Few artists have experienced the highs and lows of the music business to the extent that Colin Hay has. He came to people’s attention during the first half of the ’80s as the leader of Men At Work. (Though they’ve always been considered an Australian band, Hay himself is actually from Scotland and didn’t move to “the land down under” until he was 14.) In addition to Hay – who was the lead singer and primary songwriter – the band included Ron Strykert on lead guitar, Jerry Speiser on drums, John Rees on bass and Greg Ham on vocals, keyboards, woodwinds and ‘fiddly things.” The Men burst onto the pop music scene in late 1982 with their debut album, Business as Usual, which was actually anything but. That album topped the Billboard charts for 15 weeks, spawned two number-one singles and scored the band a Grammy for Best New Artist. In addition, with their humorous clips, the band became regulars on then-fledgling network MTV (remember, this was when MTV actually played music videos). In 1983, Men At Work was arguably the biggest band in the world.

Business as Usual presented Men At Work as a quirky quintet who combined infectious, generally upbeat melodies with often-darker lyrical concerns such as paranoia, homelessness and heartbreak. The two chart topping singles, “Who Can it Be Now” and “Down Under” are the first and third tracks on the album, respectively. But as good as they are, my personal favorite is sandwiched in between them. “I Can See it in Your Eyes,” to these ears, is Business as Usual’s great lost single, with its moonbeam synthesizers and lyrics about lost love in the dead of winter.

Men At Work’s second album, Cargo, was rushed out the following summer to capitalize on the band’s enormous popularity. If it didn’t fare quite as well as their debut, it was still a major success. Cargo peaked at number-three and spun off another pair of big hits, “Overkill” and “It’s a Mistake.” For a while, it seemed like the sky was the limit. The popular music business is a fickle place, though, and before too long a backlash began. Radio stations started holding “No Men At Work Weekends,” in which they boycotted the band’s music. At the same time, relationships within the band were becoming tense. Hay even says, “In the end, I couldn’t actually physically stand to be in the same room with the drummer and the bass player. It almost made me nauseous.”

Still, Men At Work returned in 1985 with their third album, Two Hearts. The band was now down from five members to only three, drummer Speiser and bassist Rees having departed. Shockingly, Two Hearts was an utter commercial disaster. Where Business as Usual and Cargo had produced two hit singles apiece, this disc didn’t even send one song into the top-40. At the end of 1985, Men At Work broke up. As Men At Work’s frontman, Colin Hay was its most recognizable member, and Columbia Records signed him to a solo deal in the wake of the band’s breakup. Looking for Jack, his solo debut, appeared in 1987. But aside from the minor hit “Hold Me,” it wasn’t really a commercial success, and Columbia dropped him. Hay managed to get a deal with another major label, MCA Records, and released the album Wayfaring Songs for them a couple of years later. But that effort generated even less buzz than Looking for Jack had. Once again, Hay found himself with no label. And this time, he left the States and returned to Australia, with his tail between his legs.

“I’ll give you just kind of a scale of things,” Hay told me the first time we spoke. “[Men At Work played] the Us Festival in California, to maybe 150,000 people. And that was toward the end of ’83. Something like that. In ’88, I was back in Melbourne, playing to 40 [or] 50 people, solo. Men At Work had pretty much come and gone, as far as their impact. So if you wanna stay in the game, you do what you can.”

While he was playing to smaller audiences, however, Hay noticed something interesting happening. “I didn’t really plan it,” he says. “But what I found myself doing, in between songs, was telling people what had happened to me over the previous 10 years or so – going to the heights that we reached and then all of a sudden it kind of imploding, in the space of a very short time. So that became part of my show – not only singing songs, but telling stories. And eventually, it developed into this kind of thing where people, when they’d come and see me play, [would] expect that.”

These days, Hay is based in Los Angeles. While he’s never returned to the commercial heights he scaled with Men At Work, he has experienced a minor resurgence of sorts. His combination of mixing Men At Work favorites with solo material and stories about his career turned into a one-man show, Man At Work, which he’s performed in various parts of the world, including New York’s Village Theater. His music has been featured in the hit TV show Scrubs and in the movie Garden State, thanks to actor Zach Braff, a longtime fan. And he is currently gearing up for his second tour with Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band. In addition to all this, Hay has continued putting albums out over the years, on smaller labels – most recently 2007’s Are You Lookin’ at Me? (Compass Records).

The title track [of Are You Lookin’ At Me] is sort of a four-minute autobiography. Two of the things that you mention in the song are things that you mention quite a bit. One is moving to Australia from Scotland, and then the arrival of The Beatles. It seems like both of these were huge events in your life. Tell me a little bit more about each.

Well, the arrival of The Beatles happened while I was still in Scotland. My father had a music shop. He was a piano tuner. There was a lot of music around before that, but in a way when my father first played me The Beatles… I remember specifically my father taking me in and playing me “From Me to You” like it was just the other day, actually. For want of a better expression, it was a different world to me. The way they sounded, they way the guitars sounded, that whole package, if you like, of what The Beatles were, it was like another world that I wanted to belong to. I didn’t quite know how you’d become a member, or how you’d become an inhabitant of that world, but that’s the world that I wanted to live in. So yeah, there were other things as well – but The Beatles – to me, there was The Beatles and then there was everybody else. And just as that had blown my mind and exploded in my head, we moved to Australia, which was another monumental thing to happen when you’re 14.

So these two things happened pretty close.

Well, not really. It was probably not that close. Because we first discovered The Beatles in ’63 and we didn’t go to Australia until ’67. So there was four years of listening to The Beatles. When I arrived in Australia coincided with Sgt. Pepper coming out.

You moved around “the summer of love” basically.

That’s right. And I was young, so the summer of love didn’t really impact on me particularly – but the music did. And of course, going to that place was going to another world. Definitely another world. Especially when you’re impressionable and you go to the other side of the planet. So yeah, it was a very monumental kind of impact – on everybody, I think, in the family.

I’ve wondered how autobiographical most of your songs are, because you write very eloquently about having and losing – whether it’s losing a woman, losing a certain degree of success, losing a certain degree of innocence – I don’t know if that’s coincidental. But do you draw generally off your own experiences?

Consciously, not really – but maybe. It’s not like I go ‘I’m gonna write a song about this or I’m gonna write a song about that.’ Sometimes I just get a title that intrigues me, or there’s a phrase, or a musical idea. I don’t really set out to be too contrived or specific about things. But I suppose if you look at a bunch of songs, you think ‘Oh well, there’s these recurring themes in them,’ which may be the case. I think that one of the continuing themes that seem to occur is, say, for example personally, when I had that success with Men At Work – not everyone does this, but I experienced a fall from grace, where I went from playing to 150,000 people in the space of a very short time, [to] playing for four people. It only took about three or four years for that to happen. So you think to yourself, “Well, that’s interesting.” And then you just kind of pick yourself up and brush yourself off and carry on. I was fortunate because I had enough money to put food on the table so I could continue doing what I’m doing. But I think often that’s what seems to happen to everybody who goes through their life, is that they go through periods where they have brilliant times and then they have periods of loss. And that’s really what being alive is about. You have fleeting moments of euphoria, and the rest is hand-to-hand combat, you know?

“I Can See it in Your Eyes” is probably my favorite song by Men At Work. Did the lyrics come from anything that you experienced or was that just pure craft?

I think it was a combination of things, but that song was definitely felt quite personal to me. It wasn’t really about one thing… I mean, the girl that I was going out with, who actually became my first wife, I think some of the song was taken from that relationship. And then some of it was about coming to Australia – that always seems to feature quite heavily [in my work], that move and that escapade. And also, I can’t quite remember exactly, but I lived by the water when I was in Melbourne. Well, I still do actually when we’re there… And there’s probably a lot of my mother in there as well. My mother features quite heavily in a lot of my songs.

I know there’s that one line, ‘I looked up all my mother’s recipes.’

Yeah, well, my mother is still kicking – and my father too, in Australia. She taught me how to cook. She taught me things that perhaps mothers don’t often teach their sons, you know? ‘Cause I always liked hanging around in her kitchen and I was always the first one home from school. So I would have to make the dinner for the family when they came home. Well, not totally make it, but get everything prepared so that it was ready to happen when she came in.

I [also] want to ask you about “Who Can it Be Now” and the inspiration for it, or memories of it.

What it was about really was when I was living in a place called St. Kilgore at the time, which was in Melbourne, and it seemed that everyone who came to the door was after something that I didn’t have. It was either the rent man or the police or a drug dealer or, you know, various kinds of people who were around in the neighborhood. I never really wanted to answer the door, so I would always creep to the door and look through the little keyhole to see who it was. And there was a creak in the floorboards, so I always had to make sure that I stepped around that otherwise they would hear me and they would go, “Ah! I know there’s someone there.” I think it was also just one of those songs about being a little bit paranoid about the man, about Big Brother. People knowing too much and in retrospect, God, they knew nothing compared to what people know now! (laughs) You can’t even worry about it anymore because it’s just out there for anybody, really.

There was no Patriot Act 20 years ago.

No, exactly. Exactly. And comparatively speaking, it was a very innocent time.

I know from time to time you still play with Greg Ham. But I’m curious about what happened to the other three Men At Work?

Well, I see Greg Ham when I go to Melbourne. We stopped doing the Men At Work thing, the two of us, in 2002. He teaches now and plays with a couple of bands in Melbourne. The other two, the rhythm section, I actually have no idea what they’re doing. I haven’t spoken to them in a long time. I know that the guitar player [Ron Strykert] went to live in Montana and I believe he’s still there.

It seems like you’ve gotten rejuvenated in the last few years.

Well, you get rejuvenated because you get a sense of affirmation, because you think to yourself, ‘Well, I was right.’ For example, I sent out my album Company of Strangers, I think I sent that out to 20 labels and they all said no. Now, maybe three or four of those people actually listened to it. Who knows? But if you [contact] 20 different labels and they all say no, you’ve gotta ask yourself, ‘Are they all right? That they don’t think this is worth releasing?’ But no, in fact they’re all wrong. It is in fact worth releasing, it’s just that they chose not to release it.

But they’re always the questions you have to ask yourself… and I think that happens to a lot of people. But the question of rejuvenation comes from the fact that – not even so much about the record sales, ‘cause the record sales are still not great. It’s more the live audiences. They’re growing in number, and they have the CD’s, and they see the live shows, and it all works together. And that’s real. It doesn’t require anything else; it doesn’t require a record company, it doesn’t require a radio station or anything, all it requires is you turning up and playing, and them coming to see you and buying the CD and going home and going ‘Oh, this is really good!’ It’s so direct, and it’s real, and that’s what’s sustained me for the last 15 years.

by Dave Steinfeld