Midnight Oil’s drummer Rob Hirst died on Tuesday, and as you might expect, it’s a loss which has resonated deeply in the world of Australian music, indeed Australian cultural life generally, so inextricably were they bound to this country’s landscape in the 1980s and ‘90s.

I suspect I’m far from the only one who has been a little teary about the news, inevitably dragging out the old Oils’ classics, whether the studio stuff or concert footage, for another trip down memory lane.

Rob’s passing had been coming a while since his cancer diagnosis and yet it was still a real shock. He always seemed so youthful for his age, so fit and strong. So many people have said to me over the last few days “this one really hurts”. It really does.

I was lucky enough to meet him about 10 years ago after hearing him give a marvellous talk about the Oils. He was incredibly friendly and generous with his time, and had some lovely things to say about my late muso brother Steve, whom he’d bumped into at various stages on the road.

Watching Rob behind the kit at any of those famous Oils gigs like Goat Island in 1985 or Sydney’s Capitol Theatre in 1982 was watching a human dynamo, the arms raised, the pounding on the toms, snares and cymbals, and trademark sprays of water from the drums as his sticks smashed the surfaces.

Even writing those few words conjures the most vivid imagery, and I can hear a live classic like ‘Stand In Line’ or ‘Don’t Wanna Be The One’ echoing in the background and see Hirsty at work whilst Peter Garrett spins madly across the stage and Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey play off each other’s guitar lines.

We’ve already lost the much-loved bassist ‘Bones’ Hillman, whose soulful playing and beautiful voice leant the Oils a new dimension after he joined the group.

And hardcore Oils fans like me have an enduring love affair, too, with former bass player Peter Gifford, whose harder, rockier sound was so integral to the incredibly explosive unit the band was from the late ‘70s until they rose to another level of fame altogether with ‘Beds Are Burning’ off the seminal ‘Diesel And Dust’ album in 1987.

Those ‘80s gigs were something else. I’ve seen a lot of bands live and some great performers among them, but none better than the Oils. You couldn’t walk away from one of their gigs at those gritty pub venues without being bathed in sweat and carrying the greatest sense of exhausted satisfaction.

My little group of mates saw them absolutely every time they came to Melbourne, beginning with a gig at the Chevron in St Kilda Road in early 1982. We saw them play with Men At Work at the Myer Music Bowl for Moomba, the ‘Stop The Drop’ concert at the same venue. Fittingly, perhaps, my last live viewing of the Oils came back at the Bowl 35 years later in 2017.

We saw them at The Venue in St Kilda, the Prospect Hill in Kew, saw them underneath a circus tent on what is now the site of Rod Laver Arena, and at the old Entertainment Centre (where Collingwood Football Club now resides), where one of our gang, infuriated by the bouncers not letting anyone get out of their seats, yelled out to Garrett: “They won’t let us rage”. Garrett was having none of that, told the security staff to back off, and the usual pandemonium ensued.

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We saw them at Kooyong, at the old South Melbourne footy ground, at Festival Hall, too, and in what I think are my most fondly-remembered shows, at the Astor Theatre.

It was the end of 1982, I was 17, we’d all just finished our HSC exams, and the phenomenal ‘10-9-8…’ album (think ‘Power And The Passion’, ‘U.S. Forces’, ‘Short Memory’, ‘Read About It’) had just been released.

The Oils played four nights at The Astor, and we went to them all. I had an aisle seat at the first one, and used it all night to repeatedly jump off the armrest into the seething mass of bodies going bananas in the aisle. No one batted an eyelid, this was the Oils, after all, and that’s just how fired up they got you.

I’ve done a couple of “My Favourite 20 songs” exercises with Soundgarden and R.E.M. recently, so it made sense to do so again now with clearly my favourite Australian band of all time. It was a nightmare, of course, given how much I love so many of their songs.

I’m not going to explain overly why I’ve chosen this song over that, these things always just come down to personal taste. And I make no apologies for the bias towards the earlier, rockier stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, I still loved them to death when they got big, and the messages of their songs, always important, were a big part of that appeal. But it was still, for me anyway, always primarily about the actual music, and that early, incendiary sound they generated was at times from another world. The fact it can have me bobbing my head to the extent it still does 45-odd years later says it all, really.

So check out the 20 tracks and see what you think. There’s some notable absentees (apologies particularly to ‘Read About It’, ‘U.S. Forces’, ‘Short Memory’, ‘The Dead Heart’ and ‘Blue Sky Mine’).

There’s plenty of deeper album/EP cuts here, too, like ‘Knife’s Edge’ from ‘Bird Noises’ (always a huge favourite). And no, it’s not all 100 miles an hour. Some of my favourite Oils songs are some of their most emotional and meaningful, the epic ‘Jimmy Sharman’s Boxers’, for example, ‘Warakurna’ or ‘River Runs Red’.

There’s a heap more I hated having to leave out, like ‘Progress’ and ‘Blossom And Blood’ from the ‘Species Deceases’ EP, or ‘No Reaction’ from ‘Head Injuries’, or ‘Put Down That Weapon’. But I could comfortably have had a ‘Top 50’ list here, so profound an impact did Rob, Pete and co. have on me. For one thing any dedicated Midnight Oil fan will tell you, is that just about every song in their extensive catalogue has real meaning.

They were a band you never just had on in the background as a half-listened-to mood setter. They demanded your attention. And they had that from much of this country, for decades. They were a soundtrack for my younger life. And the lives of countless others.

Rob Hirst was fundamental to that. And while he’s with us no more, his legacy will remain massive. Just like the massive sound of the band so many of us loved so much.

RoCo’s FAVOURITE 20 MIDNIGHT OIL SONGS
1. Back On The Borderline
2. Don’t Wanna Be The One
3. No Time For Games
4. Power And The Passion
5. Dreamworld
6. Cold Cold Change
7. Jimmy Sharman’s Boxers
8. Only The Strong
9. Stand In Line
10. Beds Are Burning
11. Hercules
12. Run By Night
13. Sometimes
14. River Runs Red
15. Warakurna
16. King Of The Mountain
17. Best Of Both Worlds
18. Kosciusko
19. Knife’s Edge
20. Brave Faces