![Colin Hay Discusses Men at Work, His Solo Career, and the Music Biz [Part One]](https://i1.wp.com/fastly-s3.allmusic.com/cms/30954/ColinHay1.jpg?ssl=1 "Colin Hay Discusses Men at Work, His Solo Career, and the Music Biz [Part One]")
Hay spoke to AllMusic shortly after the release of his latest solo release, Man @ Work: Volume 2, which like its successful predecessor, contains “re-imagined favorites from across Hay’s rich catalog, including Men at Work classics, solo album highlights, and new material.”
And it turns out that Colin was in such a talkative mood, that there will be a “part two” of his chat coming soon.
Let’s start with discussing Man @ Work 2. What made you decide to do a “part 2,” 22 years after the first one?
“Well, it was really Compass Records’ idea to do a sequel to it. I guess because the first one was the best-selling solo album that I’ve done, and I released a couple of albums a couple of years ago at the end of the pandemic, an album called Now in the Evermore, and then a covers record [I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself, as well. I’m not really sure why they decided to do it. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“I’ve almost ‘mined’ all the Men at Work material or songs from that period, because the reason why we did the first one was that I started working with Compass, and they said, ‘Well, no offense or anything, but not many people know your name. But they know Men at Work. So, why don’t we do an album called Man @ Work?’ That’s why we did the first one. And so that contained different versions of Men at Work songs and plus some new songs.”
“And I think that the thinking was, ‘Okay, well, we’ll do a few more Men at Work songs, and then re-record some of my favorite songs from the solo recordings.’ But I’m not really sure beyond that, why we did the second one. I think it’s just basically because they wanted to perhaps do another version of the solo recording, which has done the best for me, which is Man @ Work.”
Were there any tunes you rediscovered or developed a reappreciation for while re-doing them?
“Yeah. I think all of them. All of the songs are interesting when you re-record them – you discover new things about them. And you put records out there, and it’s very difficult to get records noticed these days. Especially if you’re somebody like myself, who is in their 70s. And it’s not like everyone’s waiting for a new album from me, y’know? So, there are songs that I think could be well-served by putting them on another record.”
“I think all the songs that I re-recorded for this record were songs I really liked that probably most people are still very unaware of, that I enjoy. And I really enjoyed recording them again, and I really like playing them when I go out and play live. So, I think all the songs, whether it’s a song like ‘Catch a Star’ or ‘No Sign of Yesterday’ from the Men at Work days, or a song called ‘Frozen Fields of Snow,’ which I really like, and I really enjoyed recording that again.”
“I have a lot of material, but I don’t have a lot of finished material. When I’ve been on the road so much, I haven’t had much time to write and finish songs and record them. So, it may be that it turns out to be one of those interim records that you put out, that’s not a ‘best of’ in a way, but just a compilation record – which you can afford to do when a lot of the songs haven’t been overexposed.”
How old were you when you developed an interest in music and began writing your own songs?
“I think I was about 14. I started playing music a bit earlier. Started playing music when I was about 12, and then I started to write little songs, I think when I was about 14 years old from then on.”
How did you find you write your best songs? Is there a certain formula you have followed all along, or has it changed over time?
“Certain little things have changed. But basically, it’s the same process. I don’t claim to understand the process, really, but it’s just something that since the age of 14, I’ve always kind of done. Which is really just to mess around with musical ideas on guitar – usually guitar – and little ideas, chordal structures, little melodies pop into your head, and you follow them. And miraculously, often, you end up with a song.”
“The ideas are free-flowing really, a lot of the time, but the hard work is really finishing the songs. Occasionally, some songs seem to write themselves. And while that’s not really true, sometimes songs appear in a way that they seem to just appear, and you write them down. And so, it would seem like you grab them out of the air. And then some songs, you’ve got to wrestle them to the ground.”
Can you give examples of songs that were easy, and others that were difficult to complete?
“‘Who Can It Be Now’ was very simple. It took about 40 minutes and written in the bush of southern New South Wales with my girlfriend at the time. I was messing around with this idea, and that only took 40 minutes. And a song called ‘Maggie’ that I recorded quite a few years ago – I just wrote that down in one sitting, and that seemed effortless. And then ‘Overkill’ was a bit like that – the old Men at Work song. I’m trying to think of one that was difficult to write…the ones that spring to mind are the ones that were relatively easy.”
What do you attribute to the reappreciation of Men at Work’s music in recent years?
“Well, I’d like to say that there’s something a bit timeless about the songs. I think the songs have had strengths when they were first released, and they still have strengths now, and people discover more things about them. Because I think there was more things there to the Men at Work music that perhaps was missed the first time around. So, there’s a density to the music that was perhaps not fully appreciated, I think now.”
“And also, Luude [Australian electronic dance music producer Christian Benson], he did an electronic version of ‘Down Under,’ which I think charted again, and was top-5 in the UK. And that did very well. It did very well on TikTok, as well – so people became aware of the ‘Down Under’ song. But beyond that, I’m not really sure what’s going on with the youngsters, and why they would choose to reappreciate Men at Work. But I’d like to think that it’s just because of the music, more than anything else.”
Looking back, how did you first cross paths with the members of what is considered the classic Men at Work line-up?
“Well, I’d been on my own for years, and I met Ron Strykert in a backyard in West Melbourne around 1977. He was playing a 12-string guitar. And it kind of hit me like a bolt of lightning, in a way – I saw this young guy, very shy guy, playing beautiful 12-string guitar. And I immediately thought, ‘Ah, I want to work with this person.’ So I got introduced to him, and we chatted for a while, and I had to go off because I had a job, actually, in a musical called Ned Kelly. And so I said to Ron, ‘When I’m done with this musical – which will probably be a few months – when I come back, we should work together.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, okay.’ And that was really the nucleus of Men at Work – was Ron and myself.”
“We worked as an acoustic duo for about a year – playing around a few places in Melbourne. And it was a great period. We played a lot of covers – we played a lot of Bob Dylan and Beatles and James Taylor and Ry Cooder and different things. And then we would put in these songs we’d written. So, we were developing this style, if you like, of songs and songwriting which was quite different from Men at Work, in a way. It was more influenced by people like Nick Drake and John Martyn, and very kind of meandering acoustic music.”
“And I had met Jerry Speiser, the drummer, at university. And Jerry called and said, ‘I want to try playing with you guys.’ And so Jerry came down, and it became a three-piece. And then I’d known Greg [Ham] for years, and I asked Greg to join. And Ron was playing bass then in the band. Because it was just me and my guitar, Ron playing bass – which, he was a great bass player, very inventive. But I wanted Ron to switch back to guitar, because he’s a very incredible guitar player.”
“Jerry knew John [Rees]. So, Jerry asked John to join. Over the course of probably two or three months, the classic line-up of Men at Work was born – I think around October ’79, something like that.”
What was the music scene in Australia like at the time?
“We didn’t really understand it. We didn’t really know what the music industry was, or how to do this, or how to do that. We only did things our way, which, was to try and find an audience. We just found a place to play, and then people came to see us. But there was a very healthy…what you would call ‘pub rock.’ There were a lot of pubs in Melbourne, and people would play in pubs – which suited most people. It didn’t really suit everybody, because if you play in a pub, you’re part of the entertainment. You’re not the entertainment, because you’re battling alcohol. For example, if you were a singer-songwriter who required people to listen to your music and you’re playing at a bar, you had to kind of fight against people talking. And so, it was really conducive to rock music – because you had big black boxes [amps], and you could beat people into submission by your volume.”
“And so that was what was going on. There was a lot of pub rock, and there was a lot of bands playing, and a lot of bands being signed. Y’know, we played for a couple of years before we had any interest from CBS – who ended up signing us. But I would say that for the most part, it was a place which was musically trying to find an identity, trying to define itself and do interesting things. And in a lot of ways, we weren’t so bogged down by being either British or American. We were Australian bands.”
“And because of the isolation, the tyranny of distance and so forth, you would gather music and musical ideas from all parts of the world, and it would kind of get all jumbled up, and it would become Australian music without it being too ‘definable.’ It had some kind of quality, which was just a feeling more than anything else – about the Southern Pacific, which was where we were all born and played.”
“And it was glorious. It was a glorious place to live, and a glorious place to have a band and play. I mean, before we came to America and started touring, when we became well-known, we would tour up and down the coast of Australia, which was incredible – just a beautiful part of the world, and people would come and see you play. And it was magic. It was fantastic.”
Who came up with the name “Men at Work”?
“Well, I thought of the name, because I would see ‘men at work’ signs everywhere. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s something that was just in people’s consciousness, even though they may not realize it.’ But it was a name that had been put forward, and we had a bunch of names.”
“But we had to have a name, because we had this residency to start at the Cricketers Arms Hotel in Richmond. And the guy calls, and said, ‘Listen, what am I going to call you guys?’ And Ron said, ‘Let’s go with Men at Work.’ So, we did.”
If I can name some Men at Work classics and if you can share some thoughts about writing them, starting with “Who Can It Be Now.”
“My girlfriend and I used to have this bit of a bush block, what they call in Australia, in southern New South Wales. And it was quite remote. And I just arrived there one night, and it was in the middle of nowhere, and just messing around with that idea. And it seemed to flow quite easily and quite quickly. I just wrote the words down, and that was it. The song was born, and took it to the band, and we started playing it that that week. It was kind of a ‘crowd favorite’ from the start.”
“Down Under.”
“‘Down Under’ was a combination of Ron and myself. Ron used to give me little cassettes of kind of soundscapes that he had written – different musical ideas. A lot of it was percussive-based or bass and percussion. And this little musical idea was exactly that. And he gave me a little cassette which I would play in the car, and it was just this [sings rhythm]. It was very hypnotic and tribal, almost. I really liked it.”
“And I’d had this phrase running around my head for a few weeks before that, which was ‘Living in the land down under.’ And I just started singing that line along with Ron’s little bassline, and it seemed to work. And I kind of sang that all the way home. And I thought, ‘That’s probably something.’ And then the next day, I woke up and just wrote down the words and the chordal structure to it, and we had a song.”
How often are you still asked about what Vegemite is and did you ever eat it yourself?
“Yeah, I still get asked about it. But nowadays I just say, ‘Well, y’know, there is a thing called Google – it’s quite easy to find out what Vegemite is!’ But it is a product of the beer industry. It’s a yeast extract, and Australians are brought up on it. And you have it on toast, or you have it on a sandwich.”
“And yes, I have had had Vegemite many times. I arrived in Australia from Scotland, never having experienced Vegemite. So, one day at school, I had a roast beef sandwich and this kid said, ‘You want to swap sandwiches?’ I said, ‘What have you got?’ He said, ‘I’ve got Vegemite.’ That was the first time that I ever experienced a Vegemite sandwich. And I quite enjoyed it.”
“Be Good Johnny.”
“Greg and I were at rehearsal one day, and the rest of the guys hadn’t turned up, so we had a little time on our hands. And I got this new guitar pedal, a little delay pedal, and I started messing around with the refrain at the start of the song with this delay pedal.”
“And Greg and I decided it would be cool to write a song from the standpoint of a child who’s always been told to toe the lane and to be good, and follow the straight and narrow, if you like. And like a lot of kids, we could still remember being a child and being dreamers and wanting to just make our own way without necessarily becoming our parents. And looking at the adult world, and saying, ‘Yeah, well, I think maybe we could do a little bit better than that.'”
“Overkill.”
“‘Overkill’ came a little bit later for me. And I think I already made the realization that, because we were becoming quite successful, I thought, ‘Well, nothing’s going to be the same from this point on.’ And it’s like asking yourself the question about taking a dive into the unknown, and whether you were going to be okay with that, because things were different. You can no longer just anonymously observe the world. And there was a certain darkness creeping into my life. And I think what that was, was kind of an increasing love and dependence on alcohol – which was starting to worry me.”
“Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive.”
“It’s just really a song about the injustice of the world, really, and how difficult it is to be the underdog, or to have someone who wants to make effective change in whatever field you’re in. I’m trying to think of what else I was going through at that time…but I don’t know, sometimes, just things pop into your head. You have no real reason, no real understanding of why or where it’s coming from, and it becomes a nice melody. And I like the play on words with Jekyll and Hyde and Heckyll and Jive – so, it just became a song.”
“It’s a Mistake.”
“It was at the height of the Cold War, and we were quite fearful of the United States, because when you grow up in another country, you have a very different view of America than when you actually live here. So, we were all very concerned about the Reagan years and somebody making a mistake. It was very influenced by the film Dr. Strangelove. And the two superpowers ultimately making a mistake and causing some Third World War conflagration – which was going to end up with no winners. That’s really what it was inspired by.”
“Everything I Need”
“It was a love song. I think it’s a love song both to my wife and also Melbourne as a city. I have a great love for Melbourne.”
We got so many great stories from Colin, be on the lookout for part 2 of this interview in the upcoming weeks.
