Colin Hay was on top of the world with Men At Work. And then, abruptly, he wasn’t. In time, the Scotland-born singer and songwriter would climb the mountain once again.
Hay has gone on to enjoy one of rock music’s remarkable second acts, both as a solo artist, as a member of Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, and as a raconteur, his stories and music opening doors and minds everywhere.
Hay has the gift of the gab, an easy charm, and stories that easily beat what the rest of us can drum up. Few tales can compare to the meteoric rise of Men At Work which, for a moment in 1983, simultaneously had the No. 1 single (with “Down Under”) and album (Business as Usual) both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, a rare achievement for an act from Australia, then and now.
Speaking with two-time Grammy Award–winning producer and music executive Pete Ganbarg for the Rock & Roll High School podcast, Hay remembered the high times, some “classic blunders” made along the way, turning his back on booze, and the comeback.
“You always think that you’re handling things really well, but of course you’re not,” he says of Men At Work’s bright start. “We made a couple of classic blunders but I think more than anything else it just wasn’t a band that was destined to go the distance really in terms of the personnel. This is also in hindsight really, we may have had another couple of albums in us, but five musicians and one manager. The manager was my friend and a couple of the guys in the band wanted to sack the manager and he wasn’t gonna get sacked cause he was my friend. It very much turned into an episode of Survivor, who’s gonna get voted off the island.”
That situation “soured me on the whole thing,” he continues. “I thought, well what is the point of conquering the world together if you can’t enjoy it together. It should be enjoyed and honored together by all the people who did that and there were six of us who did it. I’ll never understand why they wanted to get rid of him. It was just stupid. Even to this day I still think it was stupid, so it was over pretty much.”
Men At Work completed two more albums, before calling it a day: Cargo (from 1983) and Two Hearts (from 1985).
Speaking with Ganbarg, Hay points to a moment in January 1991 that he got his life and career back on track. With a move to Los Angeles, Hay kicked the bottle. “That really was the start of my new life,” he explains.
Hay doesn’t have any bad feelings, except for the bruising — and costly — copyright battle over the flute refrain in “Down Under,” which began in 2009 and concluded several years on, an “unforgivable” situation, he mentions. “It was horrible and it went for so long as well. It went for six years or something. There was nothing really I could do about it but defend it,” he reckons.
To make matters considerably worse, bandmate Greg Ham died in 2012, aged 58, two years after the Australian Federal Court ordered Men At Work to pay 5% of royalties earned from the song since 2002 and from future earnings.
“At the end of the day the sadness for me was the fact that Greg, who wasn’t in great shape anyway at that particular time, felt a sense of guilt about the fact that he played the line and yet he wasn’t sued,” Hay continues. “I was the one that was sued as the songwriter and EMI Music Publishing was sued also. And it had a great effect on my father, who had come to Australia as an immigrant and was so proud of what we’d done and I would play him the songs all the time before they were records so he knew the song was clean in terms of composition so smoke would come out of his ears…I’ll never forgive them for that.”
For the podcast, Hay discusses songwriting, resilience, how life’s great setbacks can ultimately lead to fresh starts, how Zach Braff introduced Hay to new audiences on Scrubs and Garden State, the unlikely fan in System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, and much more.
