Lead singer Peter Garrett on how Midnight Oil tried to steal the Hip’s audience
Peter Garrett performing with Midnight Oil. (Dallas Kilponen/Getty)
Update: Gord Downie died Oct. 17, 2017. Read his obituary here.
Peter Garrett was the lead singer of Midnight Oil, one of Australia’s biggest musical exports of the ’80s and ’90s, remembered for their powerful live shows—Garrett was one of the most intense performers of his day—and for setting lyrics about environmentalism and Indigenous rights to rock songs that somehow became international pop hits. In 1993, Midnight Oil could fill arenas in most of the Western world, but that summer they instead accepted an offer from the Tragically Hip to co-headline Another Roadside Attraction, a cross-Canada travelling festival that also featured Daniel Lanois, Crash Vegas and more. It was a coup for the Canadian band, proving that they had truly ascended from glorified bar-band status to being worthy of international respect.
Midnight Oil went on indefinite hiatus in 2002 when Garrett ran for public office. In 2004, he was elected as a member of the Labour Party, and in 2007 became Australia’s minister of the environment; in 2010 he was shuffled to the education portfolio. He did not seek re-election in 2013. Last year he published a memoir, Big Blue Sky, and last month he put out his first solo record, A Version of Now. Midnight Oil have since announced plans to reunite. Maclean’s reached him on tour in Australia to talk about the friends he made in Canada 23 years ago.
A. Is he on stage?
A. Standing or sitting?
A. Okay, well, wow. That’s a great credit to him.
A. Our bands are quite similar in some ways, and obviously very popular in their own countries by doing something non-derivative. The bands were very much creatures of their own instinct for music without too much mind paid to what was going on around them, in terms of the fashionable music of the day or on the charts. We discovered when we first came to Canada—and did that big summer tour and got to know them better that—there was something refreshing to find another outfit that approached the game a little bit like we did. It’s devastating news, obviously, that he’s terminally ill, but what a glorious vindication of a life’s calling to go out in this fashion.
A. It was when we first came to Canada. It was fascinating to discover a band that was spoken of so much and came to dominate the music scene there who really weren’t known anywhere else—certainly not in Australia. They’re a rock band and so are we, and yet in that frame they were producing their own music and Gord had quite a distinctive lyrical approach, which added another dimension to what they were doing. Then of course when we got to meet them and found out they were good people to have around, it added to the bloom.
A.No, that’s true, we didn’t. We might have opened for the Ramones once early in our career, and that’s it. Well, look, we felt like we were joining them on tour. It was an opportunity to broaden out and play with a band with whom we felt some kind of weird cross-hemisphere affinity. That doesn’t always happen. We also could see that they were socially and politically aware and connected people. It was also around the time the Clayoquot Sound of clear-felling on the West Coast was becoming very controversial. The Hip had spoken out about that. We ended up doing a song together [about it] with Daniel Lanois in a studio in Calgary. Those experiences are special and rare. That [anti-clearcut] campaign was ultimately successful, which is another good thing. It’s one of those chapters in your touring life that you don’t expect to happen. When it does, you come away feeling the world’s a better place. [Clayoquot Sound is now a UNESCO biosphere reserve.]
A. Oh yeah, you can bet we had a go at that.
A. Yeah, but as long as they didn’t do it during our show, you know? In some ways, they’re a mirror image band, because our audience was very similar in Australia.
A. Yeah, unfortunately. It was an amazing time, because they had clearly had broken really big. When a band reaches a point where communication with an audience is like a charge of electricity and it fires up a generation—that’s no small achievement in any country. Watching that elevation happen was terrific, and they deserved all the success they had at that point in time. I have no doubt that their legacy will be deeply felt in Canada.
A. I can’t say. What I took away from it was that most other artists don’t really give a s–t: They want to get out there and they care about their music, but they’re not really thinking about the implications of playing in a certain place or the safety of their fans or the effect they’re having more broadly. The Hip are very thoughtful people. I remember having conversations with Gord that were not lightweight.
A. It’s a hard thing. You make sure you take all the precautions. Managing mass popularity is never easy. You don’t entirely manage it; it manages you. There are some things you can do. Both [our] bands were on the side of ensuring that all women at a Tragically Hip performance should be accorded the same rights and respect as anyone else. Of course, at 9 o’clock at night in a crowd of 15,000 people who’ve had a few beers, it’s easier said than done.
A.I’d love to say that they were a highly esteemed cult band in Australia, but for reasons I’m not sure of, they’re not. We brought their CDs back and spread them as far and wide as we could. I had some friends at radio down here and I’d bring them stuff from our travels; that’s what musicians do. People sort of got it, but it didn’t catch for whatever reason. I’m pretty sure they never played Australia. Whereas we played a lot in North America, starting out at colleges, then clubs and so on. You don’t make sense of the musical vision and the fabric of the lyrics until you see the band. I feel like unless you saw them, you weren’t going to get the full picture. They were Canada’s best-kept secret.
Michael Barclay is the co-author of Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance 1985-95
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