Finally, Midnight Oil Launches a Personal Tack : Pop music: For years, the band, which plays in Irvine tonight, has stuck mostly to political songs. Now it’s trying for a more intimate approach.

Any coffeehouse pontificator will tell you that the personal is political.

But Midnight Oil, a rock band consumed with politics, seems to be struggling to find a voice that is more intimate, more personal.

The Australian band has devoted most of its 15-year recording career to songs inspired by the social and political currents around it.

The Oils, as their home-country fans affectionately dubbed them, have sung with dread and anger about nuclear threats and environmental dangers that shadow the world at large, and about the march of industrialized, politically connected greed across the landscape of its own country.

It has sung against racism while taking the part of Australia’s aboriginal peoples, whose disastrous historical encounters with European colonists parallel those of American Indians.

That may sound like an agenda for a left-leaning editorial page rather than a rock ‘n’ roll concert stage. But Midnight Oil has been able to marshal impressive resources that make it a bracing rock band rather than a very loud debating society.

The stunning, singular front man, Peter Garrett, is a towering, shaven-headed figure who St. Vitus-dances his way through concerts. Behind him, guitarists Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey, drummer Rob Hirst and bassist Bones Hillman play and harmonize with a musical acumen that calls to mind the Who in its merger of pure power with pure pop.

The result is politicized rock that emphasizes the emotions behind the issues andseeks ultimately to energize and uplift a listener rather than merely to point an accusing finger at perceived wrongdoers.

As Hirst put it in a recent phone interview from a tour stop in San Francisco, “No one would be in any way interested in what we were saying politically unless there were some killer melodies and good rhythms where you could move your feet.”

What has been missing, though, are songs in which hopes and heartaches are played out in a more intimate arena, where the issues aren’t so much about social equity and species survival, as the thorny business of living, one human being to another, with the transaction of sorrows and joys and frustrations that entails.

Most of rock’s front-rank songwriters--Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, John Lennon and Robbie Robertson, to name a few--have been at home with the personal as well as the political. For them, the problems between two people do amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Hirst is well aware that Midnight Oil, which headlines tonight at Irvine Meadows, hasn’t attained that balance over the course of its 11 albums and EPs.

“Some people write great love songs. It’s not something we’ve been able to do convincingly because of the preoccupations of the main writers,” said the drummer, who, with Moginie and Garrett, is part of Midnight Oil’s core songwriting troika.

“I feel there should be a place in our repertoire” for love songs, Hirst added. “There have been a couple that approximate love songs. ‘Shakers and Movers’ on the ‘Blue Sky Mining’ record was a fairly personal song.” That song’s refrain went, “I can shake, I can move, but I can’t live without your love.” But it also contained verses about rapacious real-estate developers.

“There have been a few,” Hirst said, “but most people wouldn’t (recognize) it.”

One of those personal/romantic songs that escapes easy recognition is Midnight Oil’s latest single, “Outbreak of Love.”

Hirst, who wrote it, said that he wanted the stately, yearning song to portray what happens when people fall suddenly out of love. He meant to write about “day-to-day personal relationships, where everything is rosy, then suddenly it’s abolished.”

But the song’s broad imagery, full of falling stars, hungry sharks, walls closing in and a world crashing down, could easily lead a listener to assume that “Outbreak of Love” is one more vision of dangerous forces at large on the earth, with a fragile human race hanging in the balance.

In writing it, Hirst said, he had to decide whether to be direct with his lyrics, or to “turn it around” and allow for the more global slant that is Midnight Oil’s specialty.

Hirst said that the band doesn’t have any rules against outright love songs: “As long as you’ve got a killer hook, you could get almost anything through,” he said with a laugh.

But in 1991, when Midnight Oil was taking a break from touring and recording, he got together some friends from the Australian bands Do Re Mi and Hoodoo Gurus and recorded “Ghostwriters,” a side project of “more personal” songs he had written that had not found a place on Midnight Oil’s albums. The album is available in Australia, Japan and Scandinavia, Hirst said, but there are no immediate plans for a U.S. release.

Midnight Oil’s current album, “Earth and Sun and Moon,” does feature a moving song called “In the Valley,” in which Garrett, who wrote the lyrics, proclaims his idealistic hopes for the world, but also engages in a deeply personal meditation on his own family and its history. This anthem, both sorrowful and stirring, hinges on an affecting passage in which Garrett openly mourns the death of his mother.

“It was really Pete’s decision to put such a personal slant to the song,” Hirst said.

The band originally had written the song three or four years ago, but with a different set of lyrics. As it prepared to record its new album in a converted factory outside of Sydney, “Pete came in quite late in the (rehearsals) with this personal story of his family, and (it was) put in such a convincing way that immediately we thought this would be the binding thread that would make the song work.”

To emphasize the song’s personal nature in Midnight Oil’s shows, Hirst said, Garrett has been singing it accompanied only by two keyboards--one played by Moginie, the other by Chris Abrahams, a piano player who has been added to the touring lineup.

Of course, there are still plenty of issue-oriented songs on “Earth and Sun and Moon,” including “Feeding Frenzy,” an indictment of economies predicated on wasteful overconsumption, “Truganini,” based on an historical episode of repression against aborigines on the island of Tasmania, and “My Country,” a mournful broadside at nationalism that Hirst said was inspired by the Bosnian conflict.

And Midnight Oil remains one of the handful of bands most likely to engage in unusual political action. On its last U.S. tour, in 1990, the Oils set up a flatbed truck in front of Exxon’s corporate headquarters and played an unannounced concert to protest the Alaskan oil spill involving an Exxon tanker.

This time around, Hirst said, the band stopped during the Canadian segment of its current tour to play in the middle of a patch of clear-cut forest on Vancouver Island, part of a protest against lumbering practices there.

Working with Daniel Lanois, the U2 producer whose own band opened for Midnight Oil in Canada, the Oils paused to record a single called “The Land.” Hirst said Midnight Oil’s proceeds from the as-yet unreleased recording will help pay court costs for logging protesters who were arrested.

Garrett, who earned a law degree before joining Midnight Oil in 1975 (Hirst and Moginie had been playing together in a precursor band since 1971), is the band’s most visible political voice.

In 1984, he nearly won election to the Australian Senate on a platform emphasizing nuclear disarmament; in 1991, Midnight Oil’s year off, he served as president of an Australian environmental group.

In talking with Hirst, though, it quickly becomes apparent that Garrett’s shaven pate isn’t the only political noggin in the band.

In a chat flowing with stereotypical Aussie good cheer, Hirst ventured analyses of Australia’s economic problems (Hirst commented on how agricultural protectionism abroad is hurting the continent’s wheat farmers, and lamented the fact that such Australian inventions as the high-efficiency, two-stroke automobile engine have been exported rather than kept at home to create good manufacturing jobs).

He also spoke of his own involvement on the boards of two Australian music-industry organizations--one a council that advises the national government on how its actions affect musicians, promoters and record companies, and another that has tried to establish college-level courses teaching the nuts and bolts of the music business.

“I’ve always been rather obsessed about all things historical. I grew up in a family that encouraged vigorous political debate,” Hirst said. “I think I brought that to the band from the word go. When Jim and I began writing songs together, we pretty much marked out our (political) territory from the first chord. There was never any discrepancy in the band as to where we wanted to go.”

Formed in Sydney, Midnight Oil started out playing for $60 a night at a beachside hotel bar to audiences made up largely of surfers. Along with Men at Work and INXS, it was part of a wave of Australian bands that created their own touring circuit in Australia, and used the experience of playing night after night to hone skills that would earn them first a national, then an international, following.

“If you survived the surfing pubs of Sydney and Melbourne, you were likely to survive anywhere,” Hirst said. “It was a good testing ground, but it’s not there anymore, and that worries me.

“The live-music venues have all but closed in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane. Dance clubs have taken away a lot of the live-music scene. You’re not getting a lot of bands to replace the INXSes and Oils. We can’t predict that sort of explosion (of new bands) can be sustained into the latter part of this decade and beyond. It would take a concerted effort by the industry.”

Midnight Oil never expected to explode as forcefully on the American scene as it did in 1988.

Powered by the single “Beds Are Burning,” the band managed to sell more than a million copies of “Diesel and Dust,” a superb album that bristled at injustices done to the aborigines and damage done to the land itself.

The songs were full of imagery and historical allusions that were specifically Australian, yet Midnight Oil managed to turn the jeopardized aborigines into an emblem of issues bearing on an entire jeopardized planet.

“We were always amazed that a record totally about Australia would get such a favorable ear over here. It caught us totally by surprise,” Hirst said.

Given a platinum success and a powerful live act to back it up, some bands would have been plotting strategy to launch themselves toward mega-stardom. That hasn’t happened for Midnight Oil.

The follow-up album, “Blue Sky Mining,” went gold (sales of more than 500,000 copies), but a 1992 live album, “Scream in Blue,” barely flickered on the charts. “Earth and Sun and Moon” topped out earlier this year at No. 49 on the Billboard album chart.

According to Hirst, Midnight Oil did not harbor ambitions for ever-expanding sales, even after its breakthrough with “Diesel and Dust.”

“We never thought that way. We still view that (platinum album) as a sort of fortunate but freak accident in the history of the band. The band has always been in it for the long term and has never taken moves to bring it to the next level faster (if they) would compromise the music and how it should be represented. So there’s no panic” that subsequent albums have failed to expand the audience reached by “Diesel and Dust.”

“The band actually feels more comfortable with a quote ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ approach and categorization. If we were perceived as being this big mainstream band, well, I listen to music being made by artists in that category, and we would have a collective shudder.”

As far as mass attention goes, the eyes of the whole world will be on Midnight Oil’s hometown in the year 2000, when Sydney will host the summer Olympics. Hirst said it is still a bit early for Midnight Oil to be planning a grand gesture to mark the event.

“It’s funny, when Sydney turned 200 back in ‘88, there was a huge display, with incredible fireworks. They pumped our song ‘The Power and the Passion’ over loudspeakers. I don’t know what kind of esteem we’ll be held in” by the year 2000.

Given its already-established track record of longevity, and its so-far undiminished store of power and passion, one suspects Midnight Oil will still be held in good esteem when the millennium rolls around.

* Midnight Oil, Hothouse Flowers and Counting Crows play tonight at 8 at Irvine Meadows, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. $23.50 and $26. (714) 855-6111. * Times Link 808-TIMES

hear a sample of Midnight Oil from its latest album, call TimesLink and press c,11,fh *5560