While Huon didn’t see too many big hotels or packed halls, I can’t help feeling my ‘rock ‘n’ roll tour of North America in the age of terror’ experience was superior – in terms of intimate experience – to Rob Hirst’s.

For a quarter of a century, Hirst has been drummer and songwriter for Midnight Oil, seemingly content to play a backseat role to the arresting and exotic lead singer/front man Peter Garrett. From the late 1970s to early this year, when they broke up, the Sydney group broke new ground in politically aware, dynamic rock. Willie’s Bar and Grill is two books enmeshed: a post-September 11 tour diary and an autobiographical memoir. Rambling and unchecked, it captures band dynamics and the mechanics of a rock show better than it does the so-called ‘age of terror’ experience or even group history.

Hirst is honest with his readers about Midnight Oil’s commercial status. In Australia, they have been an iconic constant: but their star has been fading in the US since their biggest hit, ‘Beds Are Burning’, made the US Top 20 in 1989, a feat they neatly consolidated with a notorious and admirably spontaneous performance in a New York street in protest against the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Now, Americans see them as a 1980s curio, and Hirst reports without comment one of his bandmates’ suggestions that he call his book Midlevel Band Struggling with Its Own Limitations. It is also to Hirst’s credit that he keeps any bitterness he feels about Midnight Oil’s holding pattern subtle and submerged, despite the band being forever forced to rework their old hit single at every promotional event on a tour intended to promote a new album.

The memoir element of the book is, however, less effective. Hirst’s attempts to tie the ‘present’ and his past together (‘Back in Detroit my childhood reveries are brought to an abrupt conclusion’) are often clunky, as are the telegrammatic memories themselves. The reader gets the impression that the ‘childhood reveries’ (or the low-on-detail references to playing the Bondi Lifesaver in 1977) were probably grafted on much later.

Additionally, though Hirst’s ‘take’ on the US post-September 11 is as arch as you’d expect, most of it isn’t much more than he could have picked up from watching television in Australia. This, it has to be said, is the problem with this kind of rock tour ‘diary’: the reality of the touring a group like this does. Midnight Oil are, clearly, not the types to wrap themselves in cotton wool ‘on the road’ – even if their budget allowed it, which it probably doesn’t – but their tour is still, largely, a series of hotel rooms connected by views of the insides of a coach, and some performances. We’re not surprised, of course, that there’s not one iota of rock ‘n’ roll debauchery from these conscientious, middle-aged professionals; even that notorious feature of most rock tours – backstage practical joking – is tame. But when Hirst gets time off on this far-reaching jaunt, he usually heads for a museum, and the reader’s generally not invited along, which is probably for the best. Hirst has little of the journalist in him: he’s an anonymous Australian musician filling in time in Chicago, or wherever, before he goes off to play another ripper of a gig with the band he’s played in since he was a kid.

For all the book’s faults, Hirst does come through as conscientious, likeable and committed. He is genuinely fond of most of the people he works with. While their jokes and actions sometimes fall flat on the page, there is nevertheless a convincing portrayal of a rock entourage, with its criss-crossing trails all over ‘the industry’ and its hotly ambivalent relationship to the public.

The most curious thing about Willie’s Bar and Grill is the guy you’d most expect to be explored and who really isn’t: Peter Garrett. For the vast majority of people aware of the group, Garrett is Midnight Oil. Hirst is determined to show us otherwise; while Garrett is obviously present all the time, he’s barely there at all. Possibly this is sour grapes – he may have assumed a central place in the story had he not quit the band, forcing Hirst and the rest of the Midnight Oil machine to call it a day. Garrett’s startlingly stilted and oblique statement to Hirst after the group’s farewell concert – ‘“If it wasn’t for the enduring power of the music, I wouldn’t have made it this far,” he gasps’ – is enigmatic, and prompts the reader to wonder what Hirst’s real feelings are about the man he’s been sitting behind all his adult life.