Midnight Oil consists of Dwayne Hillman (bass, vocals), Jim Moginie (guitar, keyboards, synthesizer, vocals), Martin Rotsey (guitar), Peter Garrett (vocals, harmonica), Rob Hirst (drums, percussion, vocals).
Midnight Oil was an Australian rock band known for their driving hard rock sound, intense live performances and their overt left-wing political activism.
" Burning the midnight oil" means working late into the night, by means of an oil lamp. " Smells of the midnight oil" characterizes poetry or prose studded with laboured literary allusions and arcane vocabulary.
The Oils, as they are known to their fans, began as a progressive rock band called Farm in the early 1970s, then under the Midnight Oil name became an aggressive, hard-rock group associated with the surfer community near Sydney. One of their early fan bases was at the Sydney northern beaches pub The Royal Antler at Narrabeen.
Although consistently championed by Sydney alternative rock station Double Jay and its FM band successor Triple J, Midnight Oil, like many independent bands of the period, were almost totally ignored by Australia's mainstream commercial radio stations.
The Oils developed a strong "street cred" and a reputation for making no compromises with the music industry. In support of this, it was often stated that they were one of the few major Australian bands of the era never to have appeared on the all-powerful ABC TV pop show Countdown. While this was strictly true, the fact is that they had indeed been scheduled to appear in the early Eighties, but they were "bumped" from the show. According to producer Michael Shrimpton, on the day of the taping, the band had arrived late for rehearsal but (due to the show's very tight schedule and budget) there was a strict policy that latecomers were not allowed to appear, so they were told they could not perform that day. In retaliation, the group declared that they would never appear on the show, a promise they faithfully kept.
