Midnight Oil - Malkin Bowl, Vancouver, Canada, 6-1-2022

Today, I updated the links for most of the Midnight Oil albums posted here, for various reasons. While doing that, I got to wondering what they were doing lately. I found out they say they performed their last tour in 2022, but they're still open to doing more studio work. I had assumed they would release a live album from that tour, but they haven't. So I found this, which I think is the best bootleg from that tour.

This bootleg stands out because it's a combination of an IEM recording and an audience bootleg. "IEM" stands for "in ear monitor," and it's usually an audio feed meant to help the band members hear themselves, being broadcast directly into earpieces they wear. Soundwise, it's usually like a great soundboard boot. But it can have flaws, such as not including much crowd noise. So mixing in an audience boot can take care of that. In short, this sounds fantastic, the kind of sound one would expect from an official live album.

In 2002, Midnight Oil broke up after being together since the early 1970s. The band's lead singer Peter Garrett then pursued a political career in Australia. He was elected to Parliament, then went on to first be Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, and then Minister for Education. But in 2017 he returned to music and Midnight Oil went back on tour. In 2022, they released, "Resist," their first studio album since 2002. After a short tour in Australia, this was the first show they performed on the tour in North America. This concert includes four songs from the "Resist" album: "At the Time of Writing,"
"Nobody's Child," "Rising Seas," and "Barka-Darling River."

This album is exactly two hours long. 

01 Intro [Instrumental] (Midnight Oil)
02 Read about It (Midnight Oil)
03 Brave Faces (Midnight Oil)
04 talk (Midnight Oil)
05 Nobody's Child (Midnight Oil)
06 talk (Midnight Oil)
07 Barka-Darling River (Midnight Oil)
08 talk (Midnight Oil)
09 Redneck Wonderland (Midnight Oil)
10 Truganini (Midnight Oil)
11 talk (Midnight Oil)
12 First Nation (Midnight Oil)
13 The Dead Heart (Midnight Oil)
14 My Country (Midnight Oil)
15 U.S. Forces (Midnight Oil)
16 Short Memory (Midnight Oil)
17 talk (Midnight Oil)
18 Kosciusko (Midnight Oil)
19 Only the Strong (Midnight Oil)
20 talk (Midnight Oil)
21 At the Time of Writing (Midnight Oil)
22 Power and the Passion (Midnight Oil)
23 Rising Seas (Midnight Oil)
24 talk (Midnight Oil)
25 Sometimes (Midnight Oil)
26 King of the Mountain (Midnight Oil)
27 Beds Are Burning (Midnight Oil)
28 Blue Sky Mine (Midnight Oil)
29 talk (Midnight Oil)
30 Forgotten Years (Midnight Oil)
31 talk (Midnight Oil)
32 Hercules (Midnight Oil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/gC5WjRzi

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/a4NHbKszaFuBkI4/file

The cover photo shows band members Peter Garrett (with bald head) and Rob Hirst (on drums) performing at the  Hordern Pavilion, in Sydney, Australia, on October 3, 2022. I was glad to find a photo of both Garrett and Hirst, because Hirst is a key songwriter for the band in addition to being a drummer. 

Also, I used the primitive computer styled lettering for the cover, because that's the type of font the band used for this tour.

Midnight Oil - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: In Concert, Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm, Pilton, Britain, 6-25-1993

I had come across this Midnight Oil concert years ago and I considered posting it here, but I ultimately decided against it because I deemed it too short. However, I recently found a different version that had two extra songs on it, plus some additional banter. It added about 13 minutes, and I believe makes it the complete performance.

I had previously posted a 1990 Midnight Oil concert as their only BBC album. Since I've found this, I renamed that to "Volume 1," making this "Volume 2." So you may want to redownload that other one, with changed title and cover art and mp3 tags. Here's the link:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2023/04/midnight-oil-bbc-in-concert-wembley.html

This concert took place a couple of months after the release of the band's popular "Earth and Sun and Moon" album. It was only three years from the other BBC concert I've posted. But the main difference is the inclusion of songs from that album, like "My Country," "Truganini," "Outbreak of Love," and "Tell Me the Truth."

This album is 51 minutes long.

01 The Dead Heart (Midnight Oil)
02 talk (Midnight Oil)
03 My Country (Midnight Oil)
04 Blue Sky Mine (Midnight Oil)
05 Warakurna (Midnight Oil)
06 Outbreak of Love (Midnight Oil)
07 Tell Me the Truth (Midnight Oil)
08 Truganini (Midnight Oil)
09 Forgotten Years (Midnight Oil)
10 talk (Midnight Oil)
11 Beds Are Burning (Midnight Oil)
12 talk (Midnight Oil)
13 Hercules (Midnight Oil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/zTn2nPKX

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/HqErFYYiHtoGf8d/file

The cover photo of the band's lead singer Peter Garrett is from a concert in San Francisco, California, on September 29, 1993.

Various Artists - Children of the Americas Radiothon, United Nations Building, New York City, and Palace Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, 11-12-1988

Here's another big benefit concert with a bunch of different famous musical acts. But this one was unusual in a couple of ways. For one, it was held in two locations simultaneously and broadcast live over the radio. And for the other, it's quite an odd selection of acts. I like all of them, but it seems pretty random to me to have, say, Pat Benatar followed by Al Stewart, then followed by Midnight Oil, and so on, which is what happened here. But hey, it's all good music, with excellent sound quality.

This benefit concert certainly had a good cause, which was to fund non-profits helping poor children in Latin America. This was the second annual concert for this cause. I don't know anything about the first concert or subsequent ones. But we know about this one because it was broadcast live on the radio, and a bootleg recording of it survives.

I made many, many edits to make this listenable. The concert took the form of a radiothon, which is just like a telethon, except for the radio instead of TV. And if you're familiar with telethons at all, you know they're notorious for constantly asking for donations. That's what happened here. Between acts, and even during acts, there were emcees giving pleas to donate, with the donation phone number in particular repeated endlessly. Even the musical artists would sometimes mention the phone number between songs. I got rid of all that because it's all moot now, with the number obviously no longer working. I stripped this down to just the music and the banter relevant to the music.

I also did some edits to make this flow better. Oftentimes, as soon as a song wound end, the emcee's voice would come on with more pleas for donations. So I would patch in some more applause to give the songs a decent sounding ending. I didn't bother marking those edits with "[Edit]" in the song titles, 'cos I did it so much.

Some of the acts performed at the Palace Theatre in Los Angeles. Those were Jackson Browne, Midnight Oil, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY), plus earlier appearances by Graham Nash and David Crosby. All the other acts performed at the United Nations Building in New York City. Note that the crowd in Los Angeles sounds much larger than the one in New York City. I'm guessing only a few dozen were allowed into the United Nations Building for this, based on the clapping one can hear.  

The star attraction here was CSNY. They put out a new album in 1988, "American Dream," but Neil Young decided not to take part in a tour to support it. However, he did take part in a very limited number of concerts with CSN around this time. There was the Bridge Benefit in 1988 (which I have also posted here), the Bridge Benefit in 1989, and this. (There also were a couple more in 1987 and 1990 and 1991, if you want to go that far.)

It's quite possible that there was more to these two concerts that what was heard here. For instance, there was no introduction to the CSNY set, and I doubt they started with the new song "This Old House." It also seems odd that Midnight Oil would have been recruited but only played less than ten minutes of music. I'm guessing this is just the stuff that made it to the radio broadcast, and while music was broadcast from one location, we were probably missing the music taking place at the other location. If anyone has any more of it, please let me know.  

This album is two hours and 25 minutes long.

01 Teach Your Children (Graham Nash)
02 talk (Emcee)
03 I Love L.A. (Randy Newman)
04 Dixie Flyer (Randy Newman)
05 Sail Away (Randy Newman)
06 talk (Randy Newman)
07 Political Science (Randy Newman)
08 Short People (Randy Newman)
09 talk (Randy Newman)
10 I Want You to Hurt like I Do (Randy Newman)
11 talk (David Crosby)
12 Crow on the Cradle (Jackson Browne & Graham Nash)
13 talk (David Crosby)
14 talk (Jackson Browne)
15 Lives in the Balance (Jackson Browne with David Crosby & Graham Nash)
16 talk (Jackson Browne)
17 My Personal Revenge (Jackson Browne with Sangre Machuwa)
18 talk (Jackson Browne)
19 Fruita Almarga [Bitter Fruit] (Jackson Browne)
20 talk (Jackson Browne)
21 Lene Verde [Instrumental] (Jackson Browne with Sangre Machuwa)
22 talk (Graham Nash)
23 Rock Me on the Water (Jackson Browne with David Crosby & Graham Nash)
24 Powerful Stuff (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
25 talk (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
26 Look at That, Look at That (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
27 talk (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
28 She's Tough (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
29 talk (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
30 Wrap It Up (Fabulous Thunderbirds)
31 talk (Pat Benatar)
32 All Fired Up (Pat Benatar)
33 Run Between the Raindrops (Pat Benatar)
34 talk (Pat Benatar)
35 Let's Stay Together (Pat Benatar)
36 talk (Emcee)
37 Antarctica (Al Stewart)
38 talk (Al Stewart)
39 Princess Olivia (Al Stewart)
40 The Year of the Cat (Al Stewart)
41 talk (Graham Nash)
42 Wealth Is Virtue (Midnight Oil)
43 The Dead Heart (Midnight Oil)
44 This Old House (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
45 Love the One You're With (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
46 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
47 Name of Love (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
48 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
49 Tracks in the Dust (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
50 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
51 Don't Say Goodbye (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
52 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
53 Southern Cross (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
54 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
55 Long Time Gone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
56 talk (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
57 My Country 'Tis of Thee (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young with J. D. Souther)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/DQZ2b6A2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/z8t3Ajl7bhZ3NZF/file

I found the cover image from some promotional art related to this concert. It's a drawing of all the major stars that took part. In the top row, from left to right: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. In the bottom row, from left to right: Jackson Browne, Pat Benatar, Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, and Randy Newman. The banner at the top was in the original, but I changed the text there, and added more text at the bottom. 

I couldn't find any actual photos from this concert, so I'm lucky to have found this.

Midnight Oil - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: In Concert, Wembley Arena, London, Britain, 5-12-1990

I recently found a Midnight Oil BBC concert that is a full concert with great sound quality, and from right at their peak of popularity. Here it is.

Actually, the bit about great sound quality wasn't entirely true. When I found this bootleg, I thought the lead vocals were too low in the mix. But I was able to use an audio editing program to fix that. So now it does sound great.

I also discovered another problem: there are two popular versions on the Internet, and they have different song lists. I found the correct song list, which consists of all of the songs from one version, and just two extra songs from the other one (which misses some from the first version). So I've combined the two to create the full concert. I believe the two songs from the other source are "Lucky Country" and "Only the Strong." They had a different level of cheering from the others, so I patched in more cheering at the ends of those. 

Midnight Oil is known for almost always doing all their own songs.  But in this concert they did two covers: "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" and "Know Your Product."

This concert is an hour and 26 minutes long. 

UPDATE: On January 1, 2025, I changed the title of this album. That's because I posted a second Midnight Oil BBC album. So this one became "BBC Sessions, Volume 1."

01 King of the Mountain (Midnight Oil)
02 talk (Midnight Oil)
03 Dreamworld (Midnight Oil)
04 River Runs Red (Midnight Oil)
05 talk (Midnight Oil)
06 Warakurna (Midnight Oil)
07 Read about It (Midnight Oil)
08 The Dead Heart (Midnight Oil)
09 Best of Both Worlds (Midnight Oil)
10 Koskiusko (Midnight Oil)
11 Power and the Passion (Midnight Oil)
12 Lucky Country (Midnight Oil)
13 Only the Strong (Midnight Oil)
14 Beds Are Burning (Midnight Oil)
15 Bedlam Bridge (Midnight Oil)
16 Forgotten Years (Midnight Oil)
17 talk (Midnight Oil)
18 [What's So Funny 'bout] Peace, Love and Understanding (Midnight Oil)
19 Hercules (Midnight Oil)
20 talk (Midnight Oil)
21 Know Your Product (Midnight Oil)
22 Blue Sky Mine (Midnight Oil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/eVKpLcMe

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/sxWyOuhdPMzpm5h/file

The cover photo comes from an unknown 1990 concert.

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://pixeldrain.com/u/o4xkuTHH

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/z1qNgQ5dQ8kCfjd/file 

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. In 2025, I upgraded it a bit with the help of the Krea AI program.

Midnight Oil - The Real Thing - Alternate Version (2000-2002)

In 2000, Midnight Oil released an album called "The Real Thing." But it was a rather odd album. It had four new songs, and the rest were live acoustic versions from 1993 and 1994, when the band played on MTV's "Unplugged" show and did some acoustic concerts after that. (Although it's more accurate to call them semi-acoustic performances, since they played with all their band members, including their drummer.)

I've already posted the four new songs on the stray tracks album "Spirits of the Age." And I've also already posted the full version of the 1993 "Unplugged" concert. However, I happened to be able to make a VERY alternate version of this album, using entirely different performances, but keeping to the same acoustic-y concept.

The main reason I'm able to do this is because, after not playing in acoustic format for a bunch of years, the band played six songs in that format for a US radio show in 2002, shortly before the band broke up. So that makes up a majority of this album, tracks three through eight. The first song, "The Real Thing," was played on a TV show in 2000. The second song, "No Man's Land," was released in an acoustic version in 2001.

So that's all acoustic-y stuff done from 2000 to 2002. But that alone only makes for 33 minutes of music. It so happens I have a few songs from earlier years (1994 to 1996) that were also done in acoustic format but weren't included in the "Unplugged" show I posted. So I added them near the end. 

Finally, the last song is from yet another different time, 2009. It only features the band's lead singer, Peter Garrett, with Jimmy Barnes, who is a famous rock star in Australia. It's an acoustic version of the Jethro Tull classic "Locomotive Breath."

All in all, this ends up being a grab-bag of all the worthy acoustic versions the band did that didn't make it to the "Unplugged" album. The sources may be from different years, but it still makes for a nice, cohesive listen.

This album is 49 minutes long.

01 The Real Thing (Midnight Oil)
02 No Man's Land [Acoustic Version] (Midnight Oil)
03 Golden Age (Midnight Oil)
04 Beds Are Burning (Midnight Oil)
05 Luritja Way (Midnight Oil)
06 The Dead Heart (Midnight Oil)
07 Short Memory (Midnight Oil)
08 Tone Poem (Midnight Oil)
09 Tin Legs and Tin Mines (Midnight Oil)
10 U.S. Forces (Midnight Oil)
11 Surf's Up Tonight (Midnight Oil)
12 Locomotive Breath (Peter Garrett & Jimmy Barnes) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/7csSKdGE

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/awpmtQZ1dEO4Cjr/file 

Just like the music in the album, the cover is only very loosely based on the original "Real Thing" album. I used the same text style for the top and bottom. But the original cover is just more of that background yellow to red pattern. So instead I found a photo of band in acoustic mode. Unfortunately, the photo was done way later, in 2015, around the time the band started to reunite. But I guess that's kind of fitting, since the music here is from a bunch of different years.

And by the way, while I was looking for a good picture for this cover, I found a better one for the "Unplugged" album I already posted. So I've changed the cover for that album as well.

Midnight Oil - Unplugged, Sony Studios, New York City, 4-20-1993

In 1993, MTV's "unplugged" phenomenon was all the rage, to the point that even Midnight Oil decided to get in on it. Midnight Oil is a rocking band, but a lot of their songs have an acoustic base, such as the urgent guitar strumming to their hit "Beds Are Burning." So the idea worked well, although admittedly the band bent the concept a bit by still having bass and drums.

The band's unplugged performance was shown on TV at the time, but no album of it was ever released. (A DVD of it was included on their 2017 box set of rarities "Overflow Tank," but strangely, that was missing one song.) So here it is. I think it's an excellent concert, with great sound. It's kind of like their greatest hits up until 1993 (and most of their hits were from before then), but with a semi-acoustic twist.

It's a fairly long concert compared to how these things usually go, at an hour and 34 minutes. I'm guessing MTV only broadcast parts of it to fit it into an hour, but I'm not sure.  I didn't have to do much tweaking. But there's a fair amount of talking, and I broke all of that into separate tracks.

By the way, the band later did some more acoustic stuff, especially around the year 2002. I've compiled that into another album, and I'll post that at a later time.

01 talk (Midnight Oil)
02 Feeding Frenzy (Midnight Oil)
03 talk (Midnight Oil)
04 Sell My Soul (Midnight Oil)
05 talk (Midnight Oil)
06 Short Memory (Midnight Oil)
07 talk (Midnight Oil)
08 Tell Me the Truth (Midnight Oil)
09 Blue Sky Mine (Midnight Oil)
10 talk (Midnight Oil)
11 Lucky Country (Midnight Oil)
12 Now or Never Land (Midnight Oil)
13 talk (Midnight Oil)
14 Antarctica (Midnight Oil)
15 talk (Midnight Oil)
16 The Dead Heart (Midnight Oil)
17 In the Valley (Midnight Oil)
18 Beds Are Burning (Midnight Oil)
19 One Country (Midnight Oil)
20 talk (Midnight Oil)
21 Earth and Sun and Moon (Midnight Oil)
22 talk (Midnight Oil)
23 Truganini (Midnight Oil)
24 Drums of Heaven (Midnight Oil)
25 talk (Midnight Oil)
26 My Country (Midnight Oil)
27 Warakurna (Midnight Oil)
28 We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Midnight Oil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/RPPTdmz6

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/OFt3srrSEawC3cj/file

For the album cover, I took a screenshot from a YouTube video of the Unplugged concert. In 2025, I upgraded it a bit with the help of the Krea AI program.

Midnight Oil - Spirit of the Age - Non-Album Tracks (1996-2002)

This is the last of four stray tracks albums from Midnight Oil. It covers the last years from the main part of the band's career. (The band has reunited since 2017.)

The songs come from a wide variety of sources. In 2000, the band put out an album called "The Real Thing." Three of the songs were new, full-band studio tracks, and the rest were acoustic versions. I've included the three new ones here. I plan on putting all the rest into an all-acoustic album instead.

Only one song, the medley "Advance Australia Fair - Birdman," is officially unreleased. (Not counting the bonus track, that is.) This song was played on a TV show and there's an excellent recording of it, so the sound quality matches the other songs.

The bonus track, "Stand Your Ground," is a Midnight Oil original. But it was only played a few times in concert, and the recording is from an audience bootleg that isn't very good. Thus I only included it as a bonus track.

01 Land [Australian Lyrics Version] (Midnight Oil)
02 Cemetery in My Mind [True Believers Blind Version] (Midnight Oil)
03 Heaven and Earth (Midnight Oil)
04 Dreams of Ordinary Men (Peter Garrett with Jimmy Barnes)
05 Speak No Evil (Peter Garrett)
06 Advance Australia Fair - Birdman [Instrumental] (Midnight Oil)
07 Pub with No Beer (Midnight Oil)
08 The Real Thing (Midnight Oil)
09 Spirit of the Age (Midnight Oil)
10 The Last of the Diggers (Midnight Oil)
11 No Man's Land (Midnight Oil)
12 Kiss that Girl (Midnight Oil)

Stand Your Ground (Midnight Oil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/mjm8Mi75

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/380ql1sSApIFZMu/file

The cover art photo is of the band's lead singer Peter Garrett, in concert in 1996.

Midnight Oil - Land - Non-Album Tracks (1991-1996)

This is the third in my series of stray tracks albums for Australia's great band Midnight Oil.

The songs here are a grab bag of all sorts of things. Five are from B-sides. One of those, "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda," is a cover. They also do a cover of the Grateful Dead's "Wharf Rat" for a tribute album.

One, "Burnie," is from the band's "Scream in Blue Live" album, but didn't belong there, in my opinion. All the songs on that were from live shows, except this one, which was an acoustic studio track. I think it works better with these other songs.

Nearly all Midnight Oil songs are sung by Peter Garrett, the distinctively large and bald front man for the band. However, many of the band's songs are actually written or cowritten by other band members, and some of them had side projects from time to time. I generally haven't included songs from these side projects on these stray track albums, because it didn't sound like a Midnight Oil song to me if it isn't sung by Garrett. But I've made an exception here for the song by one side project band, "Someone's Singing New York, New York," by Rob Hirst and the Ghostwriters. It's a nice song, and it was a minor hit in Australia.

The title song here, "Land," was a collaborative charity single mostly done by Midnight Oil, but also with involvement by the Hothouse Flowers, the Tragically Hip, Crash Vegas, and Daniel Lanois. On my next album in this series, I include a version done just by Midnight Oil with somewhat different lyrics.

This album ends with two more cover versions, both of them officially unreleased. One is of the classic instrumental hit "Telstar" and the other is "The Good Son" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

01 Wharf Rat (Midnight Oil)
02 Someone's Singing New York, New York (Rob Hirst & the Ghostwriters)
03 Burnie [Acoustic Version] (Midnight Oil)
04 The Band Played Waltzing Matilda (Midnight Oil)
05 No Reaction (Midnight Oil)
06 Land (Midnight Oil & Friends)
07 Ships of Freedom (Midnight Oil)
08 I See You (Midnight Oil)
09 Smash the Wobble Board (Midnight Oil)
10 A Sunburnt Sky [A Love So High] (Midnight Oil)
11 Telstar [Instrumental] (Midnight Oil)
12 The Good Son (Midnight Oil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/LgG1dPFn

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/clbk5AhHTWw1O2I/file

Midnight Oil generally puts interesting art on their album covers instead of photos of the band. For this album cover, I wanted to do something in their style. So I used the cover to the "Outbreak of Love" single. That song isn't on this album, but it is from this time period. I replaced the text in the black box at the bottom with the word "Land" taken from the "Land" single. (I otherwise didn't like the cover art for that single.)

Midnight Oil - Species Deceases - Expanded Version (1984-1990)

This Midnight Oil album follows a very similar pattern to the last album by them that I posted. With that one, the band released a four-song EP called "Bird Noises," and I expanded it to a full album. This time around, it's the 1985 EP called "Species Deceases." The four songs that make up that EP total 16 minutes. I'd added enough songs to turn it into a 42 minute-long album instead, while keeping the same name.

The "Species Deceases" EP was surprisingly successful for Midnight Oil. It went straight to the top of the singles chart in Australia and stayed their for six weeks. In fact, it was the only number one hit they ever had. All four songs got a lot of play on Australian radio, but probably the best known song is "Hercules." (By the way, that title refers to Hercules aircraft used by the US and British military, not the legendary Greek hero.)

So that's a strong start to make up an album, but really, all the songs here are excellent. The first song, "Sad Dark Eyes" is a studio outtake that surprisingly remains unreleased, even though the band put out a huge box set containing lots of rarities in 2017. "Blackfella-Whitefella" is a song by the Australian band Warumpi. This is a version jointly done by them and Midnight Oil while the two bands toured remote parts of the Australian outback in 1986.

Midnight Oil is known for almost never performing any covers, but "almost never" isn't the same as "never." Three more songs here are covers: "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," "Know Your Product," and "Instant Karma."

This album covers the period of the band's greatest commercial success, including when the broke through in the US with "Beds Are Burning" and other great songs. I think they did so well because they were peaking creatively, and that extends to this collection of stray tracks.

01 Sad Dark Eyes (Midnight Oil)
02 Progress (Midnight Oil)
03 Hercules (Midnight Oil)
04 Blossom and Blood (Midnight Oil)
05 Pictures (Midnight Oil)
06 Blackfella-Whitefella (Midnight Oil & Warumpi)
07 [What's So Funny 'Bout] Peace, Love and Understanding (Midnight Oil)
08 You May Not Be Released (Midnight Oil)
09 Wreckery Road (Midnight Oil)
10 Love Life (Midnight Oil)
11 Know Your Product (Midnight Oil)
12 Instant Karma (Midnight Oil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/5BTh6GV9

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/jHl0RFiy4LZbJ04/file

The cover art is simply the exact cover of the "Species Deceases" EP.

Midnight Oil - Bird Noises - Expanded Version (1978-1982)

Yep, I'm going to apply my usual "stray tracks" approach to Midnight Oil. I think they're a great band, and they aren't as appreciated as they should be these days. I used to think the band didn't have much in the way of worthy stray tracks, but it turns out I just wasn't looking hard enough. This is the first of four stray tracks albums I've put together. Plus I have some other stuff (live and/or acoustic) to post here eventually.

In 1980, Midnight Oil released an EP called "Bird Noises." This is that, plus much more. I'm not a fan of listening to just an EP, since it's too short to be a satisfying listening experience. The "Bird Noises" EP is only 15 minutes long. I've found some other songs from that same era to turn this into a 39-minute long album.

In 2017, Midnight Oil reunited after 15 years. To celebrate that, they put out two very extensive box sets full of rarities. Unfortunately, those didn't sweep up all their good rarities. Three of the songs here come from one of those box sets, but three more are still officially unreleased. Those three are studio outtakes that somehow have been bootlegged. Their sound quality is pretty good, though a notch below the rest here.

One of those three songs is "Bakerman." That's a song from the band's 1984 album "Red Sails in the Sunset." But a surprise twist is that the version on that album is an instrumental and the (officially unreleased) version here has vocals.

Note that for this album, and the other Midnight Oil stray tracks albums I've compiled, I didn't just include all the stray tracks I could find. There are many non-album songs that I don't think are that good, including some from the 2017 box sets. In my opinion, the songs here make up a solid album.

One last comment: Midnight Oil is known for almost never doing any cover songs, but I've actually found a bunch of covers for their stray tracks albums. This album has two. The first song "Take Me Down Easy" was originally done by Jo Jo Gunne, and the last song "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" was a 1960s hit by the Animals.

01 Take Me Down Easy (Midnight Oil)
02 No Time for Games (Midnight Oil)
03 Knife's Edge (Midnight Oil)
04 Wedding Cake Island [Instrumental] (Midnight Oil)
05 I'm the Cure (Midnight Oil)
06 Bakerman [Vocals Version] (Midnight Oil)
07 I Want to Live Here (Midnight Oil)
08 Parking Station Blues (Midnight Oil)
09 Ghost of the Roadhouse (Midnight Oil)
10 We Gotta Get Out of This Place (Midnight Oil)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ztF2KqTo

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/q1k7VIGCknic8BE/file

For the cover art, I simply used the cover of the "Bird Noises" EP.