Photo by the author
Noriega and Gadaffi can be found performing around Melbourne under the guise The Midnight Juggernauts. They traverse musical terrains ranging from organ-rock and disco-metal, through to sci-fi roller-skating anthem. Despite their respective backgrounds as political/military leaders, Gadaffi and Noriega each possess a unique musical approach, but coming together, make it perfectly clear that they can kick out the electro jams. Having just completed an invasion of Melbourne’s music scene, The Midnight Juggernauts have their nuclear tipped keyboards set on overseas enemies. In an interview, which took place at juggernaut headquarters (situated in St. Kilda’s last remaining rural area), Noriega and Gadaffi elaborate on their need to unleash their music on unsuspecting civilians abroad.Noriega: Right now we want to do some big world tour, but we don’t want to do the usual circuit. Rather, we will go play towns like Tehran and Baghdad or do some shows in Eritrea and a couple of nights in Ghana. That sort of thing. I don’t know if there’s a big electro-rock scene over in Ghana right now, but if not, we’ll be happy to start them off.
Gadaffi: Yeah, we’ll be like musical missionaries or something.
Noriega: Then in 5 years time we can pick up a music encyclopedia and read about how Ghana has become the hotspot for electro-rock acts thanks to the Midnight Juggernauts. It would be cool to leave that kind of legacy.?
Gadaffi: It’s kind of tricky to organise these tours coz people don’t let us on planes no more. Road trips are the best, particularly when you’ve got some good mix tapes. Once we hired this car in Memphis from an old ex-pcp addict called Whitey who gave us a bombed out Chevy pretty cheaply. We soon discovered that you could only unlock it and enter the thing by crawling in through the boot. So whenever we’d leave parties or shows late at night and crawl in, people would surround us, thinking we were stealing the thing. This happened all the way up to New York. In the end, we just got tired of explaining ourselves and would just take off with them banging on the car and shit.
VICE: I hear you guys put on a benefit concert for Michael Jackson when he was being charged. How much did you raise for him?
Noriega: More than anything we raised awareness. Gadaffi: Some people didn’t think it was right that we wanted to raise funds to pay for his legal fees, so there was an outcry in a couple of the papers. But in the end the King of Pop was in trouble and we had a duty to fulfill. Noriega: Don’t they realize this guy wrote Dirty Diana?
Noriega: More than anything we raised awareness. Gadaffi: Some people didn’t think it was right that we wanted to raise funds to pay for his legal fees, so there was an outcry in a couple of the papers. But in the end the King of Pop was in trouble and we had a duty to fulfill. Noriega: Don’t they realize this guy wrote Dirty Diana?