Wedding Cake Island – Midnight Oil (Instrumental) 1980, Sydney surf music

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Midnight Oil: “Wedding Cake Island” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3FQwovIJw0

Soundtrack cross post: http://notesonbeing.com/2014/05/13/the-art-of-circular-quay/

Wedding Cake Island is a small rocky outcrop a few hundred metres off the coast of Coogee Beach. Island is an optimistic term; it’s wet and rocky – not a place to visit for recreation. The surf break around there is excellent when the swell is right, like most Sydney beaches.

Surfing Wedding Cake Island

Surfer Stephen Sharpe backdooring a big barrel at Coogee – “the Southie” just offshore.

This is a superb instrumental track from Midnight Oil; you don’t need to be a fan to appreciate it. There is a kind of vocal on the track. If you listen carefully, at 2:23 you can hear the words “north swell ‘round the Byron Pass mate”. The story goes that the studio recording ran overtime and a member of Cold Chisel opened the door and interrupted the session with this remark. “Bird Noises”, the album on which this track features, was recorded at the Music Farm Studios in the hills behind Byron Bay, pictured below. All the top bands stayed there and recorded albums in the 70s and 80s (I stayed there for a while around 1980 – I was well-connected in those days).

The new owner, Eric Roberts, has now refurbished the control room and expanded the console to it’s full 42 input capacity. He has added new effects units and Pro Tools and the whole studio is up and going again under the direction of Greg Courtney.

Byron Bay, also legendary for its beaches, is on the Far North Coast of New South Wales. (Waves refracting around Cape Byron tend to run almost at right angles along The Pass. These produce the surf for which it is internationally famous.) Keen Sydney surfers regularly take the pilgrimage – approximately 770 kilometres, about a 9 hour drive or 1 hour by plane – northward to Byron to experience these spectacular conditions.

I’ll create a post on Sydney’s beaches at a later date, but this is a nice piece of music to accompany the post on Circular Quay; Sydney is all about the Harbour and beaches. Surf music from a much-loved local band seems right. The Oils played and recorded alt rock and hard rock from 1976 to 2002, initially establishing a fan base solely in Sydney.

The tune was written by guitarists Martin Rotsey and Jim Moginie and features them on guitars. Rob Hirst plays drums and Peter Gifford adds bass. Charismatic front man Peter Garret (recently serving as Federal Minister for Education) is not included on the track. This was one of the rare Midnight Oil tracks played on local radio; their huge popularity was built almost entirely on their live shows.

Midnight Oil: Martin Rotsey, Peter Garret, Rob Hirst, Jim Moginie and Peter Gifford.