Rob Hirst Jim Moginie and Hamish Stuart Outrank Taylor Swift and Olivia Dean On Singles Chart

‘A Hundred Years Or More’, an new EP from Midnight Oil’s Rob Hirst and Jim Moginie and with drummer Hamish Stuart, has debuted at number one of the Australian Top 50 Singles Sales chart.

The Singles Sales Chart measuring songs actually paid for, not streamed. This includes physical discs as well as digital downloads.

Hirst, Moginie and Stuart’s four track EP outsold Taylor Swift ‘A Fate of Ophelia’, KPOP Hunters ‘Golden’ and Olivia Dean’s ‘Man In Need’ in Australia last week.

Here is the proof:

Hirst Moginie Stuart A 100 Years or More chart

Last week I caught up with Rob Hirst to talk about the four tracks on the album. Here’s Rob in his own words explaining each song:

FIRST DO NO HARM

PAUL: Back to the EP – First Do No Harm. “You may be a captain of a dirty industry, chair of a gambling company, lawyer for a gang of thieves…” You’re really telling it like it is with business today, aren’t you?

ROB: Yes. These particular kinds of people who are in charge of massive industries destroying the planet and the environment… As I get older, I just wonder: what conversations do they have with their kids? At a time when they’re talking about temperature rise not of 1.5 – if we’re lucky – but 2.6 degrees, which would be catastrophic.

I know these people probably surround themselves with yes-men and women and don’t live in the real world, but… what the hell, you know? Really.

ARE WE THERE YET?

PAUL: The track Are We There Yet – talking about being future-proof. “Life is just a lottery with half a share of luck.” There are lots of messages in this particular track. “We might be leaving, it makes no difference how far we drive.” Very descriptive line. How were these songs structured? Did you go in with a certain message you wanted to create?

ROB: I think the messages in songwriters’ heads – whether you like it or not – they keep going around and around all night. They wake you up. They bounce around the brain. And it’s only with some objectivity years later that you realise what it was all about.

Suffice to say, Paul, that I’ve been spending much too long in hospital beds. So they’re all about existential, big-picture things.

When we lived in the earliest days – me and my brothers – we lived in Campbelltown, southwest Sydney. Dad would drive down to Austinmer Beach on the South Coast. Plastic seats, hot day, single-lane traffic. And it’d be: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” I thought we could extrapolate that to life because – in my case and like so many others hit from left field by something like pancreatic cancer, which I’ve got – you just don’t know how long you’ve got until something like this comes along and upsets the apple cart.

PAUL: “Carry us out in a road case” – there’s an instruction.

ROB: Yeah, I think that would be highly appropriate. Midnight Oil stencilled on the side.

You’ve got to laugh. You’ve got to have gallows humour. My oncologist, Professor Steven Clark, often says you’ve got to have a real sense of humour to do what he does. Pancreatic cancer is a real killer. It normally takes people out in three to six months. I’m lucky enough to still be around after two and a half years, with the best surgeon, the best gastro guy, the best oncologist, the loveliest nurses, the best facilities.

We’re so lucky in Australia – which we wouldn’t have in the UK, and certainly not in Trump’s America as he dismantles Obamacare.

PAUL: “The best years are wasted on the young.” Talking about yourself there or sending a message to the kids?

ROB: Sending a message to the kids – but it’s not going to make any difference, because they’re never going to get it until it’s too late.

When Midnight Oil finished a few years ago – 3 October at the Hordern Pavilion – I think all of us expected to have this free time after constant touring and recording. Swimming around Greece and Italy. In my case, it hasn’t worked out that way.

And of course we lost the beautiful Bones Hillman from lung cancer. So you just don’t know what’s around the corner.

We’ve been lucky with Midnight Oil. Our small dreams became big dreams, and bigger dreams with constant touring and an international audience. Very lucky.

PAUL: You definitely went out on a high when you came back and did the tours again.

ROB: Yeah. And we were determined to keep making new music right to the end – hence The Makarrata Project with First Nations collaborators, and Resist. So we could put four, five, six new songs in the last tours – Europe, America, Australia.

And the great thing was the new songs fitted in. They didn’t sound like: “What’s this?” They felt like part of the Midnight Oil history. Just more recent.
We certainly can’t be accused of going gently into the night. If anything, we turned up.

A 100 YEARS OR MORE – FEATURING ELLA HIRST

PAUL: A 100 Years Or More – there’s a vocalist on that song. Tell me about your daughter and her work on this.

ROB: True story: I was working the song up on the couch with my lovely old Martn acoustic. Ella lives in Berlin – she’s an artist in Europe. She was out here helping look after me and she overheard the song. She came in and said, “I really like this new song, Dad.”

I showed her the lyrics and she started singing it. It became immediately obvious she should do the lead vocal. She was going back to Europe three or four days later, so I asked her to come down to Jim’s studio 10 minutes away.

Jim was in Ireland, so Ted Howard recorded her vocal. She nailed it. A lovely purity and innocence to her vocal that suits the message perfectly.

This is her first lead vocal. And I’m very happy because Lex (Rob’s other daughter) sang harmonies on First Do No Harm, and of course I made an entire album with my daughter Jay (O’Shea)- The Lost Girls.

I’ve now got all three girls recorded and I’m really happy about that.

HUNGRY AFTER POWER

PAUL: Hungry After Power – we touched on Trump’s America, but this one gets right to the point.

ROB: Yeah. Not beating around the bush.

It’s a song that’s been around for a while – much shorter originally. Jim said he liked it, said it had a Pink Floyd kind of thing. We turned the early part into more of a Billy Bragg-y, busky thing.

Jim engineers, produces, plays guitar, plays keys… He suggested a vocal tone approach. Then I said we could extend the song with a key change at the end – as long as he wanted – so he could play guitar.

Most of our songs are tightly structured. I said, “Just keep playing.” So he did. Six minutes, seven minutes, eight minutes.

He said, “You’re not going to keep that, are you?” I said: “Yes – first take.” It ties in perfectly with a song he played on Midnight’s first album, the Blue Meanie – Nothing’s Lost, Nothing’s Gained – where the film clip features him standing on top of the Leslie cabinet at the Regent Theatre, playing this incredible solo. And he’s just done it again.

PAUL: I must go back and look at that video. Jim’s definitely channeling David Gilmour.

ROB: Absolutely. We could build a styrofoam wall for him – the next best thing.