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

March 18, 2025 / Amanda Rodgers

“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.

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tags / Rich Bunnell

149: A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory (1991)

October 01, 2024 / Amanda Rodgers

Here we go, yo! It's been a while since this podcast has covered either a hip-hop album or a jazz album — so this week, we're doing both at once! A Tribe Called Quest formed in the late ‘80s in the New York City neighborhood of St. Albans, Queens, which was home to some of the giants of jazz, blues, and funk, and was a hotbed of musical activity in the years when hip-hop was simmering into existence. On Tribe’s 1991 album The Low End Theory, members Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, and Ali Shaheed Muhammed pay tribute to this rich musical legacy with an album that charted a new path for hip-hop by exploring its roots in bebop, hard bop, post-bop, all the other bops, and more. This album isn’t just a classic – it’s one of the sacred texts of the hip-hop genre, and it helped Rich get into jazz after years of failed attempts. So if you’re a jazz aficionado who’s on the fence about hip-hop, or vice versa, we invite you to crank up the bass and check the (discord and) rhime with us. Just watch out for the dungeon dragon!

2 Likes

tags / Rich Bunnell

136: Kylie Minogue - X (2007)

March 05, 2024 / Discord and Rhyme

Kylie Minogue had a big comeback last year with the Grammy-winning TikTok hit “Padam Padam,” so Rich decided that it was finally time to give the Discord & Rhyme treatment to one of his favorite divas. Kylie’s 2007 album X wasn’t just an artistic comeback, but a physical and emotional one, recorded in the wake of her grueling but successful treatment for breast cancer. At the time, there was a groundswell of anticipation for her next big move, and X was the first album Kylie conceived as a singular project, rather than the latest entry in a production line of releases. Accordingly, there’s a certain vivaciousness and a willingness to try anything on this album that makes it unlike anything in her catalog, with songs that evoke Timbaland, Serge Gainsbourg and ‘90s R&B sitting alongside Kylie’s trademark Eurodisco. Some of the experiments work better than others, but the album as a whole is a fascinating portrait of a moment in time, both for mid-2000s pop music as well as Kylie herself. And Rich has invited returning guests Jen Carman and Dave Weigel to help elaborate on why you, too, should be so lucky to let Kylie’s music into your life.

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130: The Dukes of Stratosphear - Chips From the Chocolate Fireball (1987)

November 21, 2023 / Amanda Rodgers

It’s time for a psychedelic podcast extravaganza, five years and two recordings in the making! The album Chips from the Chocolate Fireball by XTC’s alter-egos the Dukes of Stratosphear was supposed to be our fifth episode, but technical difficulties turned the episode into a splendid cream bun. But Rich, Ben, and Mike are finally back for a second round discussing a collection that perhaps isn’t XTC’s definitive artistic achievement, but it’s possibly the most pure fun you can have in their discography. Artistically adrift in the mid-’80s, the band adopted goofy pseudonyms and recorded a loving tribute to the ’60s music of their youth, produced by psychedelic engineering wizard John Leckie. If you enjoy Pink Floyd, the Byrds, the Small Faces, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, and especially the Beatles – which you most likely do, because you’re listening to this podcast – you owe it to yourself to take a bike ride to the moon with the Dukes.

3 Likes

tags / Rich Bunnell

123: Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - Naturally (2005)

August 15, 2023 / Amanda Rodgers

Are you ready to do the Dap Dip? This week, the Discord & Rhyme Super Soul Revue travels back to 2005 to discuss Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, who play sunny R&B that sounds like it came straight out of the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. But despite the retro sound, there’s nothing retro about this band, who were just playing the music they loved and recording it the way they loved it. And Sharon Jones herself was the real deal, a classic diva who was born in the South literally across the state line from James Brown. The world lost Sharon Jones to cancer in 2016, but her voice lives on in the Dap-Kings’ catalog, which includes six wonderful studio albums and innumerable covers recorded for hire. So put a fish in your dish and join Rich, Mike, and Dan to talk about an album that will make you fall in love with soul all over again.

2 Likes

tags / Rich Bunnell

111: The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic (2000)

January 31, 2023 / Amanda Rodgers

The New Pornographers winkingly call themselves an “indie rock supergroup,” even though none of their members were performing before crowds larger than 200 when they formed. Since then, they’ve grown into critical darlings with a cult following and an intimidating spread of studio albums and solo releases, but they were never scrappier, hungrier, and more fascinating than on their 2000 debut, Mass Romantic. Buoyed by bandleader Carl “A.C.” Newman’s sturdy pop songwriting, Dan Bejar’s looser, more whimsical compositions, and Neko Case’s superhuman vocals, the album packs six or seven hooks into every song. The results are both exhilarating and exhausting, and that ebullient energy is exactly why Rich has loved them for more than two decades. If you’ve never listened to the New Pornos before but enjoy great pop music, we hope this becomes a new favorite – because, after all, hope grows greener than grass stains.

1 Likes

tags / Rich Bunnell

109: Fleetwood Mac - Rumours (1977)

December 20, 2022 / Amanda Rodgers

Did you hear? Discord & Rhyme is continuing our holiday tradition of discussing bands who despise each other, and this year it’s the legendary Fleetwood Mac. After their foundation as a British blues band, they went through years of unbelievable turmoil before hiring a couple of Americans to add some sunny California rock to their sound. The result of all this was 1977’s Rumours, famously one of the best-selling albums of all time and inescapable to this day on classic rock radio. We’re taking a close look at this very famous album to see whether all that hype is truly deserved, and it turns out (spoiler alert) it totally is. So come along with us. We have some dreams we’d like to sell.

3 Likes

tags / Amanda Rodgers, Rich Bunnell, Mike DeFabio, Benjamin Marlin

103: Madvillain - Madvillainy (2004)

September 27, 2022 / Amanda Rodgers

As luck would have it, two of Discord & Rhyme’s most powerful villains have been turned loose for an episode that will strike terror into the hearts of men! This week, Rich and Mike take on the 2004 hip-hop classic Madvillainy, a team-up between MF DOOM, a rapper with a metal mask and a tragic, comic-book backstory, and Madlib, a DJ with eclectic taste and an unpredictable, artfully imprecise style. The album’s 22 tracks unfold like a fever dream over just 46 minutes, with samples drawn from Bollywood, Brazilian music, Zappa, and Sun Ra crashing headfirst into snippets from old cartoons. And this is all presided over by DOOM, who packs almost unfair amounts of wordplay and meaning into every line. It may seem like chaos at first, but there’s a method to Madvillainy, and it shows how hip-hop can contain the world.

2 Likes

tags / Rich Bunnell

088: New Order - Substance (1987)

February 01, 2022 / Amanda Rodgers

We used to think that the day would never come, but Discord & Rhyme has reached a new milestone: it’s our first singles compilation! New Order issued Substance in an effort to bail out Factory Records, whose financial mismanagement is the stuff of legend. But that also meant that the label was willing to spend money on cool new equipment for the band, which meant that they were always one step ahead of the game technologically, leading an unintentional revolution in electronic dance music. Substance spans the years 1981–1987, during which the band rose from the ashes of Joy Division, issued the groundbreaking 12-inch single “Blue Monday,” and ascended to arena stardom with appearances on major soundtracks such as Pretty in Pink and hits such as “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “True Faith.” They’re one of Rich’s very favorite bands, so join us as he leads Mike and John on the journey from Manchester to Madchester.

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082: Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party (1985)

October 19, 2021 / Amanda Rodgers

This is Halloween, this is Halloween! But instead of pumpkins screaming in the dead of night, we’re throwing a Dead Man’s Party with the help of Danny Elfman and his punk-new wave-ska-pop-rock band, Oingo Boingo. This classic album from 1985 marks a transition from Oingo Boingo’s earlier yelping weirdness into a more mature and radio-friendly sound, but never fear - they’re still just as creepy and strange as ever. The result is an album that’s intense, catchy, melodic, and fun, and has become a rightful Halloween classic. So leave your body and soul at the door and join us, because there’s always room for maybe just one more.

1 Likes

tags / Rich Bunnell, Amanda Rodgers

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Miscellany

Other links

Discord & Rhyme Roll Call

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

Other clips used

Band/album personnel

Credits