Love, Protest and Passion : Australia’s Midnight Oil Adds a Bit of Romance, but Heart of Its Message Is in Global Issues

Midnight Oil may be the only rock band that could insert one of the world’s most prevalent pop cliches into a song--”I can’t live without your love”--and seem enigmatic rather than merely trite.

The Australian band, which plays tonight at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, has staked its identity on bristling, hard-edged protest rock. When Midnight Oil isn’t lashing out against nuclear arms buildups, corporate greed and environmental ruin, it usually can be heard sounding stirring anthems full of embattled resolve and faith that a change is indeed going to come.

It comes as something as a shock, then, to hear Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil’s imposingly tall, shaven-headed singer, moan “I can’t live without your love” in the middle of “Shakers and Movers.” In other respects, the track from the band’s current “Blue Sky Mining” album is a true-to-form Oils lamentation that decries the paving-over of natural riches in the name of economic development.

Speaking over the phone from Los Angeles this week, Garrett tried to clarify the band’s uncharacteristic use of the L-word.

“It’s used in a dual sense, I think,” the 6-foot-6 singer said in a gravelly but gently modulated voice. “It’s used in the classic emotional sense, but also in the sense of the embrace of the planet which keeps us alive.”

Midnight Oil’s love-pledge to the earth still places it far from the romantic sentiments that are the foundation for most pop songs. That sets Midnight Oil apart, but the band’s reluctance to delve into one-to-one relationships also has kept it from tapping into a deep fount of emotion. Some of the most thoughtful rock songwriters have achieved deep political resonances by setting romantic, person-to-person love within a wider social frame. Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” is a particularly inspired instance; Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” is a more recent textbook example of how well a song can work when romantic love is woven into a social fabric.

While Garrett says that Midnight Oil would like to expand into songs that examine love in a more personal sense, the way in which love has so often been abased and turned into a pop cliche gives him pause.

“It’s always something you have to be careful about. There’s so much devalued use of the word, and when you use it, you want to use it well. The challenge is to give the word meaning again. You can do it with committed performance.”

“I’m sure we’d love to write a ‘No Woman, No Cry,’ but it’s not that easy to do,” he added with a chuckle.

Garrett, 37, said there was no decisive, revelatory experience or event that set Midnight Oil on course to become a town crier among rock bands.

“It was just a gradual dawning over time that there were things going on that were being perpetrated by politicians that didn’t make sense to me or the band, and we started writing about them,” he said.

Drummer Rob Hirst and guitarist Jim Moginie have been more prolific than Garrett in writing Midnight Oil’s repertoire of broadsides. But Garrett has served as the band’s point man, both as an eye-catchingly dynamic on-stage figure and an activist offstage spokesman.

A lawyer as well as a rocker, Garrett ran a credible but ultimately unsuccessful campaign in 1984 as the Nuclear Disarmament Party’s candidate for the Australian Senate. When Midnight Oil first toured the United States in 1984 and 1985, Garrett recalled, it met pockets of resistance to its steadfast seriousness.

“It was the height of Reagan’s popularity: ‘America is great, we’re doing wonderfully, don’t worry.’ Some shows we did, people were throwing things, and yelling, ‘Who the hell are these guys?’ or ‘Get off’ or ‘Lighten up.’ That’s only three shows in 3,000, but it did happen, and it was good for us, too. It made us more determined.”

There is little danger of that happening now. Midnight Oil broke through to mass success in 1988 with “Diesel and Dust,” a superb album inspired by the band’s travels in the Australian Outback. Like all of Midnight Oil’s albums, it was full of references to people, places and issues that are specifically Australian. But in centering on the plight of Australia’s threatened Aborigines, “Diesel and Dust” was hardly arcane or parochial. The big scale and palpable passion in the performances made it clear that Australia was a microcosm for the entire globe. In songs such as the band’s breakthrough hit, “Beds Are Burning,” it was clear that the precarious state of Aborigine culture was emblematic of the endangered state of all humanity.

Coursing through “Blue Sky Mining” is an optimism, or at least a fervent, if beleaguered faith, that humanity can overcome greed and division and save itself. “One Country” offers a Utopian vision of world unity. At the end of the environmental disaster song, “Blue Sky Mine,” a cleansing rain comes out of nowhere to restore a scarred landscape in an echo of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.”

To Garrett, what seems to be a leap of faith is actually a form of pragmatism that can lead to earth-saving action.

“It is highly idealistic, when you look around you, to even start talking that way,” he said of the quasi-religious vision in “One Country.”

“But it is highly necessary. Human survival depends on us looking after our own and each other.”

Any band that sings out against corporate powers, yet enjoys mass success in a corporate business, is going to have to face up to ironies--even a band as forthright as Midnight Oil.

There’s more than a little irony in a band skewering the “great god of development” in “Shakers and Movers,” yet playing a concert that, if financially successful, will benefit one of America’s wealthiest real estate developers, Donald Koll, the majority shareholder in Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. That’s one instance of how the pure, clear lines that Midnight Oil draws in its performances must inevitably become blurred in real life. But, as Garrett pointed out, the alternative to going out in the world and risking ironies and inconsistencies is to live an ascetic life of isolation: “You can sit in an ashram on top of a hill, playing your music to 20 people.”

It’s also important to remember that the glory of the political pop song is its ability to cut through all ironies and inconsistencies for a brief moment and convey the intensity of emotion underlying a vividly stated point of view. Regardless of how many qualifications, contradictions and compromises would enter the picture if its songs’ premises were subjected to the back-and-forth debate of actual politics, Midnight Oil creates pop-political moments that hit with undeniable impact.

“I don’t want to claim any great insight or importance in the process,” Garrett said of Midnight Oil’s role in affecting the issues it raises with its music. “We just want to claim our views are real and tangible, based on our own experiences. We’re just trying to have our own voices, to express our own heart.”

Midnight Oil and Hunters & Collectors play tonight at 8 at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on Irvine Center Drive in Irvine. Tickets: $19.50 to $21.50. Information: (714) 855-8096.