Number 1 – Midnight Oil – Lucky Country

People who know me will probably have guessed that the Oils were going feature in this list. Not only was their inclusion a given for me, too, I knew what song was going to sit at the very top of the list before I wrote it. down. For me, now and forever, the number one Australian song is Midnight Oil’s ‘Lucky Country’.

‘Lucky Country’ is the final song on the band’s 1981 album, Place Without A Postcard. With two albums already released, the band headed to England to record this one with the highly renowned producer, Glyn Johns, who’d made a name for himself with both The Beatles and The Who. What he lacked in patience and people skills he made up for in confidence. The band did as they were told – which was simply to play and leave the rest up to him. Truthfully, he didn’t do a brilliant job. The album sounded like it could’ve been recorded in 1970, and not in a good way. And the initial digital transfers had a murkiness to them, similar to the kind that beset Pink Floyd’s underrated masterpiece, Animals. Fortunately, remastering would finally come to the rescue in both cases, but not before a good deal of time had elapsed. Additionally, the Oils’ massively successful follow-up album, the all-time classic, 10,9,9,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 – released only 13 months later – saw Place Without A Postcard pushed into the background. With songs like ‘US Forces’, ‘Read About It’ and ‘Power and the Passion’ now on high rotation everywhere, it wasn’t hard to understand why.

In truth, the albums could almost have been the works of two different band. Whereas 10-1 featured loops, drum machines and all manner of studio innovation, Postcard was five blokes playing real instruments in real time. But this ought not be confused with a lack of innovation. The songs are brilliant, the compositions challenging and interwoven. And lyrically, the album is very, very Australian. There’s an emotionally bereft quality to it, a soulfulness that resonates like homesickness. And the band were homesick. Tellingly perhaps, this album didn’t fully click with me until I myself was away from home. Living in London in 1998 provided the context necessary for connection. I was homesick, too, and band soundtracked my emotions with more nuance than I’d known existed. ‘Lucky Country’ is the culmination of all these emotions. It is everything Australia is, was, and is yet to be. It remains an extraordinary, indelible portrait of a nation in motion by a band in motion.

Written (unusually) by four members of the band, ‘Lucky Country’ is hard to categorise and challenging to describe. It starts with a riff that almost seems out of balance, with the rubbery tone of Peter Gifford’s bass guitar high in the mix. The song then develops a thumping, grinding pulse in which the bass and kick drum become virtually indistinguishable. The lyrics are both evocative and oblique in that the ‘feeling I get when I look to the sun’ is uniquely ascribed by each listener. Other details, like the tough power of love are juxtaposed with a desire for an easier life. The tone isn’t hopeful, nor is it exactly grim. It’s restless, relentless, pulsing, agitated.

Bit by bit, the song gets heavier and more intense. The twin guitars of Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey really start to grind, fuse and burn. And Peter Garrett’s voice is a twitchy, angry prototype for the kind of angst-laden groan-croon that Thom Yorke would adopt to great success a little over a decade later. Garrett’s singing is a remarkable thing; an unnatural vocalist with an unlovely timbre, he actively sought make it even rougher in those early years by taking the vocal concept of compression to throat-strangling degrees. Nothing on those early albums offered any indication of just how good an actual singer he’d eventually become. Never, though, has ‘actual singing’ served this song. It benefits greatly from that suffocating, stifling quality with which Garrett imbued it first time around.

The song’s central breakdown builds tension incredibly well. That pulsing dominates, over which Garrett talk-speaks. The line, ‘there’s so much space the heat moves you’ creates the song’s distinctly Australian physical landscape. Rob Hirst’s drumming – a feature of pretty much every Oils song – becomes thrillingly evocative, his tom-tom dominant fills punching the bars in the manner Ringo Starr does on The Beatles ‘A Day in the Life’ or Nick Mason does in the Floyd’s ‘Welcome to the Machine’. It might not be his most famous stick work in an Oils song, but to my ears, it’s probably the most electrifying.

In an aurally surprising move, though, the tension suddenly drops out; the bass, guitar and drums vanish, only to be replaced with acoustic guitars over which Garret mumble-rap-speaks a stream-of-conscious dialogue that feature a kaleidoscopic collusion of imagery, ranging from the serious ‘fragile state of world events’ to the more oblique ‘mutant media babes’. The intensity rapidly rebuilds before hitting its climax; the sing-shout of ‘Lucky Country!’ voiced by the band’s four vocalists. It’s the first use of harmonised vocals in the song, which was surely a strategic choice to maximise the power of this moment.

And as powerful as it is, it pales in comparison to the early live versions of the song. The definitive version of this song is a recording from the Capitol Theatre in 1982. The band don’t truncate the song, but it’s a full minute shorter due to its increased tempo. It’s heavier, wilder. The band is in its untouchable live prime. Garrett and Hirst literally performed to the point of collapse. Oxygen was on hand for them at the end of gigs. When the song reaches its breakdown, Garrett shushes the audience with a finger to the lips. Hirst’s drum fills are like machine gun fire. And when Garrett launches into the sing-speak rant, he’s going so fast he’s virtually incomprehensible. Finally, the song, the stage lights and the band simply EXPLODE. With that two-word burst of ‘Lucky Country’ the Oils created what, for me, is the single greatest moment in Australian music.

Lucky Country? It was first notably described as such by the writer, and journalist Donald Horne, in 1962. In Horne’s opinion, ‘Australia [was] a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.’ I think broadly, Australians have been wrestling with the veracity of this assertion ever since. It’s a hinge-point for our national consciousness, a yardstick for our sense of worth and identity. Are we lucky? Yes, of course. But equitably? Of course not. In the song, Horne’s assertion becomes a self-questioning declaration, a clarion call for self-examination from a young group of articulate, passionate young men who worried about their lives and the lives of their fellow Australians.

Few songs ever aspire to such grand ambitions. Seeking to critique a nation’s sense of self in a rock song is understandably avoided by most artists. But the Oils aren’t most artists. They’ve never given a toss about being true to anything other than their own sense of what Midnight Oil is and is meant to be. They’d have likely made a lot more money if they’d been less concerned about their collective integrity and more willing to write about Love than Luritja Way. But that wouldn’t have been ‘Oil’. The reason they pulled it off? They were just too bloody good to be ignored.

‘Lucky Country’ is as relevant today as it was 43 years ago. We are still trying to know ourselves. To frame our national discourse in a way that honours our luck, that wrestles with the unease that springs from a sense of obligation, that  reconciles the guilt we feel (yet try to deny) as result knowing our good fortune wasn’t so much the result of luck but the result of theft. We are yet to weave these threads into a narrative that we can mutually agree upon and sustain. That cry of ‘Lucky Country!’ keeps calling us back. Long may it call. One day, if we’re lucky, we’ll have arrived at a truly Australian answer.