Midnight Oil's Jim Moginie and 'a funny night in Yallah'

It's 2007 and he'd released his first solo album Alas Folkloric, and just 12 tickets for the Yallah Roadhouse had been sold - and located on the side of the highway with no houses nearby, there aren't going to be any walk-ups.

Then a massive downpour strikes, all but making the support band inaudible. Then the power goes out, forcing the support and Moginie's band to go into acoustic mode.

And that's where the Coledale resident chose to start The Silver River.

"It was a funny night in Yallah that's for sure," he says. "The rain, the blackout and the people with candles and having toasted sandwiches, cups of tea and playing acoustically in the rain."

He knew he could have started the book with a show in front of a packed Wembley, or even the 2000 Olympics gig, but felt the low points tend to have more resonance than the highs.

"I guess there's a lot of triumphal chest beating in these sort of books," he says of music memoirs.

"I just wanted to show that your failures can sometimes teach you more than the victories.

"I just think [that night] was funny more than anything else. It taught me a lot about the fall from being in a huge band to being into solo things. It's really difficult; you're always tied to that ship, the mother ship of the band, whether you like it or not."

It's also a good place to start, because Midnight Oil isn't really the focus of The Silver River. Sure, there's heaps of stuff about the band - including minutiae like the identity of the non-band member on the back cover of the Head Injuries album.

But the real heart of the book is Moginie's story of being adopted; of finding out, discovering how it affected his adult life and then tracking down his real parents and finding he had this whole other family.

It's clear from Moginie's writing that this is the reason why he wanted to write the book. Though, the fact we'd ever get to read about it wasn't originally part of the plan.

It was meant to be an instruction manual for his children, so they could understand dad a bit better. He'd head off to Ireland - which is the heritage of his birth parents (and therefore himself) - and find himself churning out the words.

After enough trips to Ireland, the band stuff began to make its way in and it became a book for more than just the family.

But whether readers pick it up for the music side of things or the more personal adoption storyline doesn't bother Moginie.

"People will get different things out of it," he said.

"People will get that adoption side out of it. I really wanted to put that in because of the struggles that adoptees go through with their lives.

"Sometimes they don't adapt to the world and their fight and flight responses are different to normal people.

"The thing for adoptees, hopefully they can draw a bit out of it, to show people that it's okay to feel this way about being adopted.

"It's okay to feel different about things. I think a lot of that confusion as a teenager, that's where a lot of my music came from. It was a way of making sense of the world, and then a lot of that stuff went into the Midnight Oil thing."

In 2003, he headed to Canberra, where he met his birth father Brian. Then, a day later, his new-found siblings arranged a meeting with his birth mother Anne in Goulburn.

In the days afterwards, he looked in the mirror and would see facial features he shared with various family members. And soon realised his brother Dave had seen him on stage in 1983 but didn't see any resemblance - though Moginie says that was probably because Peter Garrett was "running around, taking the attention".

"He just couldn't quite believe that either - that he'd already seen me," Moginie says.

"There's a real commonality with us. It's funny, we've got the same sort of humour and some other things going on, but of course you grew up in a different family situation so a lot of your learning is different.

"The thing about meeting my mother was I was never sad because I really liked her. It was more that I never got to know her like the others did. But then again I had my own mother so there was nothing to complain about."

In terms of the Midnight Oil family, the most interesting part of the book is the band's downhill slide post-Blue Sky Mining - perhaps reflecting Moginie's view that you learn more from your failures than your successes.

"It's just the time you have where it's a golden period. No matter what you do whether it's a clip or an album or a gig, it's magic," he says.

"And then that magic gets repeated and then it doesn't quite come back the same way album after album.

"I think, in a way, the book shows that the motivations change when you get to that point. What you want to do is hang on to that thing, that magic, that you've created for people in their minds. But it's an elusive thing that slips out of your hands like sand. It just doesn't stay, it moves on to somebody else.

"I think a lot of the motivations of the band possibly changed. We've got very singly, very poppy. I thought we'd abandoned musicianship and writing about Australia, which is what the band's mission statement was."

After their latest tour Midnight Oil said that would be their last one, which would be fine with Moginie; he doesn't want to be onstage "playing elderly rock". And listening back to live tapes of recent shows, he'd noticed the songs were 10 to 20 beats per minute slower, thanks to the physical limitations of ageing.

But one-off gigs for the right cause could be on the cards, as well as new recordings.

"We were quite creative people, but with us it's more if the right thing came along we probably would do a gig if we all believed in it and it was a good idea," Moginie says.

"You can go into this thing of being an old band and cross this line but who knows where that line is? You don't know whether someone's ever going to come and tap you on the shoulder and say 'hey, about time you stopped'.

"It's a very Midnight Oil thing the way we did it. We'd rather not do it at all - be great and be gone - rather than just lingering on and coming to shows to be honoured by the presence of the artist."

The Silver River by Jim Moginie (HarperCollinsPublishers $34.99). Jim Moginie is delivering an author talk at Thirroul Library on Saturday night. Tickets are available through Eventbrite.