By Martin Boulton
According to Peter Garrett, putting his new band on stage for the upcoming Zoo Twilight concerts makes perfect sense.
"I love playing outside and they're pretty important places now, particularly the work they do with conservation and endangered species," he told Fairfax Media before fronting that same band, the Alter Egos, during November's Queenscliff Music Festival.
Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil will be back on stage this year.Credit:James Alcock
Together with fellow Midnight Oil member Martin Rotsey on guitar, drummer Peter Luscombe, Jet bass player Mark Wilson and Heather Shannon from the Jezabels on keyboard; Garrett recorded his solo album A Version of Now and released it mid-last year. Those same musicians help bring his songs to life on stage, a place where Garrett feels increasingly comfortable again after years away from the entertainment industry.
"The business of making music, for me at least, has to be something which is partly a spontaneous reaction to what you're hearing and what other people are doing," he says. "So even though they're simple electronic folk songs [on the album], they've also got people bringing what they have to them and the mixture worked well."
Peter Garrett is happy to be writing music again after a spell in politics.Credit:CarbieWarbie
After a handful of live shows since the album's release, including a rousing reception from a big Queenscliff crowd, Garrett joined the popular Zoo Twilight shows, featuring other headliners Killing Heidi, the Living End, the Rubens, Kurt Vile, Ball Park Music and more.
"I love the idea and it's a natural corollary for me and the work I did at ACF [Australian Conservation Foundation], people can go to the zoo in the afternoon and then hear some music ... it's a gathering point that isn't about drinking beer," Garrett said.
After 10 years as ACF president and many more as a vocal supporter of conservation issues, Garrett spent a decade in federal parliament after winning the New South Wales seat of Kingsford Smith for the Labor Party in 2004. Three years later when Labor was elected under Kevin Rudd, Garrett became Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts.
He was re-elected in the 2010 election and later announced he would step away from politics at the following election. "I owed such a lot to my wife and family for sticking through all the long days and I owed it to myself," he said, when quizzed about his life beyond politics. "I needed to do something ... I just wasn't sure what it was going to be and it ended up being music and this record."
Not that this record is all he has on his mind.
"I'll continue to do as much music as I can and throw myself, when the opportunity arises, into the deep pool of issues that are dear to my heart ... I'll do some stuff in the Northern Territory, working with people there, and some environment stuff that we'll probably get involved with as we go."
The Northern Territory, as it did during his earlier days fronting Midnight Oil, played a part in the making of A Version of Now.
During a trip to the Western Desert with Rotsey, Gondwanaland founding member and didgeridoo player Charlie McMahon and his own brother, Garrett broke out a couple of the songs he'd been working up since retiring from Canberra.
"It's at least 15 years since I picked up a guitar and even had a crack at writing," the 63-year-old said.
"To find there was music coursing through my veins again ... I was very happy. We were sitting around one night in the Western Desert, Martin had brought his guitar; I said I had a couple of songs and we started playing. After I got home we said 'well, we better go and make a record'."
There was no grand plan to step away from parliament and back into the entertainment spotlight, back to where crowds of people adore him and cheer wildly when he opens his mouth. The new songs, the album and the shows all came out of a desire to write again, to put his thoughts on paper.
Being on stage again, Garrett says, is like "going into another room" that he knows well. "It's different from the one you've been in, but you're very familiar with it and you can leave a lot of stuff behind.
"When you've lived a very rational life and done other things, my challenge [on stage] is to make sure I distil the moment of singing or performing and nothing else counts, I'm not going to think of anything else. If you fall over, you fall over, If you hit the note, you hit the note ... it's what we were doing around camp fires thousands of years ago, only amplified."
Speaking of amplified, there's also Midnight Oil's return that Garrett has to turn his mind to after last year's announcement on Facebook. "We wanted you to be the first to know", the band told fans in May "the five of us are planning to do some gigs in Australia and overseas during 2017". There it was, the words Oils fans had been wanting to hear. For years.
"It's not settled yet, exactly what it will be but we'll try and get to wherever we can, wherever there's an audience we'll try and get to them," Garrett said when we spoke in November. "We're a band of musicians first and foremost, that's where it all started for us.
"Getting in a space, facing one another and cranking it up and going till we had nothing left; till fingers were bleeding, the whole thing. You've sung yourself hoarse and fell over; looked at one another and said 'you know what, let's do that again' and kept on doing it and doing it."
No wonder fans have waited all these years for more from the Oils.
In the meantime, Peter Garrett plays this month with his new band and he couldn't be happier. "For me it's like another life. I didn't want to be captive to it, I I didn't want it to define who I was but I wanted to be a music maker again."
Peter Garrett and the Alter Egos play at Taronga Zoo in Sydney on Friday, January 27, and Melbourne Zoo in Parkville on Saturday, January 28. Support from Kev Carmody.