The Oils spoke to me, and for me. When I heard Short Memories as a 17-year-old it spoke straight to the incomprehension and horror I felt then at what I was learning about Cambodia under Pol Pot, the Holocaust, apartheid and every other blood-soaked blight on human history. The list is a lot longer now, of course.

The Cold War probably seems faintly ludicrous to a generation that didn’t grow up in its shadow, but when I first heard Minutes to Midnight I was regularly having nightmares about dying in a worldwide nuclear war. I'd read The Fate of the Earth and it haunted me right up until the Berlin Wall came down. 'I look at the clock on the wall/ It says three minutes to midnight/ Faith is blind when we're so near'.

This stuff meant something to me. It was real, and it was comforting just to know I wasn't alone in being freaked out by the impending end of the world.

OK, I was a gloomy kid.

I was also a bleeding-heart leftie. Songs like River Runs Red and Progress spoke to my anguish about the state of the environment, while just about everything on Diesel and Dust tapped into my white middle-class guilt about the shocking way the country had treated, and continued to treat, indigenous people.

But it wasn’t empty rhetoric, as some would claim. The Oils toured outback towns and indigenous communities, where they had to learn to turn down their amps and pick up acoustic guitars so they didn’t scare off the locals. They took Indigenous bands such as the Gondwanaland and the Warumpi Band with them as supports. The Oils wanted to find out for themselves what was going on in indigenous Australia, so they reached out with an open mind and wrote eloquently about their journey.

The songs on Diesel and Dust burned with a deep desire for not just land rights - for fairness - but also for a genuine reconciliation between white and indigenous Australians. The way the Oils sang about it, it was more about our common humanity than some vague political idea.

The Oils were prescient on this issue above all the others they sang about. With songs such as The Dead Heart and Beds are Burning Midnight Oil did as much as anybody in raising consciousness about indigenous issues and aspirations among the wider population, and for reconciliation - if that rubbery term means, among other things, simply reaching out to each other. 'We will listen, we'll understand' – it had to go both ways. It seemed apposite that on the day of Rudd's national apology to the Stolen Generation, a profoundly moving moment for so many Australians, Garrett changed out of his suit to join John Butler on stage on the lawns of Parliament House.

The Oils were always described as a 'political' band, but to me their songs were powerful because they translated 'issues' into personal feelings: hope, desire, anger, and despair. It was always about passion and humanity, not some dry polemic. Mostly they threw uncomfortable truths at you and dared you to ignore them. They didn't sing 'save the Franklin'; they sang of rivers running red and black rain falling and asked, will you – will we – let this happen?

'Hope is what you say and do'.

The Oils were unmistakeably Australian, and never self-conscious about it. Peter Garrett sang in an unvarnished Australian accent long before Missy Higgins made it fashionable. The songs were full of Australian references – bindies, cockatoos, Coolangatta, the stars of Warburton - and about our issues. They really were our band, for our time, and I loved them for it.

They had integrity, too. Just the fact that they were prepared to sing about the most contentious of issues, in a country where the rule is that you don't talk about politics in mixed company, was enough. But also, they didn’t play the game Australian bands had to play in their early days, namely sucking up to Molly Meldrum. Although the reason they missed their first Countdown appearance was actually that they turned up late, messing up the show's tight schedule, their subsequent refusal to appear on Molly's menagerie gave them huge street cred.

Ditto for the fact that self-styled arbiters of taste Glenn A Baker and Bruce Elder thought they were rubbish. They really missed the bus (and Baker still doesn’t like them).

What about the music?

For my money, the Oils rocked harder than any Australian band before or since. They could be FEROCIOUS. But it wasn't the dumb plod of The Angels, there was always something interesting going on around the power chords. Check out Best of Both Worlds for the Oils at their baddest, and listen to the way those killer slabs of power chords are peppered with weird transistor beeps, guitar squeals, and off-kilter echoes of the riff.

There's no shortage of great melodies in the catalogue. It was always one of the strengths of the band, from early anthems such as I Don't Want to be the One through to sublime later ballads such as One Country. The melodies lent themselves to the increasingly rich harmonies the band developed during their career, providing the sugar coating to Garrett’s tough medicine.

They understood dynamics, too. The last time I saw the Oils was at the ANU in 2002, just before they announced their break-up. It was not long before the invasion of Iraq, which everybody knew was coming, and it felt like the world was on the verge of something terrible. They started with US Forces, which seemed more relevant than ever. After that lonely little acoustic guitar intro - a tease - the gap seemed to stretch forever. Garrett mischievously let the silence linger, the audience held its breath, and then suddenly he counted down from five to one with his fingers.

'US forces give the nard'.

The guitars kicked in and the whole crowd roared along, bouncing up and down as one in a beautiful moment of release.

'Divided world the C I Aaeeeay!'

It was one of the most cathartic concerts I've ever been to.

In Jim Moginie the band had one of Australia’s finest musicians, equally at home with bone crunching distortion, discordant blasts of sound, and delicately textured acoustic guitars – not to mention what he did with keyboards (check out Outside World). Moginie seemed to be able to pull unexpected textures, melodies and sounds straight out of the air. Live, he was the band’s quiet achiever, standing still and focusing intently while Martin Rotsey played all over the stage.

The sonic weave of Moginie and Rotsey's guitars was a wondrous thing. There were no long and boring guitar solos, rather an irresistible blend of prog rock musical sophistication, hard rock intensity, pop accessibility and punk-ish energy. It was pretty acoustic guitars one minute, butt-ugly distortion the next - or both at the same time. Nobody else sounded like them.

Grounding it all was Rob Hirst's rock solid, gunshot drumming. Hirst sat at the back of the Oils' electrical storm on his riser, usually in a singlet (all the better to show off those rippling muscles, perhaps), his arms flying around the drum kit as if his life depended on it.

And Garrett? One story goes that in their very early days an A & R man from a big record company told the band they’d be great – if they'd just lose the singer.

Garrett is hardly a great singer in the conventional sense, but he was perfect for the Oils: passionate and charismatic. When he sang those songs there was never any doubt - in my mind, anyway - that he meant them, whatever he might have said in his first question time in Parliament. Garrett’s singing was never pretty, but nobody else could have sung those songs as well as he did.

And anyway, who else could have come up with those wild dance moves, now aped by thousands of Oils fans? Garrett’s energy and intensity on stage was always amazing. He moved like a man possessed, gangly limbs flying in all directions, whirling around the stage like a Blackhawk going down. He was mesmerizing.

So I'm going to the concert.

As someone who bought into the Oils' idealism, does it bother me that Garrett is part of the ruthless, faction-riven machine that is the Labor Party? A bit. He'll make decisions I won't like, probably even decisions HE won’t like. But it's the same with the most idealistic in the Labor Left: caucus binds them to the party line. They scream and shout out each other behind closed doors, then have to walk out presenting a united front.

So I'm not sure Garrett should take the blame for Rudd's pissweak carbon targets.

Most of the issues the Oils sang about are as relevant now as they ever were. I think hearing Garrett sing about the plight of indigenous people and the degradation of the environment will be a lot less weird than hearing Roger Daltrey sing 'Hope I die before I get old' in April.

And who among us isn't compromised? What I done lately for the environment? Apart from riding my bicycle into work this morning, not a lot. What have YOU done?

Hope is still what you say and do, and we could all probably use a good kick up the arse.

Or maybe this is all a stretch of a rationalisation, and I really just don't want to miss the chance to see Australia’s best live band, for maybe the last time. Either way, I can't wait.