While performing at a recent gig in Dublin, rock icon Patti Smith covered a classic from Australian icons Midnight Oil, specifically their anthem ‘Beds Are Burning.’
Midnight Oil’s Twitter account tweeted a clip of the performance, saying “It doesn’t get much better than this…”
It doesn’t get much better than this… https://t.co/NMT0Rnfj2A
— Midnight Oil (@midnightoilband) June 19, 2018
Before the cover, however, Smith gave a moving speech on Indigenous Australians, their connection to the environment throughout history – particularly Uluru and The Great Barrier Reef – and how “settlers and tourists” disregarded, and continue to disregard, that sacred connection, and how modern society is killing the GBR.
“The settlers came and the tourists, and those who did not believe, and they tramped upon it,” she said passionately.
“And some fell to their death pulling the red skin of the great rock down into the desert, creating the dust of sorrow all the way to the sea. And beneath the sea, so many leagues beneath the sea, Great Barrier Reef, red as blood, red as a ruby. Until man infused it with his toxics, with oil, with his plastics, and choked the life out of it, until that great red reef bleached white like the bones of saints in the sun.”
She then lead into her performance of the Midnight Oil classic.
Watch the full performance below.
