I’m very deeply saddened to listen to of the demise of Rob Hirst.
Midnight Oil has been my favorite band since I used to be a younger teenager, and nonetheless stays an endlessly renewable useful resource of power and inspiration with each repeat play. Rob’s lyrics, drumming, and vocals are one of many indivisible parts that made Midnight Oil into an Australian cultural and political phenomenon, forming an intrinsic a part of the soundtrack to so many lives and campaigns.
Rob’s presence on stage was extraordinary and unforgettable. As wryly famous by a roadie within the movie, Midnight Oil, 1984, the drum equipment needed to be actually nailed down–such was the power with which Rob struck the devices. There was transcendent energy in Rob’s efficiency–but by no means any sense of aggro. What you had been witnessing was tonic, not poisonous; no aggression however unimaginable power and singularity of goal expressed by motion within the second. The dynamics generated by the members of the band on stage together had been famously exhilarating, with the large and whirling body of Peter Garrett normally the main target of issues. Nonetheless, it was Rob who offered the literal beat for the band’s huge coronary heart.
And offstage, Rob was simply a fully beautiful bloke. It’s generally warned that it is best to by no means meet your heroes, however that merely didn’t apply to Rob Hirst.
Alongside together with his bandmates, Rob was an amazing supporter of the work of Greenpeace. The Oils performed gigs and took quite a few actions on Greenpeace campaigns, among the many many causes and organisations to which the band gave their power and sources. As Andrew Stafford has famous in his obituary within the Guardian, it was Rob’s specific inspiration that the music ‘Hercules’–a part of the epic and historic Species Deceases EP–ought to be an elegy for the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, which had been martyred by French secret service brokers in Auckland Harbour.
Memorably, on their very remaining tour, the Oils collaborated with Greenpeace and others in staging a spectacular intervention towards Woodside Vitality’s climate-wrecking fuel growth plans. Greenpeace may be very deeply grateful to Rob for his deep dedication to environmentalism and social justice over so a few years.
It feels unattainable to even attempt to choose highlights on this uncooked second, so right here’s only one favorite, ‘Solely the Sturdy’–a music written by Rob in extremis–carried out because the opener, reside on the Capitol Theatre in Sydney 1982:
In fact, Midnight Oil wasn’t Rob’s solely band. He discovered time for a variety of different musically various acts, together with Ghostwriters, Backsliders, The Break, and The Hillmans–the latter whose one-off tribute to Midnight Oil bassist and vocalist Bones Hillman, who died from most cancers in 2020, now feels prefer it has an added layer of unhappiness and poignancy.
The audio and video recordings of Rob in full flight with the Oils imply that the power and determination expressed by the music is everlasting; all the time there for anybody on the fringe of themselves, or searching for that vital inspiration and resolve to take the toughest line.
As Rob stated when Midnight Oil obtained the Gold Medal for Human Rights from the Sydney Peace Basis in 2020, ‘the combat goes on, day by day and weekly on this nation’. Rob Hirst could not be bodily with us, however in these troubled instances, his music and spirit might hardly be of larger necessity, or enduring energy and salience.
On behalf of all at Greenpeace, our very deepest condolences to Rob’s spouse Lesley, daughters Alexandra, Gabriella and Jay, and to the surviving members of Midnight Oil, Pete, Martin and Jim.
RIP Rob Hirst.
