[Krusty Fries]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0202/28/entertainment/entertain4.html

 The Oils insist this latest album is not about demanding change, writes
Bernard Zuel.

Peter Garrett begs to differ. Midnight Oil aren't out to change your mind.
The band never has been, he says.

This may come as a surprise to those who have seen this band as the most
politicised mainstream act in Australian music: the bane of Exxon and CSR,
supporters of land rights, decriers of "US Forces [who] give the nod" to
Australian politicians.

It's probably more surprising to those who, while Australia dug deep into
its xenophobic past at the beginning of the Hanson/Howard years, clung to
Midnight Oil's 1998 album Redneck Wonderland as a lifebuoy of angry
opposition. But with the release this week of Capricornia , the band's
11th studio album (and 16th release overall since 1979), Garrett is
arguing that, like all the albums before, this one is merely a state of
play report for us to think about.

"That's what we've always done," he says. "I don't think people have
understood that that's what we've always done. Quite often in the past
something we have no control over has seen an album be part of a political
campaign. We're trying to get ourselves thinking about the songs [first]
and later on you get to look over your shoulder and see what you've had a
shot at. We really wanted to extract the music as a starting point for the
record. I think we said clearly what we wanted to say on Redneck and it
didn't seem like that many people got it [so] you've got to dust yourself
down and move on."

If that sounds like the band has disengaged from the argument it would be
a mistake. Capricornia , inspired in part by Xavier Herbert's novelised
examination of our efforts to subdue, cope with and finally accommodate
the land and its people, captures both a natural beauty and a
philosophical emptiness in modern "relaxed and comfortable" Australia. It
does it with a musical palette leaning more towards seductively attractive
pop elements than the electronica and force of Redneck Wonderland.

"We're interested in the resonances that lie underneath, the spirit of the
place, the moral black hole that we descended into with the Tampa and how
do we get the grappling irons and climb out of that," Garrett says. "We
knew that Capricornia loosely was the idea. It's firstly that there's been
a history of turbulent engagement. There's no good guys or bad guys but we
can't keep thinking we can white out the bits we don't understand. We have
a responsibility to know the stories."

Garrett is well aware of both those who deride criticism of past behaviour
as black armband history and those for whom the current moral debate is
merely self-flagellation. But he won't accept the tag of the unpatriotic.

"In some ways I've always felt that I've got a patriot's heart, or at
least a great affection of where I live and where I've come from," he
says. "And in some ways it's the tactical approach to trying to highlight
something over which you feel strongly: that there's a moral right and a
moral wrong. That's why the failings of the Labor leadership were so great
in the lead-up to the Federal election. You need to respect and understand
that people hold different viewpoints but then engage. People didn't find
themselves drawn into the civil rights argument and change their views
because Martin Luther King and the black leadership got up and said you
should be ashamed of what you think. They got up and said you should think
about something which is fundamentally wrong. It's a very different
approach. You need somebody to do it."

You can almost hear Garrett and his fellow band members groaning as yet
another story about the band revolves around political and philosophical
issues rather than the music and an album that is probably as good as any
they've released in 26 years. Fair enough too, considering that the band's
live shows are as potent now as they've ever been.

But maybe you can see the drive behind the politics and the music in
Garrett's answer to a question about why they choose to play several
(always sold-out) medium-size gigs in each city rather than take the less
time-consuming and more profitable option of a big one-off show. "It's not
the size, it's the intensity."

Capricornia is out now through Sony.


=====
Krusty Fries
krustyfries@yahoo.com

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