There are pros and cons to wowing the world with a succession of pop hits. The pros are obvious, so let’s skip straight to the cons.
“After Men at Work, I went out and played, and no one came,” said Colin Hay, whose band boomed the Australian tourism industry in the early 1980s. “I really did have to start again. We sold lots of records, but as far as my name was concerned, people didn’t know who I was. Audiences were pretty thin on the ground back then.”
Although Men at Work and especially their signature “Down Under” were ubiquitous on radio and MTV for a few years, the band’s pop was evidently not the sort that makes legends of its creators. When Men at Work hit unemployment, Hay retooled his resume as a new singer-songwriter.
“For a time, you feel like it’s a divorce and you want to distance yourself,” he said. “But after a while, the old songs come back. So you develop a relationship with the songs and you have a lot of respect for them because they’ve been very good to me.”
Hay will be back at work Sept. 1 at Denver Botanic Gardens when he performs new and old material on a bill with folk duo Milk Carton Kids.
Born in Scotland in 1953, Hay moved at 14 with his family to Melbourne, Australia, where the Scottish boy tried to fit in.
“My accent changed a little so I wouldn’t get into too much trouble on the streets,” he said in the still-strong Scottish accent that belies his biggest hit. “When I was back with my parents, I would speak like this again.”
Hay assimilated well with a group of Australian-born musicians who formed the highly successful pub band that became Men at Work. By the time the gig-heavy group was finally signed to Australia’s Columbia, Men at Work was the highest-paid act on the continent without a recording contract.
Business as Usual, the band’s long-awaited 1982 debut, sold five million copies in the United States and remained on the charts for nearly two years well after the group took home a Grammy for Best New Artist. Men at Work were also the first Australian act to have a simultaneous No. 1 album and No. 1 single.
The debut album’s string of hit singles included “Who Can it Be Now?” and “Down Under,” the song that finally did for Australia what the Beach Boys had done for Southern California two decades earlier.
“I’ve always had a lot of respect for that song,” Hay said. “I think it’s a novelty song for a lot of people because it contained a lot of stereotypical images of idiots traveling abroad and drinking too much.”
The song’s zany video became a staple of MTV during the height of the network’s influence and sent music fans in search of a Vegemite sandwich—a delicacy with less international durability than the hit song.
“Down Under” was one of the few songs outside “Waltzing Matilda” to give Australia a burst of economic development, but like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” the hit was misappropriated politically by some Australians—most recently by those favoring an anti-immigrant message.
“In Australia, we’re all from somewhere else, unless you’re aboriginal people who have been there for between 50,000 and 80,000 years or something,” Hay said. “We’ve been there for about a minute and somehow we own it. I had to actually stop [anti-immigration activists] from using it. They completely missed the point.”
After fleeting popularity, Men at Work were men on unemployment by the mid-‘80s. Hay almost immediately launched a solo career as offbeat and as low profile. His latest album Next Year People again showcases the songwriter’s gift for quirky storytelling.
Such is no better exemplified than on “Mr. Grogan,” which finally brings to life a character Hay and a friend had been carrying with them for years as a kind of inside joke.
“It was just a character we made up,” the songwriter explained. “When we wouldn’t be able to figure something out, we would say to each other, ‘I wonder what Mr. Grogan would do.’ Somehow the subject came up in a bar one night. When two attractive women are sitting with a couple of glasses of wine and they ask you about Mr. Grogan, well, of course, you’re going to come up with all kinds of stories.”
Hay has no problem mixing such newer material with the older songs that put him and Australia on the map. Although the musician largely keeps it acoustic these days, his aging new wave fits the current set list.
“They were all written on an acoustic guitar,” he said. “You just play the song.”
For more information, visit concerts.botanicgardens.org or colinhay.com.
A Ringo addendum:
In the June “LIFE Music” in the weeks preceding Ringo Starr’s concert at the Paramount Theater, I lamented at some length that I had never met or interviewed a Beatle. Well, to make a very long story short, my son and I wound up going backstage to meet Ringo. So what do you know? Maybe we do all live in a yellow submarine.
