Peak (Midnight) Oil

RIP Rob Hirst, co-founder and drummer

RIP Rob Hirst of Midnight Oil. Pancreatic cancer. 70. The drummer, engine, co-founder and co-songwriter and backing vocalist for one of the greatest live rock bands I’ll likely ever see in my life.

I’m not old enough to have seen the Clash in 1978, but I did see Midnight Oil in 1988 (Concert Hall, Toronto), so I don’t feel cheated. At all. I had a teenage religious experience at that show. I’m not sure I’ve recovered.

This was weeks before they landed their breakthrough international hit “Beds Are Burning” — that unique and highly unlikely Top 40 pop song about Indigenous reparations. They played the song twice that night.

I still don’t think I’ve ever seen a greater live rock’n’roll performance. Watching a band with that power, at that stage of their career, on a stage that small, was utterly transcendent.

(This week’s live music listings are here.)

While singer Peter Garrett was totally transfixing and the obvious focal point, Rob Hirst’s charisma was more than competitive from behind the kit. It’s not that he was a flashy player, beyond some rapid-fire fills. It was his physical intensity, his backing vocals, and his bedrock-solid rhythm anchoring intense grooves.

You know that ridiculous ’80s video cliché where a drummer hits a snare drum inexplicably filled with water? Watching the tail end of this live 1985 clip of Hirst at work, there’s a similar effect, which I’m pretty sure is achieved organically by the amount of sweat pouring off him and gathering on his drum pads:

While Midnight Oil were internationally successful — second only to with INXS [added:] and Men at Work as Australia’s biggest ’80s musical exports¹ — these days I don’t feel like they get their proper due outside of their homeland. Tragically Hip fans here in Canada, of course, will recall that at the height of Midnight Oil’s popularity, they agreed to open (er, “co-headline”) for the Hip on the 1993 Another Roadside Attraction tour.

I talked to singer Peter Garrett about that here. I wrote more about that tour, and its effect on Gord Downie in particular, in The Never-Ending Present.

Here they are playing “Forgotten Years” at Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration, starting out with Hirst:

Singer Peter Garrett, who later became an Australian cabinet minister, get a lot of credit for Midnight Oil’s lyrics, but the equally articulate Hirst co-wrote most of the band’s songs. Of course, most music fans underestimate drummers in general, so non-Oil fans likely don’t know Hirst’s larger role in the band.

Here’s Hirst taking a rare lead vocal from behind the kit:

On days like these, there’s no shortage of reasons to listen to Midnight Oil right now. Like every word of this, for starters. Which I’m sure Hirst would have a lot to say about.

Here’s a song that could be a soundtrack to Mark Carney’s Davos speech today, defiantly holding out for positive, proactive solutions to address dire realities and how “the old world is not as safe with the new world closing in.” Again, skeptics, tell me why Midnight Oil were not the new Clash?

I listened to that performance 10 times today, each time a little Bit LOUDER. Turn it up!

How many drummers’ obits get more than seven minutes on the national news broadcast?

In 1993, Midnight Oil did an “Intimate & Interactive” on MuchMusic. One viewer asked where they get their optimism from. Rob Hirst’s answer was about loving your country — not in a nationalistic or jingoistic way — but by celebrating progress that has been made to address historical horrors.

I can only imagine the conversations he and Downie probably had about this.

That’s followed by a question to Garrett about his political future, which he downplays by saying, “the Oils will be playing until we drop.”

They did, of course, take a long hiatus starting in 2002, reuniting the odd occasion and then a full world tour in 2017. I caught the show at the Danforth; they did a victory lap at Ontario Place the next year.

Bassist Bones Hillman died in 2020, at 62, of cancer; he didn’t share his diagnosis with his bandmates until shortly before he died.

In 2022 Midnight Oil put out a final album and farewell tour, touching down at Massey Hall for a date that was, by all accounts, incredible. I greatly regret missing it.

Hirst got his own diagnosis shortly after the tour, but didn’t go public with it until last year in an interview with The Australian. After three years with the disease, he chose a medically assisted death this week.

The Guardian and Australian Broadcasting Corporation have obits.

A 2024 documentary has several clips online; here’s a look at the band’s beginnings, starting with Hirst.

1. Unless you count AC/DC as an ’80s band