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Hirst & Greene.
 Former Olympic and Commonwealth Games runner Paul Greene first met up with Midnight Oil drummer Rob Hirst during the 2000 Games when the pair, along with Rick Grossman [Hoodoo Gurus] were involved in the 'Olympic Record' CD project. Greene, an aspiring singer/songwriter who has now accrued three solo albums, continued his friendship with the two Australian rock icons and became part of their ongoing project The Ghostwriters; the decision was now made for the sprinter to leave the track far behind him and concentrate full time on the long roads ahead. Then came the splinter incarnation of Hirst and Greene, and the two are now excited about their debut release, 'In The Stealth Of Summer'.
"I've written and toured a lot solo," says Greene, considering his and Hirst's appeal, "and I've really enjoyed going into pubs where people don't know who I am and it's amazing how enjoyable it can be for an audience and the performer because there's no expectations, it's just a group of people in a room and it's like sitting around a campfire. It's just getting back to basics and the way I see it is, there's two types of audiences: the ones that go to see it because it's big and the ones who go because it's good."
Building up a routine of around 250 gigs a year on his own, Greene is now pleased that he endured the self-imposed hard slog with the experience now proving invaluable when he's out with whom he refers to as, "the master." "That's true," he reflects. "I think with The Ghostriters it took me a long time to get my confidence up because I hadn't played as many stadium gigs as the other two but that didn't mean I was any better or worse, it was just getting more miles up that was important."
Does this mean that Hirst had some readjusting to do.?"Well he's not used to playing gigs where he has to set up his own drum kit and pack it up," Greene laughs, "so we very much met in the middle in that respect because we've now played a lot of the places that I've played solo. We did that when we first started and there was one point where Midnight Oil had just headlined Wave-Aid for tsunami victims a week earlier, and we were playing in a pub and people were playing pool about a metre away and the sound guy didn't know what he was doing; the fact that Rob can laugh and have fun and enjoy that, well I can only have more respect for him. Rob's been teaching me a lot of things just by being around him, but the project's road worn enough now that we're in our groove and we have a lot of respect for each other on stage and for what we do."
Greene now believes that Hirst is more than happy to go along with what he fondly refers to as the Folk and Roll lifestyle. "I guess Hirst and Greene is a little less highly strung than what Midnight Oil was," he muses.
"I think that's one of the things that Rob likes about the project, in that we've never forced it and we've enjoyed playing it. When talking to Rob about the stuff Midnight Oil did it was pretty intense; the hours they did and the tours they did, and even with just their approach to songwriting they worked hard. When they were writing 'Capricornia' they'd go into the rehearsal studios at nine in the morning and come back out at six at night and they'd have bent the songs every which way they could possibly think of bending them."
However, Greene maintains that he's still a bit overwhelmed when he's around certain artists, having recently finished touring with another of his idols, Ani Difranco. I remind him that he once ran against the fastest man on earth, Michael Johnson.
"I'd never seen him before, let alone run against him, so I was a bit daunted," he admits. "But I guess that if I had the confidence that I've got now with music when I was doing athletics I might not have ended up doing music, who knows? But he beat me by a long way," he modestly recalls. "We're talking about four seconds and that's only over four-hundred metres which means I was about 40 metres behind - which is enough to make me look very, very human."
Steve Jones
 | Hirst & Greene play at Jive on Thurs 7 April. |
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