The
Oil's still burning...justMidnight Oil
Sunday, August 20, 2000
State Theatre, Sydney
From primitive beginnings in hot and sweaty pubs almost 25 years ago to the plush surroundings and ultra comfy/hemorrhoid friendly chairs of the State Theatre, it's been a long journey for da Oils and I can't help wondering whether the road goes on much further from here.
Their last five releases have consisted of a live album which was spectacularly unsuccessful in its attempt to bear witness to the awesome beast that the Oils can be on a good night, two albums of generally lacklustre new material, the obligatory "best of" and now the current "Real Thing" release, which is basically an EP's worth of new material, padded out with a bonus disc worth of unplugged plunderings of the corpses of some old favourites, and a second bonus disc of commentary, general chat and videos of the two singles lifted from their last studio album. Of the four new tracks, one is a cover and at least one other is a vintage song lately rescued from the archive/cutting room floor, while the unplugged recordings themselves are also old live performances, dating back to the heyday of the original MTV "unplugged" fad. Previous albums are represented unevenly with "Red Sails In The Sunset" missing out completely while top honours go to the "10-9-8-7-6-5- 4-3-2-1" album, which the cool cognoscenti nicknamed "Countdown", although I am led to believe that now it's even cooler to refer to it as simply "10 to 1" - I have all this on that most impeccable of authorities, namely a bloke I met in a pub.
With its army of ushers and bouncers, coiled and ready to pounce on any punter who steps out of line (or out of his seat), the State doesn't really have the right ambience for a rock venue. However the two guys sitting next to me were not deterred in the slightest, taking it in turns to shout out periodically "Oils" and "Hirsty", starting before the Oils had even appeared and continuing until roughly halfway through their set, when the one who had been shouting "Hirsty" shouted "Oils" instead, leaving the one who had been shouting "Oils" so stunned and confused that silence then descended almost until the encore.
While the State may not be the most ideal rock venue, it remains an excellent setting for any musical experience that doesn't aim to inspire anything more than a little gentle toe tapping, which leaves it appropriate for an unplugged show because while rock relies on passion, intensity and barely restrained ferocity (they don't call it the devil's music for nothin' mama), an acoustic set is a far more detached and intellectual affair. At its best, the unplugged phenomenon was like taking the back off a piece of familiar but extraordinarily complicated machinery, seeing how all bits had been fitted together and at last being able to work out how the damn thing operated; at its worst, it was like taking the back off a solid state radio - all you get to see is a circuit board and some dust. In other words, the novelty of an unplugged set wears off pretty quickly unless there's some hidden subtlety and complexity that you've been missing all these years.
It would be untrue to say that the Oils' music has no subtlety or complexity, since both lyrically and musically it clearly has an abundance. The problem for the Oils and the audience (or at least this member of the audience), is that the Oils have always been such good communicators that there hasn't been anything of consequence previously lost in the aether which can now be caught and revealed under the acoustic microscope, so all you end up with are slower, softer echoes of messages already received and digested - like a bland last course of a Thai banquet after someone forgot to add the chilli - plus the usual dose of laboured, sanctimonious sermonizing from would-be Senator Garrett.
I must admit that I went along to this show with some misgivings, expecting to find the Oils like a tired old tiger in a cramped cage out the back of a zoo in the process of being converted into an environmentally responsible theme park - a noble beast reduced to a sad display of enslaved impotence, faded pride and maybe a few fleas, surrounded by the intangible aura of youthful defiance defeated and dissipated (probably combined with a whiff of stale urine), but like even the tamest seeming tiger, if you put your arm too close to the cage you could still get a serious mauling and when the band finally went electric toward the end of the night they briefly proved that they retain the ability, if not always the will, to rock hard. Make no mistake, they could still hold their own topping the bill down at your local pub if they could be persuaded to play there (and if your local pub hadn't swapped live music for pokies a couple of years ago).
Oh and the guys next to me were right: forget the front man, Rob Hirst is very much the foundation and core of the Oils.
- John McPharlin
