Defiant Songwriting
From my 1998 interview with Rob Hirst, drummer and lyricist of Midnight Oil, about their album Redneck Wonderland.
Cris Cohen: From a lyrical point of view, do you feel pressured to live up to your past, if only because your lyrics have been so challenging, so different from just middle of the road fare? Is it tough to keep generating such interesting stuff album after album?
Rob Hirst: Not really. Because Australia has been going through a very fascinating period here.
And the band has always proudly and defiantly written about what’s going on here, which sometimes has had a universal application and people have been able to understand what we’re going on about.
I don’t know whether people will make head or tail of this record, because it is actually, like Diesel and Dust, very local and focused, but probably has an application elsewhere. But we’ve never really given that much thought.
And when some of those records got away in the 80s overseas and did incredibly well, it really caught the band by surprise… who thought that we were making local land rights records in the 80s. A couple of songs got away and then the band suddenly found that all this back catalogue, which we thought would be relegated to the dustbin of cultist collections, was now available and was selling really well. Which was one of the great delights.
But really, there’s a wealth of songwriting stuff here. Perhaps it’s got something to do with still being effectively a young country with a great spirit and optimism in spite of lack of leadership in the political area. There’s still this great spirit of the place, and particularly in Sydney with the Olympics coming up. There is certainly a great spirit of what could be, even though it’s not happening right now.
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