“The Dead Heart” by Midnight Oil

"The Dead Heart" is Midnight Oil with their conscience turned all the way up. The band recorded it for the ceremony that handed Uluru back to its traditional Aboriginal owners, and it's a song about how Australia has treated its Indigenous people and refused to recognise their cultures, part of a wider push to make the country face up to the Stolen Generations, the children forcibly taken from their families. It came out as a single at home first, then landed on Diesel and Dust in 1987, which is how it reached the UK and the US in 1988.

The writing credit, Peter Garrett, Peter Gifford, Rob Hirst, Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey, says it came out of the whole band. Hirst's drums pound like a ritual, Gifford's bass holds steady, Moginie and Rotsey's guitars chop and chime, and co-producer Warne Livesey adds keyboards alongside Moginie, with cello, trombone and French horn thickening the brew before Nick Launay's mix.

At home it went to 4 on the singles chart and earned a Best Single nomination at the 1986 Countdown Australian Music Awards; in America it reached 11 on the mainstream rock chart. In 2018 Triple M placed it at 76 in its Ozzest 100 of the most Australian songs ever.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.