Australian popular art–or at least the Australian popular art that becomes popular in the Western world these days–relies heavily on images of the apocalypse. This appears to come naturally to many Australian rock bands and movie directors, but it also tends to be what we expect them to deliver us. The most popular Australian band of the season, Midnight Oil, fits this stereotype without succumbing to its cliches; the band’s art runs on the apocalypse as the current state of affairs, without resorting to the cynicism of the U.S. hard-rock bands that rely on the same basic premise.
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Onstage, the band plays against a barren backdrop that shifts in colors to suggest the varied moods of the songs–as varied as the moods of the desert. The props suggest embattled survivors: the monitors are protected by wire fencing and barbed wire; the aboriginal flag is prominently displayed; a slat-board windmill twirls in the rear alongside a corrugated-iron water tank that sometimes serves as a percussion instrument for the drummer. The band’s primary image of nuclear survival, though, is lead singer Peter Garrett, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall shaved-headed giant whose singing style and stage presence are as erratic and rough-edged as the band’s music. His loose-fitting clothing, the low neckline of his shirts, calls to mind nothing so much as that 50s nuclear survivor “The Amazing Colossal Man,” while his odd-angled staggering about the stage suggests Orson Welles’s portrayal of the aging Charles Foster Kane, careening through his wife’s bedroom smashing everything to bits. There is something that inspires sympathy in Welles’s acting there–in the odd way his body moves–just as there is something that inspires empathy in Garrett’s presence. But how he evokes that empathy is mysterious. His voice is discomforting at first. Sometimes shrill and wavering, sometimes raspy and whispering, it grows on one in a surprising fashion; one surrenders to the odd melody amid the usual screeching the way one surrenders to a beautiful sight amid catastrophe. The band’s music–all jagged angles and abrupt tempo changes on first listening–is equally affecting on reacquaintance. The band is quite accessible, actually–as any comparison of its record sales with those of, say, Husker Du or Black Flag would indicate. If Midnight Oil relies on the apocalypse to fuel its art–on images of barrenness and the rediscovery of basic facts–it is the apocalypse not as dreadful threat but as inevitable incident, as a sort of severe bracer for what must come afterward.
The show last month at the Aragon was one of the most pleasant–strictly on a level of dealing with those around you–that I’ve seen there. There was no body-search hassle at the door and no threatening glances if you stood up in front of your seat or spilled someone else’s beer. The usually lovable Aragon bouncers cut through the crowd to make someone get off the edge of the balcony–where he was sitting talking with friends between acts–but they did so not by dragging him off by the scruff of his shirt but with a few waves of their flashlight beams. The crowd was tolerant of an aboriginal band called Yothu Yindi–which performed some traditional tribal music–and then was rewarded when the band brought out some electric instruments and moved into a set that turned out quite funky. On the way out after the show there was a short line to sign a petition supporting the rights of indigenous people to their native lands.
