Ray Argall: Restoring Midnight Oil

Paris Pompor

Cinematographer (Tender Hooks, Look Both Ways)/Director (Return Home) Ray Argall has been sitting on more than 25,000 feet of unseen negatives for over 30 years. Some of the huge treasure trove of historically significant footage, is finally released under the title, Midnight Oil: 1984.

Midnight Oil: 1984 works on many levels. First and foremost, it’s a blistering audio-visual testament to a tight-knit, independent, politically charged rock band at the height of their creativity and the peak of their performance prowess.

Just as Midnight Oil unleashed their most adventurous LP Red Sails In The Sunset (on the back of their still charting, equally daring, 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 album), a 27 year-old Ray Argall gained the band’s trust and was granted broad access to filming them on the gruelling national tour that followed. At the same time – and giving it a stronger political thread – the documentary captures lead singer Peter Garrett’s run for the senate as a Nuclear Disarmament Party endorsed candidate in that year’s federal election.

Captured observationally at the time, and investigated now via updated interviews with the band, are the ensuing tensions this caused within the wider Midnight Oil machinery.

Furthermore, Midnight Oil: 1984 is a compelling snapshot of Australia in the mid-‘80s. Yes, those of us who lived through that period and the band’s energised live shows, remember a pre-mobile era where venues heaved with sweat and far less security and prohibitive rules. We also recall the threat of a nuclear apocalypse under a Hollywood-actor-turned-US-president nicknamed Raygun.

Dying young, or glowing permanently like Northern Beaches surf phosphorescence, felt almost inevitable as leaders’ fingers on both sides of the East-West divide hovered over fire buttons. What you may not remember is the frayed denim cutoffs on roadies being quite that short. More significantly, Australia in the mid-‘80s felt like it was finally turning the corner toward modernity. After all, even the Oils had released an album awash in lush production and electronics, with barely a guitar power chord to be heard across the multi-tracked songs recorded in Tokyo.

Argall’s documentary, however, shows an Australia that at times, still looks and feels like a sleepy backwater: a sun-bleached polaroid echoing the previous decade’s fug of Piz Buin, Chiko rolls and ‘70s rocker sweat. Peppermint coloured Holdens remain on the road, political press conferences still look like Norman Gunston skits, and the majority of freckled and sometimes barefoot school kids are white.

Largely thanks to Midnight Oil’s lyrics, those same kids are captured becoming radicalised. Not only were they switching on to ideas of peace and disarmament, but also the fact that Australia has a Black history.

Most music documentaries arrive with the somewhat dubious claim “never before seen footage,” but in the case of Midnight Oil: 1984 it’s utterly true. Not even the man behind the camera, Ray Argall had ever seen the images he captured back in the ‘80s. At the end of the tour he had just negatives, and the cost of turning them into something viewable was prohibitive. So, it wasn’t until just a few years ago when the idea of making a documentary became a reality, that Argall finally saw the gold in his possession.

“It’s a strange thing, I was really busy doing a whole lot of work at the time,” says Argall when asked if it was frustrating back then, not being able to see what he’d shot. “I was doing quite a lot of feature film work… across a whole range of documentary and drama projects. So, we were working and, in a sense, I knew we’d captured the material. We had it on quarter inch and… it was safe. But I’m glad… It was actually nice to have those memories for all those years and then finally see them. And then finally see them on the big screen with an audience.”

Was there particular footage that was surprising to you when you finally got to see it, maybe because you’d forgotten you’d shot it or just remembered it differently?

Definitely the material in the schools.

NB: One scene shows Peter Garrett addressing kids laid out on the playground asphalt between classes, as they take a vote on whether to declare their high school a Nuclear Free Zone.

I remember it, but it was the content and how he was articulate about those issues. Also, Peter wasn’t speaking down to them. That’s why I think they engaged with it so much. If you think about politics at that time, politicians really spoke down to young people. He was much more on their wave length.

Also, when I saw the early stuff I shot in Adelaide, when they’re doing sound checks. Really, it’s the very early stages of them learning how to play those songs [from Red Sails In The Sunset]. It’s miraculous that they got them up on stage so well. I really love all that material, those little bits of incidental music where they are just working through things. Or in the back room where Jim [Moginie, guitar/keys] is singing a song with Giffo [Peter Gifford] the bass player. Ahhh, I just love that!

One particularly genius element in your film treatment is the way you mix and segue between different performances of the same song. It works beautifully, but also means fans get to enjoy many of the songs in full, something often denied to cinema audiences unless it’s strictly a concert film; full songs have a particular emotional weight in a film’s journey.

We really wanted to make… a fairly seamless experience, so it’s almost like you’re watching the whole tour in the space of a song. [Work on] the picture took a long time, because you’re talking often 10 or 12 different performances [ranging] from small night venues to large, day exterior venues. The sound was a huge job. Jim had to help us in choosing the best live versions of the songs. We did some sound mixing at Studios 301. Then we had to bring it in to the mix room with Greg Fitzgerald who was the Sound Re-Recording Mixer – he did a lot of work. And then the final thing was the audience, bringing all the audience tracks in as well. I think there’s over 70 audience tracks.

The swell of the audience singing along sometimes is very powerful. In terms of the songs, are we hearing what you recorded, or did you source alternate recordings from the band?

Midnight Oil had various live versions of some songs, so we accessed them. We had some material from the Capital Theatre, early stuff. We used one or two versions from the Goat Island recording that were done in 1985, so it’s all the same era and we had quite a lot of our own desk mixes. That took quite a lot of work.

You and the camera are completely invisible throughout and as a viewer I was never aware of your presence. The film is largely observational, but it’s almost as if, watching it, we are one of the band or stage crew. In other words, it rarely feels like we’re seeing either the band or the audience through the eyes of a camera. With Garrett manically running all over the stage, were you just incredibly good at staying out of the way?

One of the first relationships I set up was with Michael Lippold, the stage manager who’s in the film. And you’ve really got to earn their respect. It’s really important that you respect the boundaries that they put there. A lot of people with cameras become heroes and push their lenses up in front of people’s noses to get a great shot. They’re not thinking what’s around them. My approach with a camera has always been to be very discreet. I would always check with Michael where I could go and find all of those boundaries. If you look closely at the Capitol Theatre footage – it was the only one where we had multiple cameras – you’ll often see me on stage, but you’d have to be freeze-framing because I’m usually in black or keeping in the shadows, but using the camera and lens to get across and capture those things. Particularly for this film and for that tour, I was filming from a different angle each night and at many different venues. What I’m trying to link a lot is the eye lines of the musicians looking at each other, just like you would in drama. That’s how people connect and that’s what [Midnight Oil] were doing: they were connecting with each other the whole time. Sometimes it’s musically… but those glances, when they’re relating to each other… that to me was really important. In all the drama work I’ve done on film, connecting characters is really important. My parents are musicians, so I’m carrying a lot of that sense of what it is to take something from your heart and soul and put it on stage for an audience.

You capture some big crowds with every mouth singing the words and every hand raised in the air. Being on stage with the band, you must have also experienced a certain buzz and the energy coming from the audience.

Yeah, it’s very much in the moment. I probably got it even more when I was editing, and I got to see that footage and started connecting it all together. Bringing in the sound of the audience, then it really started to feel like those magic moments happening.

As a snapshot of 1984, some of it was quite revealing. Some scenes feel more like the ‘70s.

My kids are 27 and 24 and Rachel [Argall], who produced this film with me, she’s the same age now as when I was filming it. When they were both looking at the footage, they would see the dial-up phone and go: oh my god look at that! And the Telex machine, and the fashions definitely. They were seeing it with fresh eyes, I was taking it for granted.

When it comes to blistering rock bands, you probably couldn’t have worked with a nicer/easier bunch of people. Oils members drink tea when they come off stage, there are no star egos jostling for the spotlight, and none of the sex, drugs and misogyny often associated with that scene, especially given the time period. Those anomalies are quite startling watching the film; were you acutely aware of them when filming, or were you just caught up in the excitement of it?

You sort of weren’t aware of it, because it was all about the music. I’ve worked with Split Enz quite a bit and they would be very similar. And the Models. It was all about putting the music out. There’s a certain point where you just couldn’t perform if you were too far gone. I’ve worked on the Cold Chisel film, Joan Armatrading was another one. The musicians take it pretty seriously. I know there’s lots of stories about the sex, drugs… but I was seeing young people who were fairly serious about putting out good music and performing it.

The other thing that’s quite striking, is that despite the band being all-male, along with most of the crew we see (besides Oils Office Manager, Arlene Brooks) there’s no sense of women being alienated or sidelined. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. When the camera focuses on the audience and fans, there’s lots of footage of engaged young women singing every word and owning the political message. It’s refreshing.

It’s hard to put your finger on it, it had a lot to do with what they were singing about. They were singing about issues that affected young people… broadly… It didn’t have a gender tag attached to it. It wasn’t about boy meets girl and all that stuff. I think as Jim said once: I don’t think we’ve written a love song, we’re not that good at them.

The live footage would stand up alone as a concert film without the whole story of Garrett’s senate run, but it’s terrific to have that element and its impact on the tour. Had there not been the parallel federal election story, would you have still made this film?

Oh yeah. I did a documentary with The Models in 1981. I just loved being part of that. We did some interviews, but it was just filming them… in their early 20s – young people just mucking around, but also in a professional sense performing at a really high level and really good songs. I love that there’s another aspect to this story – the cultural time capsule of 1984 – and it’s great when people who aren’t Midnight Oil fans say: I’m not really a fan, but for 90 minutes I was.

If you’re wondering if that Models doco will see the light of day, Argall has confirmed it’s coming soon. For now, Midnight Oil: 1984 opens in Australian cinemas for a limited season from May 10. Check session times in your area here: http://mad.mn/idnightilix

For international readers, screenings outside Australia are in the pipeline.