By Jim Morrison
Colin Hay is touring as Men at Work, but he hasn’t brought back the band that made those early ‘80s, ear-worm hits like “Down Under,” “Who Can It Be Now?” and “Overkill.”
“It’s not really putting Men at Work back together,” he said in a call from Los Angeles, where he’s lived for decades after leaving Australia.
He’s the only original member of a band playing Men at Work songs.
“It’s just touring with the same band that I have here in Los Angeles,” he said. “So it’s different from, you know, putting something back together again. I mean, I’m not really even sure why I’m going out as Men at Work. It’s more of an experiment.”
That experiment comes to the Sandler Center on Wednesday, Oct. 23 in Hay’s return to the area.
Hay founded the band in Melbourne in 1978. By 1983, they’d become the first Australian artists to have a simultaneous number one album and number one single in the United States. They won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. But by 1986, it was over. Hay began a long solo career.
Solo fans have made “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,” “Beautiful World,” and “Waiting for My Life to Begin” favorites. But Men at Work has six times the number of Spotify monthly streams of his solo work.
Forty years on, the group’s “Land Down Under” was and remains a massive hit. For Hay, it was a way to pay homage to his immigrant home.
“I had this phrase running around my head for a few weeks, living the land down under. That’s got a nice ring to it. And Ron Strykert (the band’s bassist) gave me a little cassette tape that he recorded on his porta studio. It was just little rhythmic ideas which were really hypnotic and really quite, quite great,” he recalled. “And I was listening to this one in particular that had a little percussive thing going on, you know, and it just repeated that went round. And I just really liked it. I was driving home one night and sang, living in a land down under, over the top of it. And I thought, that’s something. ”
“I just sang that all the way home, and then the next morning, I woke up and wrote the rest of it, the words and the chords and the structure of the song,” he added. “It only took about 40 minutes. But it was a song I think that was probably a long time running around my head because I’d gone to Australia as an immigrant, and it kind of blew my mind so much that I wanted to write something about where I had landed in the world.”
Hay revived the band with Greg Ham from 1996 to 2002. Ham died in 2012. “For a long time. I just never, never really felt the urge, you know, to go out and play as Men at Work,” he explained. “But at the moment, I do.”
Hay, 71, released the first of his 15 solo albums in 1987. But he soon found that Men at Work’s popularity didn’t transfer. His major label dropped him.
He pressed on. “I didn’t really see what the alternative was, you know,” he said. “I didn’t really have a choice if I wanted to keep making music. And I thought, well, I have to find an audience, because it wasn’t going to come knocking on my door. And so I had to go out on the road and make records at home. I had to learn I wasn’t I wasn’t going to get another record deal with a major label.”
As the son of music store owners who emigrated to Australia from Scotland when he was a child, music was his world. “I just did what I knew, which was to go out and play, write songs, record them and try and to garner some kind of audience,” he added. “The audiences would grow, but slow going. It’s taken me about 30 years or something to go from 50 people to 1,500 people.”
For years, Hay played solo. When he decided to recruit a band, he realized he didn’t know many musicians. But his wife, Peruvian-born Cecilia Noel, did. She often accompanies him on tour. Her band, The Wild Clams, combined salsa, soul, jazz, funk, and Afro-Cuban music and had 16 members in the 1990s. She’d been labeled the Latin Tina Turner. About a decade ago, he picked up a few of them.
“She was working with a couple of Cuban guys who just had recently arrived and decided to stay in the States,” Hay said. “They were hanging around the house a lot, and, you know, eating rice and beans and so I would just say, Oh, well, you, you know, when you finish your rice and beans come downstairs and play on this record because I need something on this track. They were beautiful musicians and I just stole them.”
He describes the band as not only stellar musicians but good companions. “We travel well together, which is a really important thing if you’re in a band, especially as you get older,” he said. “You think, well, this guy might be the greatest this or the greatest that, but he’s a pain in the ass. And so you kind of go, well, it’s not worth it. But I’m lucky because this group is also fantastic musicians.”
Hay says the audiences vary between his solo shows and his Men at Work shows. The audiences at Men at Work shows “tends to be a little bit more people who think that ever since then you’ve kind of fallen off the face of the Earth. They’re excited to come back after 40 years.”
The solo audiences are more varied, maybe younger. “My experience is when I got out playing solo, I’m probably the oldest person in the room,” he said.
Hay moved to the States more than three decades ago and eventually became a U.S. citizen. Touring has always been inviting, no matter the crowd size. “I found it strangely cathartic, even now when it was difficult. It wasn’t easy, you know,” he said.
“But I wasn’t poor, I wasn’t hungry, and I was traveling around the country, going to different towns, playing music for people. And, you know, they would clap at the end of the song, and you’d go and do it somewhere else. It’s not such a bad way to spend a couple of months.”
