Midnight Oil - Goat Island, Sydney, Australia, 1-13-1985

Once great thing about my big BBC project is that I've found, over and over, that BBC concert recordings either have the best sound quality or are at least right up there. But that's not always the case. When it comes to the Australian band Midnight Oil, I've found two BBC concerts done by them, one in 1985 and the other in 1993. In both cases, the sound quality is disappointing by BBC standards, and the concerts are rather short. For instance, the 1985 one is only 38 minutes long. So I've decided to post non-BBC concerts that are much better.

This concert represents the peak of the band's early years. They had growing success in Australia, particularly with their 1982 album "10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1" and their 1984 album "Red Sails in the Sunset." But they weren't getting much traction outside of Australia. So they took a couple of years off and then came back in 1987 with their album "Diesel and Dust," which broke them in a big way in the US and Britain. This concert took place not long before their hiatus.

The concert was staged at a dramatic location overlooking Sydney harbor. The concert was put on by a Sydney radio station to celebrate the station's tenth anniversary. The audience was very small for the band at the time, a few hundred people, and all of them were winners in a radio station competition. The concert was professionally filmed and broadcast in Australia at the time. It was later released as part of the DVD "Best of Both Worlds," but it has never been released in audio format.

I figure nearly everything between the songs was edited out for the TV show. For instance, there would have to be some tuning of guitars eventually, but there's none of that here. And there's almost no between song banter. But that just means the band is firing on all cylinders all the way through.

This concert is an hour and 13 minutes long.

01 Best of Both Worlds (Midnight Oil)
02 When the Generals Talk (Midnight Oil)
03 Minutes to Midnight (Midnight Oil)
04 Sleep (Midnight Oil)
05 Only the Strong (Midnight Oil)
06 talk (Midnight Oil)
07 Short Memory (Midnight Oil)
08 Kosciuszko (Midnight Oil)
09 U.S. Forces (Midnight Oil)
10 Jimmy Sharman's Boxers (Midnight Oil)
11 Back on the Borderline (Midnight Oil)
12 Tin Legs and Tin Mines (Midnight Oil)
13 talk (Midnight Oil)
14 Don't Wanna Be the One (Midnight Oil)
15 Power and the Passion (Midnight Oil)
16 Read about It (Midnight Oil)
17 Harrisburg (Midnight Oil)
18 Stand in Line (Midnight Oil)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15124201/MidnightO_1985_GoatIslndSydneyAustralia__1-13-1985_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is a bit low resolution. But I'm using it because it comes from this exact concert, and it shows Sydney harbor in the background.