Music News - Midnight Oil | The Great Circle Tour
17 February 2017 - 0 Comments
Midnight Oil is more than just a rock
& roll band. From the northern beaches of Sydney to the streets of
Manhattan, they have stopped traffic, inflamed passions, inspired fans, broken
new ground and now, this September; Eccles Entertainment is bringing you the band
in the flesh! Midnight Oil will play two monumental New Zealand shows at
Auckland’s Vector
Arena and Christchurch’s Horncastle
Arena as part of The
Great Circle 2017 world tour!
This will be Midnight Oil’s first headline New Zealand shows since playing the
Supertop in 1990. They later returned to play Mountain Rock Festival in 1995
still making it well over 20 years since New Zealand audiences have had the
true satisfaction of watching the band live! Seeing Midnight Oil in full flight
is to experience the transcendent, kinetic power of live rock & roll.
They leave you inspired to live life more passionately and to Get
Involved. This September is New Zealand’s time to Get Involved.
Rob Hirst (drums, vocals) and Jim
Moginie (guitars, keys & vocals) started making music
together at school in 1972. They gradually evolved into Midnight Oil, with
singer Peter
Garrett joining in 1975 and Martin Rotsey (guitar), coming on
board in the following year. Founding bass player, Andrew “Bear” James,
was replaced by Peter
“Giffo” Gifford from 1979 until 1987 when Bones Hillman joined
the band.
Before they took it global, Midnight Oil’s early spiritual home was the Royal
Antler Hotel, Narrabeen on Sydney’s northern beaches. It was there that ‘the
Oils’ fan base swelled from a handful to a thousand – in a space intended for
half that number. Between 1976 and the very early 80’s, these five young men
played out this blistering ritual almost 1000 times. At all of these shows the
distance and the difference between audience and band was indistinguishable.
From their earliest days, Midnight Oil was writing songs about who and what
they saw around them.
Their earliest releases (1978’s self-titled album, 1979’s Head Injuries and 1981’s Place Without A Postcard plus their Bird Noises EP) all hail from this
frenzied post-punk era. The legendary Australian pub rock scene was at its
zenith and searing classics like Bus To Bondi, Cold Cold Change, Back On
The Borderline, Stand In Line and Don’t Wanna Be The One left thousands of
sweat drenched punters staggering out of suburban beer barns night after night.
Throughout, the band wrote their own rules; refusing to appear on popular TV
shows like ‘Countdown’ and shunning all the ‘music biz’ norms. At the same
time, Midnight Oil was becoming known for their support of environmental and
social justice causes. The singular trail that they blazed set the tone for
everything that followed.
In 1982, their fourth album 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 turned
everything on its head. They deconstructed their sound and reassembled it into
complex agitrock anthems like US Forces and Power and the Passion. The lyrics
captured a band who would not be boxed in by geography, precedent,
corporations, government or the expectations of anyone. As Midnight Oil expanded
their creative ambitions they also expanded their audience. The album was a
monster success in Australia, staying in the charts for more than 200 weeks. It
was also popular on US college radio and in pockets of Europe.
Red Sails in the Sunset came next.
Recorded in Japan it took sonic experimentation and polemics to new and extreme
levels. It was released in 1983 against the backdrop of singer Peter Garrett
making a run for the Australian Senate on a Nuclear Disarmament platform. While
Garrett focused on ‘real’ politics, Red Sails saw drummer Rob Hirst coming to
the fore, assuming lead vocal duties on When The Generals Talk and Kosciusko.
In 1985, Midnight Oil performed an unforgettable live set on Sydney’s Me-mel
(Goat Island) to celebrate the 10th birthday of music station 2JJbefore
reacting to the experimental extremes of their two previous albums with the
fierce, streamlined EP Species Deceases, Featuring enduring
fan favourites like “Hercules” and “Progress” this was a reset that suggested a
new beginning.
That new beginning happened in 1986 when Midnight Oil was invited to tour
through some of Australia’s most remote communities with legendary Aboriginal
group, the Warumpi
Band. The ‘Blackfella/Whitefella’ tour was a transformative
experience that exposed the band to the austere beauty of the desert landscape,
the inspiring creativity of the indigenous people and the deplorable conditions
in which so many of those people existed.
The band returned to Sydney and began work on their global breakthrough Diesel and Dust. The singles lifted
from that album like The Dead Heart, Put Down That Weapon, Dreamworld and, of course, Beds Are Burning brought Midnight Oil
to new audiences around the globe. The band toured internationally through ‘87
and ’88 driving the album to huge critical and commercial success. It
ultimately sold more than 6 million copies and earned them a Grammy nomination
although the band declined to attend the ceremony in order to be part of a political
event at home.
Among numerous other honours, “Beds Are Burning” is included in the U.S. Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame as one of the “500 Songs That Shaped Rock’n’Roll”. Diesel & Dust was
recently listed at #1 in the definitive book “100 Best Australian Albums”.
1990’s Blue Sky Mining saw tracks like One Country, Blue Sky Mine, and Forgotten Years bring an
international orientation to the band’s songwriting without losing any of their
characteristically Australian voice. While touring the US after the
album’s release, the band drew attention to the environmental disaster caused
by an Exxon oil tanker that ran aground in Alaska. They hired a flatbed truck
and played a blistering guerilla set outside the Exxon offices in New York,
stopping traffic and putting the issue on front pages worldwide. Blue Sky
Mining was another globally successful album, charting top 5 in many parts of
Europe and top 20 in the U.S.. Back home it won the band five ARIA Awards and
was certified five times platinum.
Midnight Oil’s creative evolution continued with 1993’s Earth and Sun and Moon with its
emphasis on melody, textures and storytelling. They toured the world on the
WOMAD festival and were one of the first international artists to play in South
Africa after Nelson Mandela came to power. These new experiences influenced
1996’s atmospheric album, Breathe which they recorded in Sydney
and New Orleans. Then, in typically perverse fashion, the band veered away from
these warm, dark, ambient textures to create arguably their most angry and
confronting release - 1998’s Redneck Wonderland. In Australia,
anti-migrant and anti-Aboriginal sentiment was being inflamed for political
gain and Midnight Oil’s visceral response pulled no punches.
In 2000 the band performed to an audience of over a billion people at the
closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games revealing clothing emblazoned with
the word, ‘SORRY’; thereby provoking global discussion about the apology due to
stolen generations of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families
between the 1890’s and 1970’s. That year they also recorded the excellent Say
Your Prayers, an anthem for the East Timorese which appeared on a benefit
release and was stripped onto their 11th and final studio album, Capricornia. Aptly enough, this swag
of songs drew heavily from their deep affection and appreciation of their
Australian homeland.
In December 2002 Peter Garrett left the band to pursue a full time political
career. He was elected in 2004 as a federal Member of Parliament where he would
eventually serve as a cabinet Minister in various portfolios including School
Education and Environment. Nonetheless in 2005 the Oils regrouped to headline
the Waveaid tsunami benefit concert for over 50,000 people at the Sydney
Cricket Ground. In 2009 the band topped a massive bill at “Sound Relief” at the
Melbourne Cricket Ground where over 80,000 fans joined them in raising millions
of dollars for victims of Australian fires and floods. Apart from these two
iconic stadium appearances for charity (and a handful of intimate ‘warmup’ gigs
immediately prior to each of them) the members played together in The Break and
separately in other bands for over a decade. Then in May 2016 they made
headlines with a surprise announcement via Facebook that they would be “getting
back together for some gigs next year“.
On February 17, 2017 (Australian time) the band held a press conference on Sydney
Harbour at which they announced that they would be touring the world from April
through November of this year. The tour will be accompanied by the release of
three new box sets; one will contain all their existing LP’s and EP’s, another
will contain all their existing CD’s and videos plus there will be a new 4
CD/8DVD treasure trove of previously unreleased or rare material called “The Overflow Tank”.
As the tour name implies, “The
Great Circle” will begin with an April pub gig in Sydney and
then loop around Brazil, North America, Europe and New Zealand before climaxing
with a lap of Australia. These circles of both the globe and their homeland
will close with one more Sydney show on Remembrance Day.
Of course “The Great Circle” will see the band drawing attention to issues
affecting the planet, including collaborating with Greenpeace on crucial issues
like dangerous climate change.
The tour name also has a further meaning. Sailors and airmen use “the great
circle” to navigate across oceans because the planet’s curvature means the
shortest distance between two points is not usually a straight line. It’s
appropriate for this band who have always been deeply engaged with the world
around them but whose career path has never been obvious or linear.
Midnight Oil is still more than just a rock’n’roll band and in 2017 they will
bring things back to where they all began. The circle remains unbroken.
New Zealand tour
dates below…
MIDNIGHT OIL
TICKETS
ON SALE 12:00PM
MONDAY 27 FEBRUARY
Pre-sale tickets for Ticketmaster and Ticketek members available for 24 hours from
12:00pm Thursday 23 February.
SATURDAY 9th SEPTEMBER
AUCKLAND – VECTOR
ARENA
http://www.ticketmaster.co.nz/ | 0800 111 999
MONDAY 11th SEPTEMBER
CHRISTCHURCH –
HORNCASTLE ARENA
http://www.ticketek.co.nz/ | 0800 842 538
|
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