and the rest of Diesel and Dust) have in common? They’re about cultural preservation. The Oils particularly focused on spotlighting the Government’s negligence of First Australians. It didn’t sound out of touch, because it wasn’t. For most of 1986, the band toured the Northern Territory, performing in remote towns for Aboriginal Australians. They explored these settlements with open ears and hearts, learning and listening to the locals.
The band observed harrowing poverty, determination from elders, freezing desert nights, and everything in between. They carried these experiences with them into the studio, resulting in 11 tangible, direct songs straight from the outback.
That’s why Diesel and Dust matters. A practised rock band took their musical strengths and made it a mouthpiece for the neglected. Midnight Oil’s messages still ring true today, stronger than ever”.
I want to finish up with a couple of reviews. An album that raised such important issues, it does so in such a compelling and intelligent way, it is no surprise that Diesel and Dust won huge critical acclaim and went to number one in Australia. A chart success in the U.K. and U.S., Midnight Oil’s 1987 masterpiece remains such a moving listen. Pop Matters wrote this in their review of Diesel and Dust:
“In 1987, you simply couldn’t escape U2’s The Joshua Tree. Bono’s croon poured out of college dorm rooms, the band’s videos camped out on MTV, and the album’s songs took turns nesting on the charts, propelling The Joshua Tree to sales of more than ten million copies in the United States and more than twenty million worldwide. It was also, up to that time, the band’s least strident album. Gone was the flag-waving militancy of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “New Year’s Day” in favor of soul-searching introspection like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “Running to Stand Still”.
Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust, however, easily filled the void that, at the time, we didn’t know U2 was permanently leaving. Diesel and Dust found Midnight Oil, like U2, dropping the harder edges from its sound, but without diluting the lyrical venom. So while U2 explored the politics of the self, Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett roared about reparations and labor injustice in his native Australia. While U2 added elements of Americana to their sound and dressed like turn-of-the-century immigrants, Midnight Oil looked out across the Australian landscape and saw exploitation so profound that it permeated the soil. It wasn’t just for show, either. By this time, lead singer Peter Garrett had already begun his political career with a Nuclear Disarmament Party bid for a seat in the Australian Senate. Many years later, he’s now Minister for Environment, Heritage and Arts, although the apparent softening (in what some have called a pragmatic compromise, and others have called a betrayal) of his beliefs as a member of the Labor Party has earned him criticism.
Back in ’87, however, there was nothing soft about Garrett’s opinions. Diesel and Dust, inspired by the band’s Blackfella/Whitefella tour of indigenous areas with the Warumpi Band, bluntly calls for reconciliation and reparations over the land rights of indigenous Aborigines. The album’s flagship song, “Beds Are Burning”, immediately establishes itself as an anthem with dirt road rhythms, blaring horns, Garrett’s pointed vocals, and a top-notch singalong chorus. “Sell My Soul” tackles the issue of involvement with America through lyrics like “America’s great now / If you don’t talk back / You hide your face / Crawl in rubble and smile and scorn / At that snail-paced creature / Going up and down walls”. “The Dead Heart”, like much of the album, conveys sentiments that feel all too relevant in today’s globalized economy: “Mining companies, pastoral companies / Uranium companies / Collected companies / Got more right than people / Got more say than people”. In fact, despite the album’s deep Australian roots, much of it comes across like a very modern protest record, applicable to pretty much any modernized country. This Deluxe Edition‘s inclusion of “Gunbarrel Highway”, left off of prior American and Canadian pressings, closes the album with an ominous sense of apocalypse.
It’s all delivered with a punk-informed fire (by way of a little R.E.M. jangle and incredibly catchy choruses) that bears little, if any, hint of the often dated decade from which it came. On this Deluxe Edition, celebrating the album’s 20th anniversary, the songs and the band sound as fresh and vibrant as ever. Garrett’s nasal sneer would seem to offer a sharp counterpoint to the pop sensibilities that Midnight Oil integrated into their sound (the guitar interplay on “Sell My Soul” is worthy of the Church), but the combination actually works to convey the message more effectively than ever.
In addition to restoring “Gunbarrel Highway”, this reissue also includes the Blackfella/Whitefella documentary. The film, which captures the band on their tour of Aboriginal settlements, mixes performance footage with powerful scenes of modern Aboriginal life marked by poverty. More than just a Midnight Oil concert film, Blackfella/Whitefella gives the Warumpi band nearly equal time, presenting them as a bridge between the Aboriginal listeners and the modern rock ‘n’ roll that accompanies Midnight Oil. At a little more than an hour, it’s not able to go into any real detail about the issues at hand, but does convey a sense of how the band came face to face with the realities of the Aboriginal villages. Those experiences and realities would become the lifeblood of Diesel and Dust, which still stands as a watershed moment in the band’s career”.
I am going to end with a review from AllMusic. I hope that Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust gets a lot of new coverage on its anniversary on 2nd August. It is an album that I have loved for many years now. It is one I will love for many years to come:
“Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett has long been active in elective politics in Australia, and like any good politician, he knows that sometimes the most important thing is to get your message out to the masses, even it means speaking with a bit less force than might be your custom. While the hard edges and challenging angles of 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and Red Sails in the Sunset made Midnight Oil bona fide superstars in Australia, they were little more than a rumor in most of the rest of the world, and for their sixth album, Diesel and Dust, Midnight Oil made some changes in their approach. On Diesel and Dust, there's less in the way of bruising hard rock like "Best of Both Worlds," nothing as eccentric as "Outside World," and very little as esoterically regional as "Jimmy Sharman's Boxers," while the production favors the tuneful side of the band's songwriting (which, truth to tell, was always there) and buffs away some of the group's harsher edges. As a result, Diesel and Dust isn't an album for hardcore Oils fans, but as a bid for a larger audience, it was both shrewd and well executed -- it was the group's first real worldwide success, going platinum in America and spawning a massive hit single, "Beds Are Burning."
While the album lacks the kick-in-the-head impact of their earlier work, Diesel and Dust also makes clear that the bandmembers could apply their intelligence and passion to less aggressive material and still come up with forceful, compelling music, as on the haunting "The Dead Heart" and the poppy but emphatic "Dreamworld." And as always, there was no compromise in the band's forceful political stance -- most of the album's songs deal openly with the issues of Aboriginal rights (hardly an issue pertinent only to Australians), and one of Midnight Oil's greatest victories may well be writing a song explicitly demanding reparations for indigenous peoples, and seeing it top the charts around the world. And the closer, "Sometimes," may be the finest and most moving anthem the band ever wrote ("Sometimes you're beaten to the core/Sometimes you're taken to the wall/But you don't give in"). Diesel and Dust is that rarity, a bid for the larger audience that's also an artistic success and a triumph for leftist politics -- even the Clash never managed that hat trick this well”.
I was keen to include Diesel and Dust in Vinyl Corner because of the approaching thirty-fifth anniversary. Not only one of the best albums of the 1980s, but this is also one of the very best albums ever. If you have never heard Diesel and Dust, then it is the perfect moment to go and explore it. With classic tracks like Beds Are Burning together with exceptional songwriting and performances from the entire band, this is a classic that needs to be cherished! There is no doubt that Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust will be preserved and loved…
THROUGH the ages.