Midnight Oil history

Bird Noises (EP), Powderworks, 1980, reissued, Columbia.

Place Without a Postcard, Powderworks, 1981, reissued, Columbia.

Politically charged guitar driven rock songs (United States Forces, Short Memory) from their 1982 album 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 helped push them high into the Australian charts.

Formed in the Northern Territory at Papunya, the Warumpi Band won the best band competition at the 1983 Aboriginal Country Music Festival and released the first rock single sung in an Aboriginal language.

Their 1984 album Red Sails in the Sunset reached number 1.

In July 1986, Midnight Oil and the Warumpi Band toured through some of the most remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Midnight Oil, the Australian rock band, was introduced to United States audiences through their hit "Beds Are Burning" (1987), considered one of the most potent political rock songs of all time.

Blue Sky Mining (includes “Stars of Warburton,” “Antarctica,” and “One Country”), Columbia, 1989.

Guarino, Mark "Midnight Oil ." Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians Since 1990. . Encyclopedia.com.

Garrett was president of Australia Conservation Foundation, 1991, and is a board member of Greenpeace.

In 1992 the group issued a compilation of live performances called Scream in Blue, which Fricke evocatively described as “real guitar nirvana: crisp, catalytic agit-twang, pregnant with steely menace, shivering with skittish vibrato and erupting in enraged screams of ice-pick feedback.”

Additional information for this profile was obtained from Columbia Records press materials, 1993.

From 2001 into the next year, Midnight Oil embarked on an ambitious club tour of the United States, playing sold-out shows in most cities.

In late 2002 Garrett announced his retirement to become a full-time environmental activist.