It's nearly ten years now since Midnight Oil broke internationally, in 1987 to be precise, with what was their sixth album, Diesel and Dust, which reached #21 in the US charts, with the single, Beds Are Burning, making it to #17. That album reflected their experience of Australia's central desert regions and its indigenous people, the Aborigines, and confirmed a commitment to both that saw the band touring North America the following year with the Aboriginal band Yothu Yindi as their support act. Midnight Oils next album Blue Sky Mining, released in 1990 got to #20 on the US charts, and was similarly uncompromising in either lyrical content or the driving rock that has always been at the core of the band. The Oils made their name originally by their uncompromising stand, never subverting their sense of music mission to fashion. Recording and releasing to their own agenda, even when they came to a mutually agreeable deal with multinational label Columbia (now Sony Music).

In 1993 came Earth and Sun and Moon, returning to themes reflecting their vantage point as socially active Australian musicians who have always attempted to marry meaning and song in their music. Their last release was a benefit single LAND recorded with composer/producer Daniel Lanois, Liam O'Maonlai (Hothouse Flowers) and Cord Downie (The Tragically Hip). Recorded on the run in Calgary Canada and released in January 1995, when the Oils joined Crowded House, Hunters & Collectors and a new Australian band, the Electric Hippies for a summer tour of Australia.

Now, after a years sabbatical, Midnight Oil are back with a brand new album, the first single from which is the power rock groove, Underwater, recorded live in the studio, and the first of the surprises you can expect from this unique band.

Cue the theme from Mission Impossible, the original Late Shiffre version for older readers who remember the TV show, the U2-ised Tom Cruise movie version for the younger readers.

Your mission, Smith, should you choose to accept, is to go to Darling Harbour Rehearsal Studios in the inner city Sydney suburb of Ultimo, and interview Midnight Oil, who will be videoing their rehearsal for their forthcoming Breathe Tour. Learn all you can about the making of their latest album, Breathe, and report back. You may find some members a little reticent to talk - even after all these years in the limelight they prefer to just do what they do - be musicians and make music - and ignore as much as possible the hoopla and the hype of the recording industry. Do your best Smith. Good luck.

I duly arrive, trusty tape recorder in hand, taking the service lift to the fourth floor of a converted warehouse space, and am taken to the live room, where bands can set up and rehearse as if they were on a tour stage. Walking in, the room is a hive of activity. The band are going through Time To Heal, singer Peter Garrett facing back into the band behind a barricade of monitors, the room-long window showering proceedings with some cool Spring Sydney afternoon sun. In the right-hand corner are assembled a few Sony Music people and Midnight Oil's Manager, Gary Morris. In the left-hand corner, also under that unblinking window, is the sound technician, and weaving around the various band members are the video crew. The director greets me and tells me the assignment is a little more unusual than I might have expected. Rather than stop rehearsing to answer my questions, the band has decided I should duck in whenever there's a break in proceedings and snatch a response from whomever is close at hand, before the band launches into the next song. Mission impossible?

Bass player Bones Hillman is whacking away at his bass with a violin bow during the number so when it ends, I decide to take my first crack at this assignment with him.

So Bones, what's with the violin bow?
It's percussive. It locked in more with the drums rather than purely finger playing ( that last bit is poetic license - Bones actually played a few notes - see, there can be truth in journalism!).

And this is how you recorded the track for the album?
Yeah, but you don't know what the hell it is when you hear it. This is the hard part, recreating it.

Was it easy to record this percussive bass sound? (This bits obviously for the muses out there, bear with me).
Yeah. I use more of a violin-shaped bass, like an old Hofner (the Beatle bass) - this (Fender) is a bit big. The Hofners really old, 1957, so if I take it on the road, its gonna die. It's one of those cherished things, so I leave it at home.

But you'll be taking the violin bow on tour:,
(Laughs) I dunno - I'm getting bad reactions! we'll wait and see - I'll keep trying.

The whole approach to recording Breathe seems to have been very primal from what I can gather, especially the sound of the rhythm section.
"It all comes from this", Bones interrupts, explaining the huge bass sound on the album, slipping into a mock Cockney accent. "It all comes from this lovely little pedal, you know. The Sansamp. Oooopps, I'm giving away my secrets aren't I?!"

Something soft like Bring On The Change and I step out of the picture as they launch into this urgent, swirling number. No violin bow this time.

As the last notes of Bring On The Change fade, I confront Garrett...
What do you mean let's do something soft?! The statement is, of course, ironic.

One of the most striking things about Breathe, especially on the later tracks on the album, is the sheer breadth of range Garrett takes his voice over, with some surprisingly strong falsetto work as on Bring On The Change, I wonder if he's having trouble finding it behind the less than adequate monitors in this rehearsal room.

With these cameras pointing at me Michael I cant find anything! His voice is scratchy as all get out.

How's it feeling so far, I wonder? Is the band recapturing some of the feeling of recording the album in this very room with its amazing plaster florettes breaking up the walls, salvaged by the studios owner from what was supposed to be a Heritage protected building, gutted to make way for Sydney's own Planet Hollywood. Now there's a bit of controversy for you.
I dunno. It's like a weird chemistry that's affecting us as we speak. Were in a room and were making a racket and it feels pretty good. I can live with that. And wait for the noisy ones!

The Oils launch into the opening back and first single off Breathe, Underwater, and guitarist Jim Moginie forgoes his guitar for what looks like the most ancient synthesism still left operating on the planet. I decide he's my next target.

You were looking to bring the Oils back to their roots with this album, I suggest. That's a pretty arcane piece of machinery there.
It's from 1979, which was the birth of the band, and it still works. I got it out of the cage after about 15 years, blew a bit of dust off it and it's still going.

So what were the Oils after when they put this album down? You wanted it to be a really live, really raw album.
Sex! (joke): A pretty loose kind of record, slightly funkier, slightly deconstructed if anything. We were trying, rather than come in with really fixed ideas to the studio, to do things that were a bit more made up on the spot and king pf sounded like it. So long as it had a really good feel to it and hung together as a record. We tried. It's just another Oils record.

There's that legendary Moginie reticence, and as I tackle guitarist Martin Rotsey after a rousing version of Surf's Up Tonight, I find he's just as low key about the business of being in Midnight Oil.

I suggest there's a touch of Rank B Manrin of The Shadows in the guitar lick that weaves through Surf's Up Tonight, back to the old surf days.
A little bit of that, yeah.

Okay, what about the decision to record the album pretty much live?
It's just what we were doing in here. It just sounded alright without going anywhere else, so this is where we did it, just in this room. Pretty live.

Saved by the band, who crash into track three from Breathe, Common Ground. I think I'm getting the hang of this. I pick my mark, cue the video crew and head em oft at the pass the moment the song stops. Piece of cake! Now, how to get around all those drums to tackle the inimitable Rob Hirst.

For me, there's a certain sombre quality about Breathe that I haven't heard on previous Midnight Oil albums. Maybe that's just me, but there seem to be a lot of low key rumbly, moody kind of numbers, so I ask a silly question and ...
We're a melancholy, low key, rumbly sort of group these days! I just think the band's really honest. That's the way the band feels so it writes that way, so there's no artifice. There never has been really.

Okay, something a little less low key and rumbley ... the drum sounds, yes, and Canadian producer, Malcolm Burn, who did such a terrific job on Breathe. His most recent credits include co-producing the latest Emmylou Harris and Patti Smith albums. And I had to keep the bastard off the drums! You'd go out of the studio for 15 minutes and he's sitting doing some drum beat, so I had to kick him off the drums a few times.

I wondered if he had any particular drum sounds in mind when he came to doing this album because there's a real diversity across the record, from the huge bucket snare sound of Underwater to the loose dance-beat kind of shuffle on Bring On The Change.
Well I've assembled this shitty old bits and pieces of kit from previous decades and there's one drum that Malcolm liked which was this wooden 1920s Leedy snare drum, and you hear that on most of the songs on the record, that offensive doink. A lot of the instruments are pretty warm and degraded and pretty shitty sounding, so it makes it sound more honest and human.

Did it take long to put the album together?
Not really. We recorded about two-thirds of the album here, and it was quite undisciplined, people would just roll in when they felt like it, so in a way it wasn't very hard work. And Malcolm had this way of leaving the tape recorder going all the time. The song Underwater for example - I didn't realise he was recording that beat, I was just sort of mucking around and he recorded a couple of minutes. A couple of weeks later we were going through some of the tapes and he said this is a pretty cool beat, why don't we use this for a song? And the song was built up around the beat. Pete wrote some words, Jim had that riff and it sort of developed from there. So it's a different way for us to work but a good one.

Okay, so what prompted the choice of Malcolm Burn as producer for Breathe?
We liked the American Caeser record that he'd done with Iggy Pop, and we'd been listening to Kingsway recordings for quite some time and they had a certain humanity to them which was lacking in a lot of clinical studios. Daniel Lanois, in New Orleans. Midnight Oil recorded their last single, Land, with Lanois.
Yeah that was on Dan's mobile, just one long night with Hothouse Flowers and The Tragically Hip.

Among the surprises on Breathe are a country but it aint country and western track called One Too Many Times, and a duet on another country-tinged track called Home, which sees Garrett singing with Emmylou Harris, who toured Australia earlier this year.
The song's actually an adaptation of a song by Jim, which was given a complete rework by Malcolm, who'd worked on Emmylou's record; they'd become good mates and when she was touring through town, she agreed to sing the song! Her guitar player, Buddy, came in and played, and Daryl, who plays bass and Djembe, came in and everyone had a lash at it. It was good, a real combined effort. A lot of the songs ended up that way.

The camera crew was hovering but so were the other band members so I had to relinquish our Mister Hirst as the band went into Home. Next victim, Bones Hillman.

The band took an extended break after touring their last album, Earth and Sun and Moon. Internationally, a whole year, something of a luxury in their hectic career to date. I wondered what it must have felt like to get back together again to make Breathe.
It's good to have a break. We'd had this cycle of make a record, play play play play play. Towards the end of it everyone had had enough. It's like being married to four other men! Oh not you again!! Travelling on these buses is like being in the submarine corps. If someone doesn't close their curtain you see their bare arse in the morning! So it was good to have a break, and once you get back together it all sort of clicks really. It doesn't seem like we stopped now.

After 12 months apart there must have been plenty of ideas.
Yeah, there's always an abundance of material. We had these big white-boards we set up over there in the corner with parts and songs and it was just too much, too much stuff! I think the white-boards made it worse! ! We had an A list and a B list, and what we always do is we end up taking half of A and joining it onto B and creating C.

There were songs that grew organically in the studio too.
Yeah, Underwater, Sins Of Omission and One Too Many Times. That's really good. I enjoy those more because they're fresh with me. All the others you sort of slave over, whip them into form. It's a funny business, making records. Maybe we should just take a lot of drugs and jam or something? No, that was Cream, wasn't it?! We're a little bit more together than that.

Hirst's snare is erupting in the back of our conversation and the next song pounds into life. I persevere a moment more with Bones, who informs me that he's now got to learn Emmylou's parts for the live version on the tour.
It was really good having other people play on the record. I think we should do more of it. Katrina Schumacker, the assistant engineer in New Orleans, is singing on one song and of course, Malcolm's playing on stuff as well. We swapped instruments around, broke it up a bit. Like a jigsaw puzzle we put hack together the wrong way. Malcolm was great, a dedicated chap. I couldn't do his job. He goes straight off and makes another record after that - insane! The guys got no life.

Garrett strums away at a diminutive (in his hands) semi-acoustic guitar for the country'n'Oils track and after the band runs the track I ask him about the song.
I think it was on one of Jim's early tapes in a different version, and Malcolm, like the rest of us, was quite annoyed and frustrated by the headlines one day of some idiot with a gun here in Australia, other people doing silly things, it just seemed like a good song to put on the record. So then I had to learn it.

Now is that song country or ....
I thought it was gospel! Retorts Rotsey after they've been through it. Hirst agrees.
It's got a bit of gospel to it. More a song of hope than outright,complete despair. We never despair in this group. We've come close to it! (laughs) Never gone the whole way thank God.

How does a track like, say, In The Rain, for which Martin threatens to pull out an electric mandolin, come about?
That's one of the New Orleans songs. One of those songs that could maybe only have come up in Kingsway studios. It's got a lot of that room you know that French Quarter ambience, that song, because it's a pretty atmospheric, dangerous dusty, dirty, drunken old town New Orleans. For some reason all the groups that go down there end up absorbing this atmosphere which ends up on their records.

Did the band spend much time there before recording?
No, we just rolled in, a couple of days later we just set up a few mics and started recording. It's very casual, there's nothing premeditated about this album.

Recording in New Orleans and recording in Darling Harbour must have been very different experiences but it's a credit to Burn as producer and the band as musicians that Breathe comes across as a seamless whole, with the listener having no clue as to which track was recorded where.
This Darling Harbour studio thing is about as close as we've found in Australia to recreating that New Orleans thing. It's obviously a long way from Harris Street, Ultimo, to Rampart Street, New Orleans but it's got a certain sort of late night feel to it. Most of the recordings were done late at night because this glass here (pointing to the vast room length window at the other end of the room) lets in a lot of light, and for the entire time we recorded the record I didn't actually see any of the other members of the group at all. They were just silhouettes. I know Martin was sort of vaguely over there - I know his silhouette - and I knew Bonesy and Jim were over there (pointing right and left), and Pete was over there somewhere. I had to wear sunglasses the entire time or go completely blind. It was only after we'd done the recording that I met the others in the group!

As you can tell, Rob Hirst is not adverse to a little exaggeration.
As a result we recorded later and later into the night, to get away from this glare. I think that had an effect on the record as well. At Kingsway we'd work later still. We wouldn't start until two or three in the afternoon and work through till about the same in the morning. So its almost an entirely nocturnal record. During the day there it was a hundred degrees and a hundred and ten per cent humidity, quite uncomfortable, so we'd try to sleep through it.

That's why getting Malcolm Burn was the right choice for this record. He's the common thread that you're talking about when you say the record sounds seamless. You can attribute so much to the studio and the songs and stuff but Malcolm had a very clear way about how he wanted this record to end up sounding. And I think that there was more of an acceptance this time within the band to let him "have his way with us". I think it's the sign of a strong band to put their trust in someone whose work they admire. And it's not something you do when you're a kid starting off - Don't f*** with my music, man! Hands off!! - and that was very much the way we started as well. Gradually, over time, I think that we've opened up enough to be manhandled into different ways. And in fact not only accepted that but welcomed it, change being a vital thing in a bands survival.

Now I discover that the plan all along was to have me in this video of Midnight Oil rehearsing for their Breathe tour, for something the Recording Industry calls an EPK - Electronic Press Kit. The dirty dogs! Could this be the beginning of a new career? Should I get an agent? Should I get my hair cut? ..... Naaaaaa. i'll leave you with a few more thoughts from Peter Garrett as the light from that vast window starts to fade and the video crew trl( to snatch a last few head shots for that aforementioned ERK.

What I want to know is, why didn't we work out that we could make records in rehearsal studios ten records ago?! Even five records ago! It's just one of those weird intangible things, it feels pretty good in here. There's no pretence, no artificiality, it's just walls and people making a racket and making it work.

With Martin Rotsey picking out the tune to Dusty Springfield's You Don't Have To Say You Love Me in the background, readies winding up leads and general let's get out and grab some tea noises all around, I ask Peter if he can feel the band coming together again as a live unit.
We charged around the place making records and touring and doing all these things and you either have an amicable divorce or you take leave of absence or you become rock silly and we just had to go away and come back and see if there was anything there and we were lucky that when we came back there was something. It's been good fun.

Were the Oils surprised by the record they made when they got back together?
I think we always wanted to make something that was a little rough around the edges but that gets harder to do as you get more used to studios and budgets and things of that kind so it was just a case of stripping it right away and having someone who's going to discipline you, like a producer, to make sure that you don't get indulgent. Then you keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best. You've got to be able to walk away saying We can't make it any better, it's just us. This grunting noise today is Midnight Oil in Sydney in Australia.

For me it was good because I was able to clear my deck a little bit of all the politics and stuff I'd been doing for some years and just hang in here with the boys, just getting into sounds and getting into tunes and just working a little harder on that. So I've enjoyed making Breathe. I found it really easy to sing on the record, which is always nice. For Midnight Oil to do anything now it's just got to make music that really at least moves us around a little bit. Maybe we've done that. He turns to the camera and signs off - See ya folks.

Cut.

Did I do good. Ha ???? Mission, I hope, accomplished.

Its crunching, sinewy bass lines punched along by a declamatory snare hit hard and determined by Rob Hirst, you know this is back to basics Midnight Oil - raw, edgy, jagged and just that little bit intimidating, with a sound as uncompromised and open as the colours of unpolished opal, you can see the sweat beading on Garrett's head and the smiles as each player looks at the other, feels the incessant groove and remembers that this is why they still love, still need to get together in a hot, sweaty room, crank up the volume and play. This is magic and the Oils are having fun.

There is room for make believe out in the ocean (Underwater)

Curious flourishes from the guitar weave in and out as the song churns, voices weaving first a chant then a chorus then snatches of verses like cross currents in the ocean. You're out in the wide Pacific feeling the power of the tides and the glistening shapes of creatures, that guitar again, flash, just for a moment, somewhere near.

Surf's Up Tonight continues the lyrical images of warm summer nights, recalling the bands early days playing Sydney's northern beaches clubs. There's still a little romantic naivety in there, for all the hard socio-political lessons they've presented in their records over the years. A Hank B Dlarvin-style guitar line weaves a counterpoint to Garrett's melody, pure Australian surf culture and the sands there between your toes.

The realities of life in the 1990s aren't forgotten though. Nor are the politics even if on this record, they are presented far more subtly, even muted, without the stridence of the past. Realty prompts a certain pessimism in Common Ground, a recognition that if we don't find some Common Ground, "If we surrender ourselves to industrial rules/We'll wake up in the wreckage of Tomorrow". The optimism inherent in the chorus wins out in this straight rocker, balanced by the next track, Time To Heal, an uplifting sort of a shuffle that chuggs along with an almost gospel zeal.

Cymbals swirl, guitars blip and in crashes the band on another brooding groove, almost Zeppelin in the snares thumping insistence and the riffs solid chop. This is the glorious Sins Of Omission and Garrett's really enjoying himself, pulling out the harmonica for a bit of rock-out blues wailing and finding a strength in his falsetto that flirts with the upper reaches of his range like an uneasy Bone around the Rattle & Hum days. The surprises have only just begun.

The acoustic guitars come out for One Too Many Times, pure Country, but what appears an innocuous bit of Country fun hides a sting in the finest Oils tradition. The verses confront the realities of abuse, theft and greed while that harmonica replies to a voice that has an almost Lennon tonality and sincerity.

Then it's back to classic moody Oils another churning slow rock groove that counterpoints a world weariness that gratefully offers glimpses of release, that star of glory, star of hope. Even that optimism, though, can't restrain Garrett's plaintive voice as it cries out, over a grinding climax, It's your turn to pay.

Home is full of yearning, a throbbing vision of dislocation, bittersweet in its recognition of the healing powers of the clear blue sky, a shimmering, ethereal guitar shattering like chalk across it. And here's another surprise, as Emmylou Harris joins Garrett to sing those bittersweet lyrics. Recorded during her tour of Australia earlier this year, the connection is Malcolm Burn, who produced this new album, half of which was recorded at Daniel Lanois Kingsway Studios in New Orleans, the other half cut live in the rehearsal rooms of Darling Harbour Studios in Sydney. Burn had co-produced Emmylou's latest album as well.

Great open chords chime over a loose Ringo Starr kind of feel as the driving Bring On The Change comes in with an almost Oasis-like energy urgent, insistent and Garrett really lets fly as the song climaxes, his weaving falsetto demanding that change.

Consumerism cops a serve with the ebullient E-Beat, a rallying call to listen to the earthbeat. But it's In The Rain that really surprises, drums lost down some darkened corridor, rattling away in an almost Plastic One Band shambolic groove, Garrett's voice finally finding the deep, emotive power of that newly nurtured falsetto, dripping with a soft nostalgic edge that recalls the Blue Nile, so poignant is it, short, sweet and surprising.

The lyrics may again be enigmatic, but there's a power and openness as the whole band sing as one the melody of Barest Degree, a real treat as the harmonies that have so often teased us in choruses here and there across the band's career finally come together in solidarity to take us out of this truly unique album from Midnight Oil.