A music podcast where we discuss our favorite albums, song by song. New episodes every other Tuesday.

157: Midnight Oil - 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (1982)

“I think that a lot of us in [Australia] are scared about sticking our neck out, whether it's in music, or whether it's in some other places. And I think that we just happen to have a certain combination of belligerence, cheek, enthusiasm and passion for what we were doing and what we were saying.”

—Peter Garrett

It’s taken us nearly seven years, but the time has come. Midnight Oil, one of Australia's quintessential bands, is probably best known for its tireless political activism as expressed through hits like "Beds Are Burning" and "Blue Sky Mine," as well as the on-stage acrobatics of their 6′4″ frontman, Peter Garrett. But behind the sloganeering and agitprop, the Oils are a fiendishly creative and charmingly oddball band, and their 1982 Australian breakout album 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, recorded at a make-or-break moment for the group, was when they first really landed on their unmistakable aura. Rich has been an Oils fan literally since he was a teenager, and he’s called in Ben and returning special guest Dave Weigel to deconstruct 10 to 1 and all of the power and the passion that went into these incredible songs.

Miscellany

The following sources provided a good deal of the background info for this episode:

The 2024 documentary The Hardest Line is a career-spanning deep dive into the Oils, featuring interviews with every band member. As of the release of this episode, it’s only available to stream in Australia, so U.S. residents will need a VPN, which is a device that fools your ISP into thinking the toilet in your home flushes counterclockwise.
Beds Are Burning: Midnight Oil – The Journey, by friend, fan and occasional Midnight Oil employee Mark Dodgson, is a detailed recounting of the Oils’ career from someone who knew the band well, though it suffers from some structural and pacing issues.
Willie’s Bar and Grill is Rob Hirst’s memoir of the band’s bus tour across North America directly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and is an extremely funny travelogue of the band’s experiences in a different kind of outback at a very strange time in history.
Sounds Like an Ending by Glen Humphries is an exhaustively researched, track-by-track breakdown of 10 to 1 and Red Sails in the Sunset, providing loads of valuable Australian context that would have otherwise gone right over Rich’s Yankee head.

The Maralinga nuclear tests were also the subject of the 1986 song “Maralinga (Rainy Land)” by Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls. And for the record, Rich does not think that “Maralinga” by the Oils should have been a fun party song, or anything other than what it already is.
The Oils and the Wiggles have technically collaborated once, on a pan-Australian project called “EveryOneBand” that included more than 3,000 members, including Peter Garrett and several of the original Wiggles. The collective released one song called “Stand by You” in 2018.
This is Dave’s seventh appearance on Discord & Rhyme, and if you’d like to hear him again, he previously joined us to talk about Todd Rundgren, Yes, Pet Shop Boys, the Numero Group power pop compilation Yellow Pills: Prefill, Sparks, and Kylie Minogue.

Discord & Rhyme Roll Call

Rich Bunnell (host)
Ben Marlin (moderator)
Dave Weigel (special guest)

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 tracklist

Outside World
Only the Strong
Short Memory
Read About It
Scream in Blue
US Forces
Power and the Passion
Maralinga
Tin Legs and Tin Mines
Somebody’s Trying to Tell Me Something

Other clips used

Midnight Oil:

Beds Are Burning
Blue Sky Mine
Run by Night
Stand in Line
Wedding Cake Island
Don't Wanna Be the One
Scream in Blue (live)
Dreamworld
Lucky Country
Warakurna
Kosciuszko
The Dead Heart
Redneck Wonderland
Truganini
Gravelrash

Others:

The Wiggles - Hot Potato
The Beach Boys - Surfin' USA
Kate Bush - Sat in Your Lap
Todd Rundgren - Love of the Common Man
The Wiggles - I Went to the Library
Wire - Nice Streets Above
The Waterboys - The Big Music
Simple Minds - Alive and Kicking
Big Country - In a Big Country
The Fixx - Stand or Fall
The Alarm - Rain in the Summertime
U2 - New Year's Day
The Chaser - US Bases
The Wiggles - Do the Daddy Long Legs
Candlebox - Far Behind
Prince and the Revolution - Darling Nikki
The Go-Betweens - Cattle and Cane
The Wiggles - The Fish Starts to Swim
The Wiggles - I Count Ten Stairs

Band/album personnel

Peter Garrett – lead vocals
Peter Gifford – bass, vocals
Rob Hirst – drums, vocals
Jim Moginie – guitars, keyboards
Martin Rotsey – guitars
Gary Barnacle – brass (7)
Peter Thoms – brass (7)
Luke Tunney – brass (7)

Credits

“Discord & Rhyme (theme),” composed by the Other Leading Brand, contains elements of:

Duran Duran - Hungry Like the Wolf
Amon Düül II - Dehypnotized Toothpaste
The Dukes of Stratosphear - What in the World?? ...
Faith No More - Midlife Crisis
Herbie Hancock - Hornets
Kraftwerk - Autobahn
Talking Heads - Seen and Not Seen
Midnight Oil - Only the Strong (this episode only)

You can buy or stream 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and other albums by Midnight Oil at your local record store, or the usual suspects such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Amazon. Follow Discord & Rhyme on Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky @DiscordPod for news, updates, and other random stuff. Editing and production are by Rich Bunnell, and special thanks to our own Mike DeFabio, the Other Leading Brand, for our amazing theme song. See you next album, and keep as cool as you can.