If you're here, it'll no doubt be because you've followed my music career in one way or another. This blog is an extension of that career. I am an independent artist who has thrived on the backing of my fanbase and I'm supremely grateful for all of you and your continued interest. Thank you for supporting me, and my art, in all the ways you do. 

My goal for this blog is to create another arm of my community. If there are friends you think might enjoy reading what I'm writing, please let them know about it. And also, importantly, please feel free to comment on the posts if you should feel so moved. I want this to be a place where people can connect and feel part of something. 

Many thanks and much welcome. I really do hope you enjoy it. 

Xx Stringzy 

This is a personal account of what it was like to be on the inside of one of the greatest bands Australia has ever, and may ever, produce. It’s the musings of an Oils fan who became, for eighteen glorious months, an Oil themselves. And a personal commentary of the impact they’ve had. On me and on the Australia I know. 

 

I vividly remember meeting the band for the first time in 2020 as we began rehearsals for the Makarrata Project tour. Jim Moginie called me while I was walking aimlessly through Pacific Square in Maroubra, having fled Victoria by the skin of my teeth to avoid a snap lockdown which had been called the afternoon before, pushing my flight frantically forward by a few days so I’d make it to Sydney for the start of rehearsals. I’d never spoken to Jim before. And there he was, on the other end of the phone. “G’day mate,” he said in his gentle, easy manner as I paced back and forth out the front of Aldi. “Just wanted to say welcome and see that you’ve got everything you need. Did you get the list of songs ok? We keep adding to it, sorry about that”. As far as I was concerned, Jim could fire fifty songs a day at us. I was pumped. Our mutual friend Leah ‘Flano’ Flanagan was the one who’d put me forward for the second BV role next to her. Jim trusted her judgment and there I was, my thongs slapping on the white tiles at an inner-city shopping centre in Sydney, about to sing backing vocals with my best friend for Midnight Oil. 

 

Being part of Midnight Oil, albeit as a session musician, was something I’d never even considered as a goal to have because it sat squarely outside the realm of any possibility I was aware of. Our first rehearsal was at the famous Rancom Street. I’d met Rob before and was always struck by his friendly openness and his support of and interest in other touring musicians. Little did I know how much I would grow to adore him, his slightly off-colour jokes and his deliciously raspy, mischievous laugh. I’d never met Martin. Or Peter. And there they were. Martin quiet, dressed in black, polite, watching. And Peter. Peter Garrett, even taller in person than I’d imagined, with those cheekbones that could cut glass set under piercing blue eyes. Looming, smiling, wary. This couldn’t have been easy for any of them. Leah and I were cognisant from the outset that the reason we were there was that these men had lost their mate. Their beloved Bones. Bones was gone and so was his sweet, strong voice, the water flowing between the granite-like angles of the Oils’ delivery, the yang to Peter’s yin, the lanky Kiwi with the infamously dry sense of humour. Despite this gaping hole and its firm reminder in the form of two trembling backing vocalists, the four Oils made us feel welcome from the outset. Minimal direction, maximum trust. With them was Adam Ventoura, the ‘New Bones’. Lord knows the weight he would have been feeling at those early rehearsals. But Ventoura is a deeply talented and respectful person, and his extraordinary musicality allowed him to learn over ninety of the Oils’ complex, multi-faceted songs and play them with a passion reserved only for the most dedicated Midnight Oil fan and the skill of one of the best bass players in the country. Ventoura, Flano, Andy Bickers (saxophone) and I went on to form what I know will be an enduring friendship gang, ‘The Kids Table’ to insiders. One of the many gifts from this experience. 

 

That first rehearsal was like watching an old V6 Torana fire up. Grumbling and spluttering and then gradually roaring to life, spewing smoke and sparks, hitting the open freeway and taking off, the chassis rising under them, the cylinders all alight. Here they were. Midnight Fucking Oil. And that rehearsal was the first of the dozens of times I’d get to see them play over the next year and a half during which time I’d become deeply familiar with every corner of their extraordinary back catalogue from the best seat in the house. Jim crooned casually, “Would you mind playing a bit of acoustic on Beds Are Burning, Liz? Oh, actually also on Blue Sky Mine?” As it turned out, I was fine with that and a few more guitar songs for me were added over the months. Heaven.  

 

The Makarrata tour was sewn up after a month in mid 2020, and I left that experience glowing with gratitude, my head swimming with surreal memories of being on stage with the best band in Australia. Leah and I were under the impression that our part was over. But, in a glorious twist, I got the email from the Oils management about the Resist tour when I was in the carpark of Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital following my first Pfizer injection. As a born and bred (and recently returned ex-pat) Melburnian, things were grim. Even my seemingly indefatigably introverted love of being inside on my own writing songs on Logic was beginning to wane. This email from the Oils about another tour was a lifeline. It was a plucking from the depths by the hand of the Rock Gods, a bright flare fired above the equal parts aching mundanity and panic of the Covid-19 trenches.

 

While the Makarrata Tour had glided unaffected for a full month like an untouchable golden child through the perils of that first year of the pandemic, the initial part of the Resist tour was not without its challenges. Rob got Covid first. Then Peter went down in Darwin, the Darwin and Cairns dates cancelled and the crew and trucks turned around and sent home a couple of hundred kilometres outside of the NT capital. Leah and a couple of the crew got it at Blues Fest in Byron Bay and then the Canberra show was pulled ten minutes after we were scheduled to go on stage due to dangerous conditions caused by unabating, intense rain all day and night. (That Tuesday happened to be sandwiched between two glorious, autumnal Canberra days.) The Oils management handled it with trademark grace and pragmatism and shuffled and shifted and reimagined until all shows were rescheduled for later in the year. 

 

In late May we set off for North America and Europe. A blur of hotels and time zones amid nightmarish airport and train experiences as the US and Europe catapulted back from the last two summers of Covid in a frenzy of travel and revelry. So much bread and cheese, those Euro hotel breakfasts and gourmet show catering, wristbands, boarding passes, lobby calls, washing clothes in the bath, walking kilometres a day through cobbled streets on summer days off, an uncountable number of double espressos, WIFI passwords and elusive USB ports on trains. 

And then the shows. Watching the Oils come alive on every stage. Every single performance wrung dry, nothing left on the park, sweating and steaming and spitting their way through over two hours of masterful composition and delivery, the fierce energy marshalled by their unabating respect for their audience. Martin and Jim’s completely opposing but profoundly harmonious guitar styles and their clean, perfect tones placed at the front of the mix by Colin Ellis, the front-of-house legend. Rob’s other-worldly energy, stamina and charisma on drums and vocals and Peter’s ‘born-to-be-a-front-man’ performances and fearless onstage commentary about the state of US democracy, the Ukrainian war, the brutal colonial legacies of Belgium and England. The shows were lit by Alex Saad, the best and most talented in the business and our in-ear-monitors deftly balanced by Kenno. This wasn’t just a legendary band, but a legendary crew with dozens of years’ experience between them and as many stories, the best ones beginning with ‘I’m not going to tell you who this is actually about’ and ending in complete disclosure about everything and everyone involved. Which will forever remain in the tour cone. 

 

We were in Washington DC the day Roe v Wade was overturned and arrived in London to watch Boris Johnson’s resignation. We all felt and lamented the palpable difference in the US since the devastating combination of Trump and the pandemic, a culture on the edge, an empire crumbling. Countless conversations on train platforms and at boarding gates and around breakfast tables about politics and the state of arts funding in Australia, about music and tv shows and guitars, the delightful moments when Peter would launch into a ‘war story’ and say, ‘sorry, I’ll just tell you one’ and we’d beg him, like children cross-legged on the mat, to tell us one more. There was also a lot of shit-talking and stupid joke-making. A lot. A time-honoured strategy to break up the monotony of the road. 

 

And it was during these weeks and months that the lines between who the Oils had always been to me as a music fan and their roles as my road companions became blurred. The Oils became mates. And so did their wives and partners, most of whom were on tour with us. Road warriors themselves, supportive, smart, funny women. I also bonded with the crew during those weeks overseas. We were all in close quarters and got to know each other in a way that hadn’t happened on the Australian tour so far. We became a unit. A bunch of units, if you will. We strolled through the streets of Paris and Leipzig together, huddled on trains and schlepped bags over countless town squares and concourses. I began to rely on them like one does on tour companions. For a good joke, for a spark in the belly. 

 

People have asked me what it was like to be on stage with the Oils. But interestingly, it was the moments that Leah and I were watching side of stage, during the songs we didn’t sing or play on, that I found the most profoundly exciting. There they were. Midnight Fucking Oil. On stage we were concentrating, doing our job, inside the music and the songs. But offstage we were fans. And every night I’d watch with my mouth agape as they performed Only the Strong, Read About It, If Ned Kelly Was King. Slightly different every night but with the same extraordinary force. The synergy of the five of them, meeting at that unreplicable juncture of musicality, vulnerability and muscle.

 

The last run consisted of more shows in Australia and a completely delightful week and a half in Aoteoroa. The mantle of Best Tour Catering was awarded unanimously to Auckland, not least for an unparalleled desserts buffet which was responsible for The Kids Table emerging from the dining room like bulging toddlers following a clandestine trip to their parents’ sweets pantry. The emotion of the enormity of this run began to settle into the bottom of my stomach. The Oils aren’t ones for particularly overt displays of emotion themselves. The shows were all approached with the same routines and trademark professionalism. But there was a bubbling under the surface. Among the band and their families, the crew and the entire team. This was it. I first felt it palpably during the Monday night Palais show in Melbourne. Granted, it was my hometown, but there was definitely something extra-charged about those Palais gigs. The performance of 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 in album sequence was extraordinary. That whole set was a masterclass in rock’n’roll. And punk. Jagged and driving and relentlessly intense. The venue was one moving animal, the punters heaving out their lifelong love for this band into their every movement, the air thick and alive. Everyone there knew how important this gig was. How important this band is. And that we’ll never know anything like them again. 

We got to know the faces in the front row of the Oils gigs pretty well. Some of these dedicated fans came to every single Australian show – some even turning up in the States and Europe. As the shows ticked on, I began to understand and respect, more and more, why someone would commit their life to a band like this. Some people follow their football team everywhere, the games punctuations of passion in the swampy ordinariness of everyday life. For the Powderworkers it’s no different. This is their community, the place where they feel most alive and most who they are. And if you’re going to see a band literally hundreds of times, this is the one. As the last shows ticked on, the emotion in the faces of these front rows became more and more raw and it was these people who I knew would be most affected by the Oils hanging up the touring spurs. The end, in some cases, of a lifelong era. 

 

Finally, the Sydney Hordern Pavilion arrived. The last show. Like any good grand final preparation, this game was approached like every other. Routines, warmups, nothing special or out of the ordinary. The setlist settled minutes before the beginning of the gig (again, not unusual). A (long) list of songs whittled from 40 years of releasing music and touring. Four decades of the tectonic shifts of Australian domestic affairs, environmental threats and world politics. And for the four Oils, a career beginning at the start of adulthood, which would oversee marriages, the starting of families and the developing of other life paths and projects. All of this documented in their remarkable songs. Their deep interest in the world around them, their concern for Australian people from every corner of the country, their decision to go in instead of away, to begin their learning with the Warumpi band members and their families, to face the consequences of lives lived as privileged migrant Australians, opening themselves to vulnerability, discomfort and challenge. Their fearless public commentary about the inequities and complacencies in Australian life and the relentlessly apathetic approach of successive federal governments. Their decision to put their money where their mouths are and campaign for environmental protection, often at considerable personal and professional risk. They never separated their life from their music and their authenticity and idiosyncrasy as a band steamed onwards, never docking in the harbours of fashion or the search for mainstream popularity. Which is what made them, more than anything, so relentlessly cool. 

 

As the Hordern show drew to a close after almost four hours, my tears began making their way up to the surface and I left the stage sobbing uncontrollably, which continued for a good half hour, much to the mirth of the band and crew. I wasn’t crying because my personal Oils experience had come to an end, although I knew I was about to face the mother of all tour comedowns. I was, and am, profoundly grateful for every second of it and constantly reminded myself to remain present and to suck all of it in. Which I did. I was weeping for the end of an extraordinary era of Australian music and activism. A band that is unabashedly Australian, who spoke deeply and critically to Australian issues and who, in doing so, affected not only Australian people, but people all over the world. It was profoundly moving to see audiences everywhere from Brussels to Toronto singing the Oils’ songs, tears streaming down their faces, their bodies in rapture. As Ventoura said, Moginie should be considered as one of Australia’s greatest composers, a simply extraordinary musician. And in the same vein, Rotsy is one of the greatest, if not the greatest Australian rock’n’roll guitar player, Rob (apart from his obvious chops as a drummer) one of Australia’s greatest songwriters, and Peter (in my opinion) the most magnetic front man Australia has ever produced, sitting on that double-seated throne next to his old mate George Rrurrambu. And the sum of their parts, like every great band, was a force of nature to behold. There was nothing like them before and there’ll be nothing like them again. 

 

“I’m just so grateful”, I sobbed backstage at the Hordern. “What you’ve done for this country”. Jim put his arm around me and told me with a firm gentleness to shut up. Sure, I was high on adrenaline and buzzing with the energy of 2000 deeply emotional punters but I stand by it. I was, and remain, deeply grateful to Midnight Fucking Oil.