Jim Moginie’s twenty-five year contribution to Midnight Oil cannot be under-stated, songwriter musician and vocalist in a blistering band which pioneered new ground, inflamed passions and challenged social justice and environmental concepts. Midnight Oil produced sixteen studio albums including their most recent release, Resist. Eleven ARIAs, an induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame and the two songs – ‘Beds Are Burning’ (nominated for a Grammy in 1988) and ‘Power and the Passion’ are on the APRA Best Songs of All Time list. The band received The Ted Albert Award for Outstanding Services to Australian Music in 2018 and the Sydney Peace Prize in 2020.
Moginie has produced records for Sarah Blasko (winning an Aria for ‘What The Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have), silverchair, Backsliders, End of Fashion, Neil Murray, Coloured Stone, Kate Miller-Heidke and dozens of others, sometimes in his Oceanic studio in Sydney. He has written songs and played on records with Neil Finn, Kasey Chambers, Jimmy Barnes and silverchair. He has composed soundtracks for films with David Bridie and director Geoff Bennett.
Moginie’s projects include his Electric Guitar Orchestra which has performed at MONA, Sydney Opera House and music festivals in Ireland, touring/recording two albums with The Break, a surf/space/rock themed outfit whose members are ex-Midnight Oil, Violent Femmes and Hunters & Collectors, his folk band, Shameless Seamus, his rock band Jim Moginie & The family Dog and has four solo releases, Alas Folkloric, No Vans Mary, Triptych and Murmurations. Jim has also toured here and in the U.S.A. and Canada as guitarist with the Grammy nominated Australian Chamber Orchestra. Jim has recently played shows touring his solo guitar record Murmurations in the first half of the shows and on piano and vocals in the second.
Since The Great Circle comeback tour of 2017 that Midnight Oil undertook doing 77 sold out shows worldwide, the band followed with five years of solid touring and recording. They made The Makaratta Project EP and a full album Resist at Rancom Street Studios and Jim’s Oceanic Studio. The former included collaborations with many Australian First Nations artists including Jessica Mauboy, Troy Cassar-Daly, Leah Flanagan, Ursula Yovich, Kaleena Briggs, Frank Yamma, Kev Carmody, Sammy Butcher (Warumpi Band,) Alice Skye, Tasman Keith and Dan Sultan. The latter was a 12 track album of songs.
The band’s final Resist tour covered Australia, United States, Canada, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, France and New Zealand with its final show at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on 3 October 2022. He has been active working on and mixing music created in prisons, Songbirds 2 (male NSW prisoners) with early Midnight Oil alumni Murray Cook and Heart of A Woman (West Australian female indigenous prisoners) with prison music program administrator Angela Leech.