Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  We were stretched for cash so couldn’t afford to do much more than hang around and write songs and grab the opportunity to get tracks down when Glyn was in the mood. Place Without a Postcard was recorded on the run (sometimes literally, as the vocal for ‘Lucky Country’ was done after tramping through the fields, and then tearing back breathless to the studio), to record something with urgent bite. Other tracks were put down in one or two live takes, as was the case with ‘Loves on Sale’, ‘Quinella Holiday’ and ‘If Ned Kelly Was King’, which were all recorded in a row without pause.

  We were proud of our third album, spare and unmistakably Antipodean, but A&M Records, our putative label for the rest of the world at the time, couldn’t hear a single and asked us to go back in and record more songs. We refused.

  Glyn was also proud of the album. So much so that, dissatisfied with this turn of events, he took it upon himself to fly to the record company headquarters in LA to play it to the label heavies.

  ‘Where’s the big song, which track should I listen to first?’ one demanded.

  ‘Put it on anywhere,’ was Glyn’s defiant response.

  They passed.

  We were back at square one and broke again, having spent all our money travelling to England, and now there was no prospect of an international record deal. Dreaming of the sun, we just wanted to get home. Another stint on the road awaited but at least we had a batch of new tunes under our belt to keep things fresh.

  From a music-industry point of view the band had reached a plateau, with a strong cult audience in Australia, and the beginnings of one overseas, but with very little reach for our records, although eventually CBS picked up the album for worldwide release. It didn’t bother us greatly. We’d never been in sync with popular taste, and there was no reason that should change now. But at some point we’d need to reassess, if only to square our ambition with the reality we found ourselves facing—big name, small records. So small, in fact, that when the Australian record company requested a greatest hits package—well-known live songs in actuality, as we’d had little airplay—Zev Eizik, in an inspired moment, offered a B side, ‘Armistice Day’, with a special edition T-shirt as a single. It promptly made the charts.

  Once Postcard was released locally in November 1981, we took in the whole country, finishing in Cairns, the last big town in Far North Queensland, full of cane farmers coming in for supplies and tourists heading out to visit the reef and the Daintree Rainforest a little further up the coast. I then detoured for a week to drive across to the Northern Territory with my Rock Island mate, Richard Geeves. He was going to teach in a small community called Numbulwar on the east coast of Arnhem Land, a long way from anywhere.

  I was looking forward to the escape. The further from the big cities, the more difficult it was to find suitable venues that could accommodate our equipment, for the Oils were always loud and large no matter the size of the gig. We’d been at it for a while now and yet would often end up playing in sleazy pub rooms or makeshift nightclubs, which served as temporary pick-up joints, playing mutant disco, running wet T-shirt competitions, and on quiet nights offering girls free entry to bulk up the crowd. There was a depressing familiarity to this scene, and the Cairns club was oppressively chauvinistic, so escaping to the big spaces as we headed west across Queensland was a welcome relief.

  As the flat landscape opened up and I wound the window down to suck the air in, I felt the tingle return: new faces and new places heading our way. We’d pull up stumps to sleep wherever we happened to stop, grab a roadside burger for breakfast, then set off again. On the second night out we got spooked by the Min Min lights, a strange natural phenomenon of flickering low flashes on the horizon that seemed to be tracking us at a distance outside the driver’s-side window. With no inkling they were a feature of these parts, we had a few eerie moments imagining that we were being chased by UFOs.

  By the time we reached Mataranka a few days later, I was in heaven. This was a part of Australia I felt at home in, even though I’d never visited before. The eyesore of roadside signs flogging cheap land and cheaper furniture was gone. And there were interesting types around: wanderers like us, a lot more Aboriginal people, truck drivers I could yarn with, missionaries looking for easy game and a smattering of pioneer grey nomads. It was remote and sparsely populated, but it felt intimate, real.

  And so we motored across Queensland in Richard’s ancient Holden, chatting about old times, reprising the Beatles songbook, often going for hours without seeing another vehicle. The country was given over to hard-hooved grazing with the odd mining tenement popping up every now and then. As we crossed the border into the Northern Territory, the landscape slowly turned rocky as we left the big dusty plains and entered escarpment country. Here the jagged landforms gave off an air of permanence and mystery. With Please Please Me and With the Beatles thoroughly worked over, we turned north on the only road leading to Darwin. We were on the upside of the Tropic of Capricorn and thick, perfumed air as sweet as fairy floss whooshed in the window.

  Then came large chunks of Top End frontier flavour as we entered Darwin, the end of the line. The mix of people out and about increased: bankrupts, misfits, get-rich-quick types, adventurers and idealists, all rubbing shoulders at the Roma bar, then the only cafe in town that served a decent coffee. You could always close out the night at the appropriately named Birdcage. This was no-frills drinking with concrete floors and perforated wire walls that finished a metre off the floor to enable patrons to make a quick escape if things got hairy.

  We put in a couple of nights at the YMCA and then said goodbye. As we stood on the high cliffs, looking out to sea, there wasn’t a boat in sight. Yet a day or two under sail would bring Timor—part of the East Indies on the old maps—into view. I was entranced and decided then and there to return when conditions were right.

  …

  By now I’d moved into an old rundown four-storey block of flats called the Ritz (another Ritz) in Cremorne, on the north side of Sydney Harbour. It was close to the foreshore and some rooms had spectacular views across the harbour to the city and the Opera House. Most of the tenants were pensioners, as it was dirt cheap and buses ran close by. I could hear my neighbours listening to the races on the weekends as cooking smells seeped under the door and through the walls: tinned spaghetti and baked beans—my staples as well.

  Mark Dodshon was back in Sydney working night-shift radio, and if the Oils were playing around town I’d drop in at the Lavender Bay boatshed he’d holed up in to debrief following the show. The melange of distorted guitar feedback and cymbal crashes, and the crowd braying, would bounce around in my head for hours after the final chords sounded out, and it was a good wind-down to sit listening to the water lapping against the harbour walls with cockroaches scuttling to and fro. Across the silky bay Luna Park had long fallen silent. Sometimes we’d step outside to stretch our legs, and if we looked up to Brett Whiteley’s house we could see him padding about in a kimono, prodding and gesticulating at imaginary friends and enemies. If Doddo asked how the night had gone, I’d dissect the evening’s performance song by song, sometimes bar by bar—the poor man.

  After a few hours there, I’d walk a couple of kilometres through the quiet streets that ran along the harbour back to the Ritz, where residents were just starting to stir. In my basement flat—a single room with a bed in one corner and a kitchenette on the far wall—I’d pull the blankets up over my head to keep the dawn at bay as sneezes, shuffles and the whistle of the first kettle of the day merged into a soundscape above me, drifting in and out of reverie until my body finally gave way to sleep.

  I got to know Whiteley a bit later on as he was friendly with Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits, who’d found big favour with Australian audiences with their 1985 album, Brothers in Arms. Musicians would often stay at the Sebel Townhouse Hotel in the Cross. Away from the main drag, it was a good place to hang out after shows and wind down. I’d bumped into Knopfler there and was struck that he didn’t
seem the least bit carried away by the mega success Dire Straits was enjoying. At the peak of their fame, he’d agreed to co-sign a statement with us directed to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, calling for the protection of Tasmania’s ancient forests.

  He liked to talk politics and art and had become friendly with Whiteley, who dropped by to shoot the breeze. Brett was a brilliant painter and his death by overdose a few years later threw me off balance. Whenever I was at a function at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I’d grab a moment in front of The Balcony 2, one of his large Sydney Harbour paintings that was part of the permanent collection. Sails scattered across the iridescent water, the quick arc of a sea bird in flight, dashes of white against luminous blue and green. The painting shouted life in the epicentre of the glistening city of Sydney.

  Occasionally we’d hang out with other bands, although most were nightclub habitués, and I’ve never been in a nightclub I didn’t want to get out of asap. More often we would cross paths with the road warriors of the time: Mental As Anything, the Angels, the Sports from Melbourne and Cold Chisel. The Mentals were art-school guys, having fun and making quirky pop. Chisel were already cutting strong records and burning up the stage like we did. We ended up jamming with them at the Music Farm studio near Byron Bay one year. The evening became the stuff of minor rock folklore, but like most encounters of this kind, it was as much talk as it was music.

  It was always interesting to see how other people were handling the pressure cooker of rock marriage, where you end up spending more time, in more extreme circumstances, with the members of the band than anyone else. In this petri dish of different and often-colliding personalities, what you loved and wanted more than anything could turn into a slog. And then the question rears up: when the merry-go-round stops, do you still feel the shiver when syncing up on a song, or walking onto the stage with these same people, night after night? If the answer is yes, then most else is forgiven or more likely forgotten until such time as you can afford to do it by yourself. That’s when bands tend to go their separate ways.

  I loved that Jimmy Barnes sang till his throat bled; we were soul brothers on that score alone, and he was great company. Don Walker’s songs were pithy short stories, the melodies abundant, and to cap it off, Ian Moss sang and played guitar like a young Muddy Waters. Chisel in full flight at Cloudland in Brisbane doing ‘Wild Thing’ is one of my most cherished memories. They left nothing to chance and could swing while going off the dial—that’s rare. I always felt they deserved more critical acclaim and could have gone a long way internationally if the stars had aligned, which, sadly, they didn’t.

  For Midnight Oil, endorsing a direction, and the decisions that followed, even if some members weren’t so concerned about offstage matters, was more an emotional reaction than a strictly rational process.

  The Oils tended to respond intuitively, trusting the direction ‘the band’ was taking, while still being aware of what was going on around us. If anyone had doubts we could hold a meeting to thrash things out, and the right to veto was always an option if an individual member wanted to exercise it. Throughout, we were usually unanimous in agreeing to take up an issue.

  This was the case from day one, when we put our hands up for our first benefit concert, Save the Whales at Balmain Town Hall on 29 April 1978, to coincide with the date the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior left London for Iceland to contest commercial whaling. As late as the 1970s, whales were being pursued to extinction. Boats armed with high-powered harpoons, launched from ports like Albany in Western Australia and Eden in New South Wales, would hunt them down and drag the bloodied creatures back to shore, where various parts of the carcass would be hacked off and sold to make perfume, candle wax and even soap.

  Our first benefit show was a chaotic evening, never mind that it was a noble cause. The anarchists and community activists running the show couldn’t tie anything off properly. And we were doing a double, and due to play again later that night at the Bondi Lifesaver in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, one of the few venues then dedicated solely to live music.

  After a while, knowing people would be showing up for the politics and the music, we took to handling the organisation of these events ourselves, with Gary and our office taking the reins. Benefit shows were a way of directly helping activists and community groups who were often engaged in a David-and-Goliath struggle against powerful forces with deep pockets. If anyone deserved a hand it was the planet savers, everyday citizens often armed with little more than good intentions.

  These shows were also an antidote to nuts-and-bolts touring, a means of putting some flesh on the bones of our songs and inviting our audience into a new arena that showed our values. The night at Balmain Town Hall marked the start of us hooking up with the like-minded—young and old—who weren’t content to sit on their hands and whinge. They actually wanted to do something about what was going on around them and so did we. Some of the issues we encountered have faded from view, and that’s a good thing. Others have stuck around, none more dramatically than whaling, an issue that returned with a vengeance during my time in government three decades later.

  …

  In the early days we played a few times at the Lifesaver. It was a notorious industry hangout, featuring a long bar at the rear of the room, and a big fish tank that provided cheap entertainment for punters who could no longer see the stage or had overindulged. Everyone went, played or partied there, and it was the place where a lot of acts got a run, including Rose Tattoo, Richard Clapton, Chisel, Dragon and Split Enz—even AC/DC were early regulars.

  In the late 1970s, with a stagnating economy, rising youth unemployment and Malcolm Fraser in the Lodge, and propelled by the punk explosion, the stage was set for a resurgence of live music. You could sidestep the doldrums and scope out one of the many new bands emerging overnight—or, better still, you could form one. The Civic Hotel at the southern end of Pitt Street in the city was emblematic of this period, and, unlike the Lifesaver, was willing to take a chance on little-known bands. Up a flight of stairs, with big windows looking down to the street, it was an L-shaped room that held about 300 with a small stage wedged into a far corner. The doors were open seven nights a week to a huge range of acts, some with a career already in hand, others just starting out and hoping this was the beginning of something solid. In a typical week you could catch locals—Chisel, Mentals, Flowers (later to become Icehouse), Oils, Wasted Daze, Lipstick Killers—and the latest interstate up and comers, like the Models and Paul Kelly. Some nights there’d be three bands for three dollars, the equivalent of around ten dollars today—sensational value.

  As the crowds grew, drawn to the novel excitement of the burgeoning scene, so more venues sprang up in and around the city to accommodate them, including the Chevron, the Rex Hotel at the Cross, the Trade Union Club and the notorious Stagedoor Tavern. The cream of Sydney’s crop was regularly in full view, supported (and on some nights usurped) by the breadth of talent on offer: Johnny and the Hitmen, recyclers of the Detroit sound; the XL Capris, architecture students having fun à la Television; the Laughing Clowns, Saints guitarist Ed Kuepper’s startling left-field homage to jazz impro; Jimmy and the Boys, a revue-style outing with singer Ignatius Jones and keyboardist Joylene Hairmouth dressed to offend; and the Reels, quirky keyboard-based pop/rock all the way from Dubbo.

  It’s easy to idealise the past. The mind seems to have a self-protect capacity in that we tend to remember the good times and bury the bad, but by any measure this was a special period. The sheer number of bands that were around was remarkable. There was nothing uniform in the breakout. Everyone was chasing a different sound, trying to land on something that stood out, channelling their inner cool, spewing angst and attracting fans who travelled from all points of the compass, any night of the week, to catch the shows.

  Then the multiplier effect took hold, with the cluster of new bands providing work for a growing cast of technicians: poster artists, road crew, agents and, later, as careers star
ted to take off, lawyers, designers, film-clip makers—this was a creative cottage industry on the rise.

  It has always been the case that Australia’s huge distance from the rest of the world meant local artists had to travel to bigger markets overseas to test their wares and try to make a go of it. But in the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, there was critical mass right here at home.

  Occasionally, when tomorrow was looking too much like yesterday, the Oils would feel the need to break out a little. So we’d put on our own shows—mini events that were a bit different, like ‘Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll’ at Paddington Town Hall. This night predictably drew a super-keen mob. They seemed content enough until the power was mysteriously pulled, plunging the hall into darkness mid-set. Crouched backstage in the gloom as the audience screamed ever louder and threatened to trash the venerable old hall, we wondered if there was too much rock and too little sex and drugs, and now we were being judged guilty of misleading advertising. Finally the power was restored and the event ended on a high, with very loud music and a kaleidoscope of frustrated gig goers raging the night away.

  The Stagedoor Tavern was in an unlikely location—a basement below a huge office block opposite Sydney’s Central Station—but had a brief yet wild term. Inside it was dark with low ceilings, a huge bar dividing the room and great rock atmospherics with 1500 on the chant. The promoter, Pat Jay, was a big burly redhead of the ‘colourful Sydney identity’ school, and bands were paid on the spot in contraband, with mountains of cash piled up in his office like freshly washed nappies in a crowded nursery. No one knows where he ended up, but he was last heard of heading for the Philippines. He was a ‘bad bugger’, to quote Don Walker, so I suspect, if he’s still alive, he works in entertainment.

  When word came through that the Stagedoor had to close down, local fans saw this as a bureaucratic slap in the face to the swelling music scene that was spicing up the city. We were booked to play the final night and, as a way of livening up proceedings, had produced a set of posters promising, among other things, that Midnight Oil would ‘destroy’ the Stagedoor. This was pure Colonel Tom Parker—Elvis Presley’s legendary manager—on Gary Morris’s part, and the oldest trick in the book: teasing punters with over-the-top claims to draw the crowds and make a splash.