I was looking at the credits on The The’s Mind Bomb and noticed a name I’d never paid attention to: Warne Livesey, co-producer. He also played keyboards, banjo, and acoustic guitar on the record. The name didn’t click until I looked him up.
Livesey produced every Midnight Oil album I own. Diesel and Dust in 1987 — the one with “Beds Are Burning.” Blue Sky Mining in 1990. Redneck Wonderland in 1998. Capricornia in 2001. The Makarrata Project in 2020. Resist in 2022. He was there for the whole second half of their career.
And the same guy co-produced Mind Bomb in 1989, the album where Johnny Marr plays guitar and Sinéad O’Connor sings on “Kingdom of Rain.”
I’d never connected these two records. Midnight Oil and The The occupy completely different corners of my collection — one is Australian protest rock, the other is English art-pop that sounds like it was recorded inside a cathedral. But Livesey shaped both of them.
The connection goes deeper than just producing. Before Mind Bomb, Livesey produced The The’s Infected in 1986. And in 1987 — the same year he went to Australia to make Diesel and Dust — he produced Julian Cope’s Saint Julian. Then for Mind Bomb, he brought Julian Cope’s bass player, James Eller, into the studio. So the bass on “Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)” belongs to a musician who had just finished playing on Cope’s psychedelic rock record.
There’s another layer. Livesey co-wrote most of the songs on Mark Hollis’s solo album — the only solo record by Talk Talk’s frontman. I own that album too. And he produced The House of Love’s Babe Rainbow in 1992, another record in my collection.
So one producer connects Midnight Oil, The The, Julian Cope, Mark Hollis, and The House of Love across my shelves. Five artists I think of as completely separate, linked by a British-Canadian musician who moved between post-punk, Australian rock, and dream pop in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I’ve stared at the Diesel and Dust cover and the Mind Bomb cover hundreds of times. I never thought about who was behind both of them.