Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  While punk and new wave favoured a minimalist mindset, with people who’d never played an instrument before forming bands—an approach that delivered plenty of hallelujah moments—we were a reverse-engineered version of this prototype. This meant plenty of ‘let’s go for it’ attitude, tempered with some inkling of the pitfalls that lay ahead, but being players and writers at heart, the band had to search out a route that was both musically satisfying, and short and sharp enough to hold everyone’s, but especially my, interest.

  It was a strange, unusual tension, but it served us well for a long while. If a song like ‘Don’t Wanna Be the One’ worked on stage, we could be pretty confident it would work in the studio. Once budgets increased and songs entered the studio in finished form, it got harder, but that’s another story.

  Still, endless road slog will eventually take its toll and strip some shine off the duco, so not long after we finished Head Injuries, the time came for a real break, and the chance to search out some fresh terrain. Being at home reminded me of how much I missed my mum, so early in 1980 I took off on a cheap round-the-world standby ticket, travelling west in a stop-start fashion, pulling up for a few unplanned nights in cheap hotels on the outskirts of Seoul and Tokyo while waiting for a seat to become available so I could continue my journey.

  I couldn’t have a schedule, and had no plans other than to satisfy a long-standing desire to surf in Hawaii, the home of big waves, and to drink in the atmosphere of different lands now there was a welcome pause in the endless season of touring.

  I eventually landed in London and stayed with my college mate Andy Richardson, who’d moved to the UK to further his flute studies. He was putting food on the table by busking to commuters in the London tube. They were as tough an audience as you could ever find, but with thousands of commuters passing by every hour it could be lucrative, so long as you grabbed a good spot.

  I took in the sights and sounds of the empire fading, taking care to skirt around suburbs like Earl’s Court, where many young Australians would gather in a predictable rite of passage that seemed to involve lots of beer and not much else.

  I was also keeping watch on upcoming tours and noticed that a new Irish band making waves was due to play their first gig at the legendary Marquee Club. Andy and I headed down to join a smattering of punters as U2 went through their paces. They were cranking out a pretty good sound for a three-piece, especially when Edge’s trippy guitar and Bono’s voice met in the upper register. I stayed back to say hello, figuring the Irish and Australians have a bit in common—our attitude to the English for one—and that proved to be the case.

  Apart from the abundance of culture, especially the non-stop procession of music performances, there was little to hold me. The institutions and ways of the English were familiar enough, which was why lots of Aussies ended up there, but the odious class system was still in full swing. This meant heaping reams of condescension on colonials, who were considered to be even lower down the rung than the working classes, a mentality that was irritating and out of date. Added to which the Poms were a morose lot, given to constant complaining about everything under the ever-sodden skies. They seemed perpetually unhappy, not my disposition at all.

  A visit to a new exhibition on the Great War at London’s Tate Gallery cemented these feelings. I was intrigued to see how the war would be portrayed, particularly given that Australia and New Zealand had played a loyal supporting role across Western Europe and the Middle East, one that was magnified in our history by the experience at Gallipoli.

  I knew the military encounter had been a tragic fiasco. This was due in no small part to the decision taken by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to attack the Turkish forces at a location that was too easily defended. The ANZAC soldiers trying to advance up the steep slopes from the beach could have reasonably been expected to suffer serious casualties, and they did.

  I also knew that the Gallipoli campaign was the first time Australia as a young nation joined others to fight as part of the British Empire. The exchange ended in retreat but the bravery and camaraderie of the Aussie and Kiwi soldiers became the stuff of legend. The diggers were predominantly young men. A visit to any country town’s cemetery shows how innocent in years and life experience many were. They displayed a refreshing resistance to authority, including refusing to salute their superior officers, especially the British.

  How would the exhibition present these events? What paintings would the curators choose to show what happened when the Australians and New Zealanders came ashore and attempted the near-impossible task of taking higher ground and defeating an enemy that quickly marshalled far greater numbers?

  To my surprise there was nothing on the walls—no paintings or sketches, no written descriptions—referring to 25 April 1915, our Anzac Day. Not one skerrick.

  Whether the ANZAC tradition as it has evolved deserves the attention it receives today, sometimes at the expense of equally deserving chapters of our military past, including the first resistance of Aboriginal people, is an open question. But my grandfather had been injured in the deserts of Arabia. I knew every note of the Last Post, the bugle call that had rung out once a year for as long as I could remember. The example and sacrifice of the young diggers in that place is rightly honoured. This is an event seared into the consciousness of Australians and Turks. It defines, to some extent, the nationhood of both countries. Yet it had been left out of the exhibition completely.

  I doubted the omission was deliberate, rather Australia just wasn’t in their viewfinder. It was consistent with the tone of conversations I’d already overheard. Many English looked down their nose at or made fun of Australians, typecasting them as ex-convicts who were only good at sport and drinking. You couldn’t be too precious about this, and we inevitably gave it back in spades, but nevertheless I felt a deep sense of anger welling up.

  Even though I’d soon be back with the Oils to play and record Place Without a Postcard in the English countryside, and not long after that, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 in London, we could never dig in there, of that I was reasonably certain. The only way England welcomed bands from Australia was if they moved over and took on some of the English habits, dressed in black and played their game. This was never likely to happen with the proud outfit I was in. No matter what, we would always drink from the well of connection to home. My visit to the Tate underscored this a thousand times over.

  Europe was a different kettle of fish: magnificent public buildings, especially churches, a crowded, cosmopolitan cafe culture, intertwined histories that after centuries of war and peace meant there was a lot to chew on. They were putting things back together again, trying to join as one. The goal of a united Europe, where they no longer resolved conflict on the battlefield, seemed a very long way off but their stoic, rational stance after so much turmoil was impressive; you got the feeling they might just make it.

  I feasted on a surfeit of culture and art and craft, expressed over centuries, revealed layer by layer in museums and towns. The usual spots sucked me in and lifted me up. I got stuck with busloads of gawkers for hours in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, a place I would return to whenever I got the chance, so utterly compelling and accessible were Vincent’s paintings, so tragic the backstory.

  Continuing west, I dropped in to New York to see a few of my friends from ANU: David Bradbury, now busy making left-oriented documentaries, and Paul Sheehan, veering to the right, who was studying at the Columbia School of Journalism and about to start writing for The Wall Street Journal. I was planted somewhere in between. But we were joined, as so many of our countrymen and women have been, trying to make it on a wider stage.

  The streets of the Big Apple were overflowing as hurrying crowds surged through the city, and muggers and derelicts lurked on the periphery, getting braver as the shadows grew longer. The air was filled with the smell of hot bagels and roasting chestnuts from the street vendors in the day and the strains of jazz from the clubs at night. I sta
yed at the YMCA, with the heaviest security grilles I’d ever seen across the windows, completely blocking the view, and just walked along the giant avenues of this in-your-face high-rise town.

  This was a city I could get to like. I was drawn to its energy and constant hustle, and to New Yorkers: black, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, all pushing their way forward. It became our East Coast base in Midnight Oil’s latter stages, a place that made touring manageable, with a raucous voice louder than the homesick blues.

  Then I was off to LA via El Salvador.

  I was on a pilgrimage of sorts to visit the cathedral in the capital San Salvador, where the Catholic Archbishop Óscar Romero had been recently gunned down by a right-wing death squad while conducting mass; he had criticised the military dictatorship who had ruled the country on and off for decades. El Salvador, one of the poorest and smallest nations in the region, was experiencing a civil war, and when I applied for a one-day visa in New York I’d been surprised to be granted one.

  As I exited the plane I saw soldiers everywhere, and I fell into a conversation with an American woman who, it turned out, was taking the same trip. Figuring it would be safer to pose as husband and wife, once through customs we took a cab straight to the cathedral square and pretended to be dumb tourists. The poverty of El Salvador was plainly in view, but it was the air of fear and dread permeating the city that slapped you in the face. The cathedral was empty, with a handful of young soldiers standing outside in the blazing sun, nervously fiddling with their carbines. We paused briefly to pay our respects and then hightailed it back to the airport.

  The Reagan administration ended up providing billions of dollars to the right-wing El Salvador government and the army. The left-wing opposition received some support from Cuba and peasants in the rural areas, not surprising given that 2 per cent of the population held around 90 per cent of the wealth. It wasn’t until 1992 that a process sponsored by the United Nations brought the warring sides together in an uneasy truce that staggers along to this day.

  My funds were running low as I overnighted in LA on the way out of the States. I could hardly see the Hollywood sign, but when I did glimpse it through a veil of pollution it looked crooked and tawdry. I’d landed in a Raymond Chandler novel, and I wanted out.

  I hung around Los Angeles airport until eventually I got a flight to Hawaii. Camped in a cheap motel in Honolulu, I awaited the arrival of giant waves, glancing occasionally at the weather channel where the announcers, talking in tongues, never stopped smiling. I knew the names of the breaks by heart: Waimea Bay, Makaha, Sunset Beach, Banzai Pipeline. They’d been plastered over my bedroom walls since my early teens. My skills as a board rider were limited, in fact they’d stalled altogether, but I’d long wanted to test myself as a body surfer in this crucible of world surfing.

  Each day I made my way from Honolulu, in a cheap rent-a-bomb, out to the North Shore (another one), to scan the horizon for the big lines of swell that chug across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean, then rear up out of deep water and thunder-dump onto the Hawaiian shoreline.

  This part of the island was reminiscent of New Guinea: uncrowded and undeveloped, hilly, with dirt tracks winding around the verges of tropical rainforest, which came down almost to the coastline, on the edge of which many Hawaiians had built small homes.

  I was reasonably confident that I could hold my own in the bigger waves. I was super fit and just before leaving home had swum out to the infamous Queenscliff Bombora, a break about half a kilometre offshore, on a day when huge seas whipped the coast and all of Sydney’s beaches were closed. The rush of adrenalin that coursed through me as I shot down the face of a growling monster before ducking down under the crunching lip left me quivering. I wanted more and Hawaii was the place to get it.

  By the end of the week, just as I was running out of money and running short of patience, the ocean at last began to stir. I drove north for the final time to find the flat conditions of the past week had vanished. A solid three- to four-metre swell was pushing in to the shore. It was bigger than I was used to but not that big.

  I chose Pipeline, famous for its extreme waves that pitch up over shallow reefs, as it was a shorter swim to get out to the break. It was a left-hander, a difficult wave to get a grip on, with a much thicker lip and a sudden throw, and a lot more power than the easygoing rollers of Curl Curl.

  More surprising was that out of nowhere scores of board riders had materialised and were already positioned beyond the break, sitting patiently like a flock of seagulls, waiting for the next set.

  I picked one of the littlest, and hopefully easiest, waves that suddenly reared up. But in an instant its sheer force flung me from the face and I speared into white foam, went around the spin cycle a couple of times, hitting the lava-encrusted bottom with a sudden, scarifying thump—not good.

  I was the only body surfer who’d ventured into the water and there was an outbreak of cackles from the boardies around me. I took a few more small ones to salvage a bit of self-respect before retreating to the shore to watch the locals rip it up.

  I’d fulfilled a boyhood dream, having escaped with a few scratches and a vivid memory of getting dumped at Pipeline. The next morning I flew home.

  8

  THE HURDY-GURDY MEN

  WE WEREN’T GOING to just f-f-fade away, and we certainly weren’t running on empty. Once back from the brief sojourn overseas, albums and tours came round as quick as the morning headlines.

  We weren’t chasing the charts. We were chasing something more elusive: the distillation of a moment in which five (six if you include Gary Morris) odd fits—extroverts and introverts, some focused on making music, some intent on making waves—could find common ground.

  I always saw the band as family, sharing a mission. We would socialise now and then, still do, but the years of being together for an ideal and for the music meant we were more like brothers—fragmented, perverse, affectionate, loopy and difficult to explain as any family can be. You might not always agree with or even like your brother every step of the way, but the bond that holds partnerships of this kind together is not easily described—let’s just call it tight.

  And one thing we always agreed on was taking a chance to go further if the opportunity presented itself, as happened when the legendary English producer Glyn Johns, who really did deserve that description, saw us play at Selina’s in Sydney at the beginning of 1981. Selina’s was a big room at the back of the Coogee Bay Hotel just across from Coogee Beach—extra sweaty and very, very crowded.

  He came on a typically humid Saturday night, standing amid a crush of about two thousand punters, mostly young blokes, T-shirts stripped off and tied around their heads, who knew every word. The singing was louder than the monster PA the crew had squeezed into the room. The aircon struggled to keep up.

  We played song after song, barely pausing between, as the roiling crowd surged towards us with their arms outstretched, crashing and falling into each other, getting thrown to the floor only to be hauled back onto their feet to resume the crazed stampede.

  Buckets of ice were stashed backstage, ready to be tossed into the throng to revive the hard-core fans who were now wilting in the front rows. Before the encore, the crew poured leftover freezing water over our heads to stop us from conking out in the furnace—the show will go on.

  Outside, couples and families would be ambling up the Coogee shopping strip, clutching melting ice creams. Inside our brick box, the spectacle raged. Racks of lights flashed madly and the groaning rumble of the bass and walls of guitar noise spewed from the bank of amplifiers lined up across the back of the stage like techno centurions preparing for battle. To close the night out, I clambered onto the top of the speaker stacks and leapt back down onto the stage floor (what was I thinking?!). At the same moment, Rob, standing on his drum stool, slashing at his cymbals, kicked his drums off the riser and onto the floor—take that, Pete Townshend! The pale-faced Johns had come straight off the plane, jetlagged and blin
king, from a London winter. No wonder we made an impression.

  Glyn was unlike the toffy English I’d met in London. He was an East Ender who’d risen from working-class roots to produce the cream of 1970s artists like the Who, the Eagles, Joan Armatrading. He’d even worked with the Stones and knew them as mates. All this naturally piqued our interest, and he was keen.

  Like many people, he’d fallen in love with the spectacle of the Oils live, but his lights had dimmed a little when we brought our new songs in, determined to craft a deeper album than the last. Glyn was coming from years of increasingly painstaking sessions with bands that could afford to spend forever in the studio. But for him there was to be no more taking two weeks to get the bass drum sounding right. Glyn wanted fresh, and that meant making the album quickly.

  We lived and recorded in England at his home studio out in the Sussex countryside through the European summer of 1981. The best part of the stay was roaming the fields in the long twilight, wandering across the commons and along the ancient walking paths—finding a bustle in a hedgerow at last—with the smell of fresh-cut hay and English blossoms saturating the air. That, and sneaking a listen to old demo tapes and backing tracks of the greats (the Stones, the Who, the Beatles) he’d secreted away in a storeroom. Surprise, surprise, they sounded kind of normal—but no, not ordinary, because of the distinctive, oh-so-familiar voices. Still, there were these legends, sounding like just another bunch of musos stepping through different arrangements, drifting in and out of tune, stopping and starting, trying different keys and debating the best way to finish a song—the perspiration before the alchemy.