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First Name:​ Brennan Last Name:​ Smith

Student ID Number:​ 3388 Contact Phone Number:​ 0411 053 199

Course of Study: Music Performance

Unit Name: Australian Music
Assignment: Analysis essay - Beds Are Burning
Lecturer: Adam King

Student Declaration of Authorship (​Attachment of this document to an electronic submission will be construed as
agreement to the below statement)

● I declare that this assignment is my own work, except where the work of others is clearly indicated in either direct or
parenthetical quotation, or paraphrase, and is referenced accordingly in citation and the bibliography, and it has not previously
been submitted for any assessment at an educational institution.

Student’s Signature:

Date: 3/11/2020
A musical and cultural comparative analysis of Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning” by Brennan Smith

In 1986, Australian rock band Midnight Oil embarked on their ​Blackfella-Whitefella Tour ​which included
performances in remote Australian-Indigenous communities (McCabe 2016). The tour solidified the band’s
attitudes towards Indigenous mistreatment, which heavily influenced their sixth studio album ​Diesel and Dust.
Midnight Oil’s drummer and songwriter Rob Hirst has explained that they tried to “synthesise an Australian sound
from the Aboriginal people and an Australian sound from Anglo-Irish folk tradition” (Donoughue 2020). This album
begins with the song “Beds Are Burning”, which is arguably the band’s most influential composition. The historic
track was written as a call-to-action towards colonised Australia, pushing for acknowledgment of the Indigenous
peoples’ suffering - specifically through allocating land rights (Haskell 2019). The following essay is a musical,
cultural, and comparative analysis of “Beds Are Burning” with reference to the conventions, history, and context of
the composition.

In order to analyse the song, it is important to understand the history of colonised Australia. Having independently
developed a rich culture for over sixty-thousand years, Indigenous Australians were faced with conflict from
invading British colonies in 1770. British settlers immediately inflicted extensive damage on Aboriginal
communities through violence, diseases, and land repossession. In the century following colonisation, it is
estimated that Indigenous populations diminished by 90% (Bodkin-Andrews 2016). The remaining population was
forced to coexist with the colonised way of life, and that is still the case for Aboriginal people today. This has
resulted in further conflict, as systemic racism has led to minimal educational and financial opportunities for the
Indigenous, which has seen devastated communities battle mental health and substance abuse issues (Markwick
2019).

Midnight Oil on the Blackfella-Whitefella tour in 1987. Used for the “Beds Are Burning” artwork. (Source: Columbia Records)

Midnight Oil’s experience on the ​Blackfella-Whitefella Tour ​allowed them to see colonisation’s effects first-hand.
Drummer Rob Hirst recalled seeing “an epidemic of petrol sniffing” as well as “a lot of domestic violence in some
of the communities” and “alcoholism too” (Haskell 2019). However, despite observations of social downfall, the
band saw highly-functional sides to the Indigenous culture - particularly through art. For example, the Northern
Territory’s Warumpi Band was chosen as the main support for Midnight Oil on the ​Blackfella-Whitefella tour. All
members (except one) of the Warumpi Band were Indigenous Australians, and had
found great success in crafting a unique Aboriginal rock sound. In 1983, they won the best band competition at the
Aboriginal Country Music Festival where they performed the first rock single to use Indigenous language (McMillan
2017). This demonstrated that despite systemic racism, Indigenous people and their culture were widely
recognised and appreciated in a modern context. Midnight Oil’s experience with the Warumpi Band and remote
communities led them to gain an understanding of the Indigenous way of life, as well as a mutual pride for
Australian land (Mayocchi 2017).

During this experience, Midnight Oil began drawing inspiration for their next album: ​Diesel and Dust, w ​ hich
features “Beds Are Burning”. However, the song was conceptualised before the tour by drummer Rob Hirst when
he visited a World War II exhibition. The chorus lyric “How do we sleep while our beds are burning” was originally
translated from an Italian expression used when fightback against the partisans occurred in the early 1940s
(Britannica 2020). Hirst translated this expression into something that he felt the Australians could resonate with in
relation to the Indigenous land rights issues, and added the preceding lyric “How can we dance when our earth is
turning” which reinforces the same metaphor. He felt that these lyrics accurately represented the land rights issues
that faced “an ancient Australian community who had so much thrown at it but was still joyfully dancing” and
“pushing back against all the shocking things that had been visited upon them ever since Europeans had arrived in
this country” (Haskell 2019).

The verse of “Beds Are Burning” reflects Hirst’s perspective of the Australian land, while the pre-chorus
establishes the notion of land rights. Mentions of “bloodwood”, “desert oak”, “cockatoos” and “boiling diesels”
steaming “in forty-five degrees” lead the listener to visualise a scenic yet harsh landscape. The tone changes
during the pre-chorus lyrics: “The time has come, a fact's a fact. It belongs to them, let's give it back”. This is
Midnight Oil’s exclamation of their efforts toward reconciliation with Indigenous people through land rights
legislation. “It belongs to them” refers to land rights belonging to the Indigenous people, while “let’s give it back”
reflects the band’s advocacy of awarding Indigenous communities with well-deserved land rights. The lyrics of
“Beds Are Burning” provide a perfect balance of artistic metaphor and literal statements, which successfully
communicates its pro-reconciliation message to a diverse audience.

Peter Garrett exhibits exasperation and energy whilst performing live with Midnight Oil (Source: Daily Telegraph)
Midnight Oil vocalist Peter Garrett’s delivery of the lyrics utilises some interesting conventions of its time. The first
of these is the Australian accent, which is something that the band somewhat helped appropriate amongst
international audiences. Before “Beds Are Burning”, it is difficult to find a release that utilises the Australian accent
and gained considerable commercial success. For example, Jon Williamson’s “True Blue” (1982) and the
Two-Man Band’s “Up There Cazaly” (1979) are examples of successful songs that were released prior to “Beds
Are Burning” and utilise the Australian accent. While both of these releases are still widely celebrated and
performed in Australia to this day, they have not had success in any international market. However, “Beds Are
Burning” was one of the first examples of a song that used the Australian accent and became internationally
successful. Hirst admits it “opened up a much larger audience right across the world” even though he was “very
determined that [Midnight Oil] would be seen as an Australian band, in an international context” (Haskell 2019).

Peter Garrett was able to utilise the accent whilst still being internationally appealing partially due to his
exasperated vocal delivery, which was previously popularised. Particularly in the verses of “Beds Are Burning”,
Garrett exhibits a passionate and slightly irritated vocal style with vibrato and occasional semi-spoken/shouted
lyrics. This style of delivery was normalised by the end of the 1980s, but it contrasted other previous popular music
vocal approaches. Performances such as U2’s Bono on ​Under A Blood Red Sky (​ 1983) and The Cure’s Robert
Smith on ​Three Imaginary Boys ​(1979) helped solidify this exasperated and theatrical delivery that became an
accepted convention of popular music.

These performances are also similar to “Beds Are Burning” due to their use of mostly diatonic harmony, simple
melodic contours, and basic rhythmic patterns. All of these conventions appeal to an international audience by
creating ​hooks within the composition. This common technique involves creating short rhythmic and/or melodic
phrases that “catch the ear of the listener” (AIMM 2019). One of the most memorable hooks in this song is the
brass phrase that starts the composition and appears before each chorus. The phrase is very simple as the brass
and rhythm section outline the E, G, and A major chords on beats 1 to 3 (below). While this is melodically and
rhythmically simple, the harmony of the hook departs from the E minor key that is used throughout most of the
composition. The G sharp and C sharp within the chords are examples of notes that are not diatonic to the E minor
scale. Using non-diatonic harmony and prominent brass in this section of the song causes the hook to become
easily distinguishable and memorable to the listener, even though it possesses a very basic rhythm and melody.

The opening hook of “Beds Are Burning”, which includes the lead brass melody at the top of the treble clef (Source: MuseScore)
The remaining sections of “Beds Are Burning” continue to alternate between using diatonic E minor harmony and
elements of E Mixolydian. An exception is the bassline’s flattened 5th in the verse (below), which otherwise utilises
E minor in both the harmony and vocal melody. The flattened 5th adds a bluesy element as it originates from the
blues scale, but this creates some harmonic tension in the pre-chorus. While the bass repeats the same two-bar
pattern as the verse, the vocal melody and rhythm section stray away from E minor to E Mixolydian. The chord
progression of E, D, and A major builds into the brass hook on a non-diatonic F# major chord. This harmonic shift
creates an effective contrast between the verse and pre-chorus sections, even though the drums and bass are
repeating their verse parts. These changes are not conventional to any genre, but they help achieve Midnight Oil’s
goal of synthesising a uniquely Australian sound (Donoughue 2020).

Repeated bass figure from the verse, including a flattened 5th (Bb) as the third note (Source: MuseScore)

The chorus of “Beds Are Burning” is the most conventional section of the song due to its diatonic minor harmony
and 80s pop/rock instrumentation. Peter Garrett’s vocal melody and the rhythm section adhere strictly to the E
minor scale, other than the bass’ use of the D sharp (natural 7th) which acts as a chromatic lead back to the tonic.
This section is also the dynamic climax of the composition with all instruments playing loudly (forte) throughout.
The combination of chordal guitars, synth countermelodies, both acoustic and sampled drums, and thumping
eighth notes on the bass is a quintessential 80s pop-rock band lineup. Bands such as Genesis, Yes and Toto are
examples of artists that normalised this approach to instrumentation throughout the 1970s and 80s. This
instrumentation provided a blend of new synth and effects technology of the time period, as well as more
conventional rock elements established in the 1950s.

One of the most quintessential elements of 1980s music technology that was used in “Beds Are Burning” is the
gated reverb drum tone. Gated reverb describes the application of a large reverberation following each drum hit,
which is silenced shortly after by an audio processing unit known as a noise gate (Debczac, 2017). This technique
is synonymous with 1980’s music across a number of genres and has been used by countless artists such as
Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and Roxy Music. The revolutionary technique was actually discovered unintentionally
during a Peter Gabriel recording session in 1979 when tracking drums with Genesis drummer Phill Collins
(Caswell, 2017). Their method was conceived when a talkback microphone picked up Collins’ drum hits from a
distance briefly before the outboard noise gate kicked in and silenced the signal. Following this, many other
engineers have been able to synthesise a refined version of the sound using outboard or digital reverb and noise
gate technology. In “Beds Are Burning” (and many other songs that use this effect) the gated reverb on the snare
drum adds a punchy attack and prominence in the mix. This emphasises beats 2 and 4 of the standard rock beat
in a 4/4 time signature (below), which strongly appealed to an international audience at the time.

The verse of “Beds Are Burning” uses a standard rock drum beat (Source: MuseScore)
Some other examples of quintessential 1980s music technology that are used in the song are triggered percussion
samples, synthesisers and chorus guitar tone. These are all examples of technology that allowed musicians to
alter or expand the tones of their instruments through electronic signal processing. Synthesisers such as the
Yamaha DX7 keyboard and electronic drum kits like the Simmons SD-S8 (below) allowed players to trigger and
alter purely electronic pitched and unpitched sounds on instruments that resembled their acoustic predecessors
(Solida 2019). The most noticeable use of electronic drum samples in “Beds Are Burning” is the break right before
the second chorus, during which Rob Hirst plays a unique fill on electronic drum pads. Various synthesisers are
also used throughout the song and are most noticeable in the chord hits during the pre-chorus, and in the low
counter melody in the chorus. The guitar tone used in this section utilises a chorus effect, which makes the
instrument sound ‘shiny’ by adding a slightly detuned parallel signal. The use of these three pieces of technology
was also common throughout 1980s popular music and enabled Midnight Oil to appeal to a wider audience than
just Australia.

An early model Simmons SDS electronic drum kit used heavily in the 1980s (Source: Simmons)

Another impactful Australian release that also utilises the aforementioned technology to appeal to an international
audience is the album ​Kick b ​ y INXS (1987). This album was also released in the same year as Midnight Oil’s
Diesel and Dust ​(which features “Beds Are Burning”), and shares many of the same 1980s conventions. These
include exasperated vocals, gated reverb drums, wind instrument parts, chorus guitar, and heavy synthesiser use.
However, unlike Peter Garrett INXS vocalist Michael Hutchence consistently uses an Americanised accent rather
than his native Australian tone. As previously mentioned, the Australian accent was not a normalised element of
mainstream pop/rock music during the 1980s. INXS most likely used an alternative accent to fit the expectations of
international audiences at the time. This somewhat contributed to INXS’ ​Kick ​being better received than ​ Diesel
and Dust;​ Midnight Oil’s album only received two top three international sales chart positions, while ​
Kick r​ eceived
five (Kent 1993). However, commercial sales charts are not necessarily a definitive measurement of the real world
cultural impact that an artist has.
Midnight Oil has continued to reinforce the same musical conventions and cultural attitudes throughout their
discography following “Beds Are Burning”. Their continual efforts to expose national issues involving the
Indigenous people, women, and other marginalised groups has contributed significantly to Australian music and
culture. The band’s last release ​The Makarrata Project ​(2020) is dedicated to defending the rights of Aboriginal
people, through lyrics about population loss during colonisation, changing the date of Australia and once again
acknowledging the need for land rights to be returned to the Indigenous. The track “Uluru Statement From The
Heart” explicitly outlines the band’s attitudes towards reconciliation, and includes politically driven statements such
as “We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country”. Unlike
Diesel And Dust, The Makarrata Project ​also includes Indigenous Australian feature artists such as Jessica
Mauboy, Gurrumul, and Dan Sultan (Hirst 2020). This strengthens the message of advocating reconciliation and
multiculturalism in Australia, which has not always been the perceived message of Midnight Oil’s actions.

Album artwork for Midnight Oil’s The Makarrata Project (2020) (Source: Sony)

To some Australians “Beds Are Burning” was found to be “offensive and viewed as perpetuating myths and
prejudice” as a result of “silencing of Indigenous voices” (Vellutini 2012). This claim was generated because it was
felt that an all-white band should not be speaking over Indigenous people on Australian issues. This debate grew
when Midnight Oil released a song named “Truganini” (1993) supposedly telling the tragic story of the last
Indigenous Tasmanian before the population ceased to exist. However, the song received substantial backlash
after it was found that at least seven thousand Tasmanians claim to be of Aboriginal descent. Since Midnight Oil
engaged in debate with people who responded negatively to their activism, the band has adopted a technique of
speaking ​to Australians rather than attempting to speak ​for them. This allowed the band to continue engaging in
important cultural conversations through writing politically fuelled protest songs.
“Beds Are Burning” also paved the way for other Australian artists to voice their opinion of Australian Indigenous
issues. Their willingness to write lyrics about topics that were previously unmentioned in popular music meant that
a forum was opened to other artists to do the same thing. Paul Kelly’s “From Little Things Big Things Grow” (1991)
and A.B. Original’s “January 26” (2016) are examples of protest songs that followed “Beds Are Burning”. “From
Little Things…” recounts the true story of Vincent Lingairri (below) and his fight against the government for
Aboriginal wage and land rights throughout the 1960s. As the lyrics explain, it is a story about “how power and
privilege cannot move a people” from standing up for human rights. Paul Kelly’s approach to writing a protest song
is contrasting from A.B. Original’s aggressive and tongue-in-cheek tone on “January 26”. This track directly
protests the placement of national holiday Australia Day being on the same date that a high percentage of
Aboriginal people were murdered during colonisation. The composition also attacks the general prejudice of
Australian power systems, especially in the lyric “I get a DWB, and that's a "Driving Whilst Black" where Briggs
implies he is targeted by police simply because of his race.

Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam symbolises the allocation of land rights to Vincent Lingairri in 1975 (Source: ABC)

The impact of “Beds Are Burning” and Midnight Oil’s discography continues to have an effect on Australian music
and politics to this day. During the early 2020 uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement, the song was covered
by numerous artists in order to reinforce efforts for reconciliation and land rights. Performers Missy Higgins, Julia
Stone, and Amanda Palmer all released cover recordings, showing that its message still resonates with the
Australian people today. In conclusion, Midnight Oil’s combination of international instrumental conventions,
Australian lyric delivery, and use of technology were what allowed “Beds Are Burning” to become one of
Australia’s most influential cultural and musical works.
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