One of the biggest acts of the initial MTV era, along with Duran Duran, Talking Heads, The Stray Cats, and Pat Benatar, was Men at Work. Led by the Scottish-born Colin Hay, the Australian exports were known for a series of video clips that aired around the clock, filled with peculiar imagery to match the equally idiosyncratic songs. It was almost like an introduction to another culture, “where women glow and men plunder,” as detailed in the chart-topping hit “Down Under.” And very few in the States had heard of Vegemite at the time, let alone a sandwich made with it.
Unfortunately, the ride didn’t last. A lethal combination of interpersonal collisions within the group and the public growing weary of the quirkiness of a band with a flute player and saxophonist led Men at Work to go out of business before the ‘80s even hit an apex. Hay embarked on a solo career, which was effectively dead on arrival, setting the frontman and his former musical outfit up for relegation into footnote status. Then, as so infrequently the case is, there was a second life.
Hay got sober, ‘80s nostalgia kicked in earlier than expected, and Men at Work were suddenly in demand again. Not only that, but Hay had carved out a second career as a burgeoning singer/songwriter, doing small room gigs around his adopted home of Los Angeles, notably at Café Largo, where he was spotted by the cast of the popular television series Scrubs, leading to an appearance on the show and a friendship with its star, Zach Braff.
Braff would go on to pen and direct the hit indie romantic comedy Garden State in 2004, which had the rare distinction of its soundtrack superseding the film’s popularity. Built like a musical confectionery for hipsters with tracks by The Shins, Imogen Heap, and Zero 7, the Grammy Award-winning collection featured Hay’s six-year-old “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,” which also had an integral scene in the movie, introducing a new generation to his catalog.
These days, Hay is a revered storyteller, with his shows a mixture of music and tales behind the songs, often injected with his dry sense of humor. He’s also a card-carrying member of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, beginning two decades ago. This Thursday (November 6), Hay returns to Medford’s Chevalier Theatre for “An Evening With,” where he’ll be showcasing songs from throughout his history, including the hits from Men at Work, where he remains the only employee.
Ahead of the show, Vanyaland caught up with Hay for a 617 Q&A (Six Questions; One Recommendation; Seven Somethings) where we chatted about his time Down Under, the soaring popularity of Men at Work, what led to the band’s demise, and when he last had a Vegemite sandwich. He was just as sardonic and self-deprecating as he is onstage, a caustic wit always followed by a wry smile.
:: SIX QUESTIONS
Michael Christopher: I find it interesting that two of the biggest bands to have come out of Australia were actually made up of frontmen from Scotland, which are AC/DC and Men at Work. Was there something in the water in Scotland that was producing these amazing frontmen?
Well, not only frontmen, I mean [AC/DC’s] Angus and Malcolm and [brother] George [Young], they’re Scottish as well. Bon [Scott] was Scottish, of course. Brian [Johnson] is from Northern England, from Newcastle. There was a lot of immigration in the ‘50s and ‘60s into Australia from certain places. It was a fairly racist policy at the time [laughs], but they brought people from Britain and parts of Europe to try and increase the population, and I don’t quite know why, but it seemed that a lot of immigrants decided to put bands together and had successful bands, whether it’s the Little River Band or the Bee Gee or AC/DC or our band, or there’s a host of others that was made up of immigrants.
When you broke big in the States for the first time, obviously with Men at Work –
The first and only time. [laughs]
At the time, you were almost 30 years old, which, back then, was considered ancient by music standards.
Pretty old. Yeah.
Did you feel out of place at all in the landscape when you were getting lumped in with all these young upstarts, all of the other MTV bands at the time?
I think that 27 or 28 is probably still pretty old in terms of being a pop act. I mean, when The Beatles broke up, George [Harrison] was 27. [laughs] When The Kinks were gone, I think that Dave Davies was like 19, I think. Yeah, we were pretty old by comparison. But I mean, I don’t care. I never cared about that then. I still don’t care about it now. [laughs]
But as just as a point of interest, I tried to become successful as a singer when I was younger, but it didn’t happen. I went to Sydney, and I played in different bands around ‘73 when I was 20 years old, and nothing really clicked. And I came back to Melbourne, and I got a letter from the university saying I could go to university if I wanted to.
So I decided to please my parents, and just kind of becoming a rock and roll star was more difficult and more complicated than I thought it was going to be. So I went back to school. I went to university for three or four years, and so by the time I got out that I was 24, 25, or something, however old I was, and started working towards putting a band together. And it took me a couple of years to get that together.
You mentioned that at that age, even today, late for a “pop act to start. I always looked at Men at Work as hard to categorize. You got lumped in with new wave, maybe some considered you pop, but the songs had all these elements of reggae, some jazz, and there was just an overall, I don’t want to say quirkiness to them, but it’s like you guys were operating on a different level lyrically than a lot of the other bands. And I’m wondering if at the time you knew that you were outside of the box from other artists.
I never really thought about other artists, really. They were doing what they did, and we were doing what we did. Never really, I mean, sometimes you’d meet bands, and you would get along with ’em. You had some kind of commonality. We had that with a bank called Mental as Anything. Back in the day, they were friends of ours, and we worked with Midnight Oil. We opened up for Midnight Oil, but there wasn’t really much camaraderie there. It was fine. They were fine and everything, but they were much – very much – a camp unto themselves.
But I think we just did things our way because we didn’t really know how to do it any other way we went. I think that we weren’t part of the… We just kind of did things our way that seemed the most natural things for us to do, which was kind of different from a lot of other bands. And it took a couple of years, but then it did what it did. It became very, very successful. And I think that much to the annoyance of a lot of other people, too. [laughs]
A lot of people, especially in this generation, don’t realize how big MTV was during the mid-’80s. But when you started getting airplay on there, I think another thing that historians don’t really talk about a lot is that you were sort of integral to the success of the channel, which was just this fledgling upstart, and you were one of the first bands that came on that was getting in rotation constantly. I mean, every hour there’d be a Men at Work video getting played because they didn’t have a lot of material.
They only had about four. Well, they played us because we were successful on the radio. The radio still ruled. There was a lot of bands that didn’t get played on MTV, and not just because they hadn’t [been] played on the radio either, but there were lots of other reasons. But yeah, we were lucky, but we were a radio band, a successful radio band first, and then coincided with MTV launching, and that was very good for us, because we had videos.
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Did you enjoy making those videos?
Yeah, they were fun to do. There was a history of making videos in Australia, more than more so than in the States, I think. Just a visual representation of the song. And Greg [Ham] had great performance skills, and he was a clever guy and inventive, and so we used to work on them together, and they were very cheaply made and very quickly made it. The record label was always hard to get money out of. I think they cost three or four grand or something to do them. And we did them really with friends who were kind of fans who were handy with the camera, who were in that business, but they really did us a lot of favors more than anything else.
When was the last time you had a Vegemite sandwich?
Well, I don’t really have Vegemite sandwiches. I’ve never really had Vegemite sandwiches. But you have Vegemite on toast is what you do. But that didn’t rhyme. I mean, “sandwich” didn’t really rhyme either in the song, but it rhymed better than “toast.”
You moved into a solo career after Men at Work ended, which I’ve read that you said was over as early as ‘83. It was, for all intents and purposes, done. The way it ended with that discord, did that put you off wanting to be in a proper band ever again?
No, I wouldn’t say ever again. I never really thought that much about it, about it “ever.” But yeah, it was distressing because it had been a dream of mine for many years to have a band like Men at Work, and it turned into something that was not what I imagined it was going to be. So, it was discouraging and just really, it could have been so much more, but it was kept small, really, by what I consider to be small-mindedness, really.
But yeah, we were a great band. Well, we were a really good band. It could have been great if we could have realized what we had and what we could do, but it’s kind of like we came in and exploded, and then we just went away. It was done. It wasn’t like we built up something that was going to really, I’m not going to say last, but you have some bands like say, probably a great example is Bruce Springsteen, who kind of built up this huge live following and then started to make the records. And so, the foundations are strong, the records are really strong, and everything builds on itself.
And you have, at the end of the day, this very, very successful enterprise that lasts for generations, whereas we didn’t have that. We just came in with a couple of albums and had these sold millions of records and had these massive hits, and then we just broke up, and then we went away. So, it was kind of over almost before it started, but the music’s lasted, which is a nice thing.
Anyone that I talk to who says, “Oh, Colin Hay, the Men at Work guy,” I tell them to go watch the documentary Waiting for My Real Life, which is just incredible. It shows that while Men at Work was an important part of your history, it was such a small part of your personal and probably professional arc in life. And I was wondering if that’s one of the reasons why you did it, was to show that your life was so much more than just that little window.
Oh, Men at Work was very important for me. It still is. It wasn’t a little part of my life; it was a very big part of my life and still is a very big part of my life, because what we achieved was massive. It was a massive, massive achievement, and I’m very proud of that. So yeah, I love being in that band, and I’m still in that band, really. I mean, I never left Men at Work. Everyone left me. [laughs] Either you got sacked or you left. That was what happened.
The thing is, I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything. It’s like, I don’t care. If people don’t know who I am or they’re not aware of what I’ve done since Men at Work, I don’t care. I don’t give a shit really, because the people who do care about what I do, they find you and I have relationships with them, and I go and play shows, and they come and see them and everything’s great. I’m not trying to rewrite anything or complain about anything, or… I’ve got nothing to complain about or try and convince people of something that they weren’t aware of. You can do that if you want to, [laughs] but I have no interest in doing that.
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:: ONE RECOMMENDATION
Well, I was very excited about making a very successful pasta Aglio e olio last night. It was delightful and delicious. And one of my friends said, “Oh, this is like Michelin standard.” So that was pretty cool,
Now, did you make this pasta from scratch?
Yeah, of course.
Amazing.
It’s not amazing. It’s just a nice pasta dish, is what it is. There’s nothing amazing about it. [laughs] The guy who I listened to when I was on my way home, the English guy who invented the internet [Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee], now, he’s fucking amazing.
I don’t know… if people are saying it’s Michelin standard.
Well, it was a nice plate of pasta. So, I would recommend learning how to make pasta Aglio e olio. It’s really good when you come home from somewhere and you haven’t really had dinner. And it takes about 30 minutes to make a good one. But once you do, it’s very satisfying.
:: SEVEN OF SOMETHING
You’ve been touring with Ringo Starr as a member of his All-Starr Band off and on for over 20 years, and you’ve also covered a couple of Beatles tracks in “Norwegian Wood” and “Across the Universe.” Give me seven of your favorite Beatles songs.
“She Loves You.”
“Strawberry Fields.”
“Rain.”
“And Your Bird Can Sing.”
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I think “Across the Universe” is a great song.
“You Can’t Do That.”
And “Revolution.”
Which “Revolution?” The rocking one?
Yeah, yeah.
No Ringo in there. Poor Ringo.
Ringo’s fine, man. Don’t worry about Ringo. [Laughs]
COLIN HAY :: Thursday, November 6 at Chevalier Theatre, 50 Forest Street in Medford, MA :: 8 p.m., all ages, $66 to $124 :: Event info :: Advance tickets