Compromise and Peter Garrett

Peter Garrett MP. Alternatively seen as an idol and a sellout. Vitriol is flowing freely as people are still eager to approach the person.

Peter Garrett was once frontman for Midnight Oil. No look at Garrett is complete without first looking at Midnight Oil.

Midnight Oil are the first, last, and only no-compromise rock group in the history of rock. It's hard to appreciate how deeply this goes without looking at their history.

Midnight Oil started in the surfer clubs in NSW outside Sydney. Clubs Garrett described as being as far from what one would find in LA as imaginable. More like what the Beatles saw in Hamburg but even more so. Biker types who would, in the words of Garrett, break the bottom off a beer bottle and shove it in your face if they didn't like the entertainment.

Midnight Oil were always about entertainment. Not laser shows and smoke bombs. Those things only make bikers pissed as hell. You had to make music - mach shau as the Beatles were told. And even if your average biker doesn't know that much about music theory or technique, he intuitively grasps when something is good and when something is really good and when something is truly exceptional.

Midnight Oil at those surfer clubs played roller coaster music. It took off, grabbed you, never let go, didn't let you catch your breath.

Midnight Oil searched for a recording contract but they had their stipulations. They were no-compromise before they even had a contract. They insisted on full artistic control and they wanted distribution, not a recording contract. There were no buyers.

So they financed their first album on their own Powderworks label. They were later to get distribution by CBS Australia but they never sold out.

Their title song on the Powderworks album starts with the ominous lyric 'there's a shit storm coming'. The song is 5:34 long. At 2:38 the instrumental roller coaster starts - and continues for several minutes on the twin guitars of Martin Rotsey and Jim Moginie with hectic bass work by Bear James and finally segues back into vocals at 4:28. Way more than half the song is instrumental. There are so many twists and turns in there it's not funny.

It's not just that the songs wear you out emotionally and intellectually - they're so technically demanding. No challenge without entertainment of course. The next song on that album is called Head Over Heels. Listen carefully. It's got hot plectrum work that not only is demanding and needs a lot of practice but is HARD WORK. And it's done in unison between one guitar and the bass. This is a song most groups would never even attempt to play - it's just too hard! But Midnight Oil did it.

Their time signature changes. Listen to the opening of Dust. It's a 3/4 song actually. But it's actually more like a 6/8. Yet the intro is definitely 3/4. And listen what happens in the second verse! This is not easy music making.

The arrangements - meticulously laid up. Best since Paul McCartney's work with the Beatles. Add on gradually. Keep the concept of song format in mind. And so forth.

This is brilliant music all around. The compositions are anything but trivial. The practice that went into mastering each of these tracks. The overriding rule that technique and virtuosity have to lead to something - to audience happiness.

The raucous Used And Abused - a rebel rock song. Again - hold on tight because it goes all over the place. Don't think so? Just wait until the second time around (it takes off at 1:24). And listen to the fast-picking unison work between guitar and bass. 3:11 but a very long 3:11.

Surfing With A Spoon. Have any idea what's going on there? For the first: one of the guitars is (some of the time) strapped with a capo at a very high fret - perhaps the 8th or even 10th. But it doesn't stop there. You have the usual mix of syncopation and attack drums but you also get a flurry of harmonics built around a organ grinder type of interlude which gives the guitarist with the capo enough time to switch instruments and sounds. And then he launches into a heavy solo which is taken over by his counterpart again so he can get the original guitar back in place for the finish.

Playing those harmonics as Midnight Oil do isn't easy. Neither is it easy to turn the solo and the whole song into a show-stopping experience. This is no-compromise music.

Nobody wanted to write about Midnight Oil. They were the bad boys of rock. They didn't do stupid interviews, answer questions like 'what's your favourite colour' and 'do you sleep in the nude' and they weren't very appreciative of the media or the ABS either. And you all remember who controlled the media in Australia back then? Your good old friend Rupert. And his since imprisoned friend Alan. They had a great tactic Rupert uses to this day: you don't attack someone you don't like in an editorial - you just don't write about them at all.

Murdoch used this famously to swing elections all over the place. And Midnight Oil, that no-compromise group, retaliated with a song years later called Read About It - or as Garrett called it, The Rupert Murdoch Alligator Express. People in Australia didn't know shit if Rupert's newspapers didn't write about it.

Midnight Oil's album Powderworks got no play in the media, no airplay, and yet was a big success. What did Midnight Oil do? They invested their profits right away.

Things on the surfer circuit weren't that good for anyone save the venue owners. Midnight Oil set about changing all that with the profits from their first album. They started a booking agency and got most groups on the coast to sign with them. At which point they exerted a virtual monopoly. And what to do with this monopoly? Change the way the system worked.

They wanted lower prices for their fans and they wanted more pleasant behaviour from venue owners and their bouncers. And so forth. They got it because no one got a major act unless they went through Midnight Oil. And those were the conditions imposed by Midnight Oil. A lot of ordinary people loved Midnight Oil for this but the people with money did not. Amongst those people, they became more hated than ever.

Herb Alpert heard of this fantastic group and sent two pinstripes to Sydney to talk to them. Midnight Oil were at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds at the time. The A&M dudes went up to 2JJJ as they were told, got told Midnight Oil were in Vic, drove out to the MCG, asked around for free tickets, were told there were none, paid their way in, met Midnight Oil the following Monday.

The A&M dudes asked about the free tickets. Midnight Oil had known they were coming - couldn't they have left some free tickes?

Midnight Oil, not intimidated by the sugar daddies from California, told the pinstripes there was no mistake, there were no free tickets. Free tickets are only for their friends. Sorry.

Alpert thought he had the senstation group of the 1980s. But he wanted them to play his covers and he wanted less esoteric lyrics in what they themselves wrote.

Midnight Oil showed Alpert's people to the door. Here they were being offered a multimillion dollar contract with the express promise of being the BIGGEST THING OF THE 1980s - and they turned it down.

We've worked too hard and too long to sell out, said Midnight Oil. But they'd already had a second album out in Australia - Head Injuries - that went gold on word of mouth alone and is cited in books on rock history as the only real example of a recording that succeeds despite there being no publicity whatsoever. Think about that: the second Midnight Oil album Head Injuries went GOLD with NO PUBLICITY WHATSOEVER. Rock historians think this is a big thing because everyone would like to believe art succeeds on its own merits. Lots of theory there - but only one example in practice. Head Injuries. Midnight Oil.

Things still didn't turn around for Midnight Oil until their next album and more importantly England's entry into the European Union. That move by the UK meant Australia lost favourite nation status and suddenly exports to the British Isles evaporated and unemployment became rampant in the Lucky Country.

What did those bad boys Midnight Oil do? They organised a pan-Pacific telecast to fill the coffers of the unions - with themselves headlining of course. This concert was transmitted on radio and television all the way up the Pacific Rim and brought in millions to help the unemployed. Now bad boys Midnight Oil were suddenly the heroes of the nation.

As late as 1990 Midnight Oil drummer was still cursing CBS for exploiting the Australian bicentennial to push Beds Are Burning. Yes, he said he was pissed at the way they did that. Everything Midnight Oil did - whether pure sentiment or sham - was 'no-compromise'.

They hijacked Exxon after the oil scandal, pulled up in front of Exxon HQ in NYC with a flatbed truck and played a concert in protest at the Valdez, then held a press conference with Greenpeace about it - with Peter Garrett asking very pointed questions of Exxon for their lax technology.

Some of the songs Midnight Oil have recorded over the years (with very specific targets).

Don't Wanna Be The One (Herb Alpert); River Runs Red (Exxon); Dead Heart (lands rights); US Forces (guess); Power and the Passion (middle class lifestyle); Beds Are Burning (Lands Rights); Blue Sky Mine (uranium mining, workers rights); Forgotten Years (war heroes); One Country (Australia); In The Valley (ancestors and descendants); Sometimes (the 'man'); Read About It (Rupert Murdoch); Dreamworld (real estate exploitation); Only The Strong (parental child abuse); Sell My Soul (plight of migrant workers); Progress (what it sounds like); Hercules (Rainbow Warrior); Blossom and Blood (Hiroshima); Pictures (wood chip companies); Armistice Day (anti-war); Short Memory (anti-war); Warakurna (aboriginal rights); My Country (false patriotism); Feeding Frenzy (middle class mania); Truganini (aboriginal rights); Redneck Wonderland (reactionary Australian governments); Too Much Sunshine (destroying the environment).

Midnight Oil were the musical arrangers of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Things were tense in Australia. Their 'Redneck Wonderland' PM refused to apologise to the aboriginals for further revealed transgressions. Midnight Oil were to headline the closing ceremony. They ambushed the PM (and the entire nation) by appearing on stage in black jumpsuits with the word 'SORRY' printed all across the sides and back. If the Australian government wouldn't apologise, Midnight Oil would.

That's Midnight Oil. That's why they're a legend. It's not only the no-compromise music - never any frills, light shows, laser beams, smoke bombs. Only music. And as far as their principles went: same thing. They started in 1978, ended in 2002, and were as true to their own ideas and ideals in 2002 as in 1978.

*

Now compare this with the political career of Peter Garrett. It's not germane if Peter Garrett has a point that he has to compromise. Blah blah. The point is he does compromise - something no one in Midnight Oil would have dared to do or dream about for 25 years. Compromise was anathema to them - their archenemy. Compromise was simply not in their character - not for a one of them. None of them would have considered it. Perish the thought.

Garrett made a show for the Nuclear Disarmament Party in 1984 (and of course wrote a book about it - Political Blues). No one expected him to win. The NDP wanted his candidacy to get more votes so they could get government subsidies. He got them those votes. He pulled so many hilarious stunts across the country and the media flocked to him. And he'd have won the seat in Canberra if Labor hadn't ganged up on him.

There was no compromise about Garrett back then. Most Australian were hoping he'd unite the green parties. He could have done it. No one is sure why he didn't.

It's often said Garrett has enough money and doesn't need to work. Perhaps he does have enough money but he's certainly not rolling in it - you can't quite do that when you sell only 12 million records in 25 years and you have to split the money half a dozen ways. Not even with the considerable concert revenues you pull in.

But Garrett could have been very influential outside mainstream politics - certainly had a more profound influence than today when people rarely hear him say anything of his own, hear mostly of his failures and demotions, and when Australia totally lacks the type of articulate voices that used to abound. Garrett says he has to compromise but the people of Australia see him only as a Labor lapdog.

Midnight Oil never compromised. Never. Peter Garrett knows nothing but. Maybe Garrett can sell an excuse to some people but he's still a sellout to himself and the group he fronted for 25 years - things good people took very seriously.