Photo: Paul Mobley
Colin Hay performs at the Southern Theater on Sunday, November 2. Doors open at 7pm. To purchase tickets, visit the CAPA website.
You know those [insert social media platform] engagement farming posts: “What’s the first album you ever owned?”? I’m not positive the first album I ever owned was Men at Work‘s Business as Usual but it definitely was one of the first. We didn’t have cable in 1982, but the hits “Who Can It Be Now?” and “Down Under” were constant staples on the radio and, as an 11-year-old kid, discovering the rest of the album, the “deep cuts” if you will, was like finding buried treasure. The rest of the songs are as familiar to me in 2025 as the hits and while I don’t regularly listen to the album, when I do, I can sing along with just about every word – the lyrics burned into my memory at a young age from repeated listens.
Lead singer Colin Hay started a solo career following Men at Work’s breakup in 1986 and with the release of Man @ Volume 2 in July, his catalog is now 16 albums deep. He’s been a fixture on the road, from performing as Men at Work with an all-new backing band to being a member of Ringo Starr’s All-Star Band to a steady stream of solo dates. After a summer spent playing (mostly) outdoor amphitheaters with Toto and Christopher Cross as Men at Work, Hay’s solo tour is under way and will hit the Southern Theater on Sunday, November 2.
Between legs of the tour, I had a chance to see a guy on the other side of a Zoom screen that I’ve been listening for 42 years and ask him a few questions.
Business as Usual was one of the first cassettes I ever owned, along with Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz and Rush’s Moving Pictures. Although I haven’t had a working tape deck in probably 30 years, I still have the cassette.
I liked cassettes. They were good. I guess it wasn’t great technology. I think vinyl still is king in terms of sonics, but cassettes were okay. And plus, you could record on them as well and just play them straight away, which was a cool thing.
When you were writing “Who Can it Be Now?” and “Down Under,” would you have ever believed that those songs would still be part of the popular lexicon 40+ years later?
You don’t really know that when you’re in the moment of writing something. I never thought 40 years ahead about anything back then. You know, you’re just young, so you think you’ll live forever. That’ll happen in its own due course. I don’t need to waste my time thinking about it now. When I’m 26, I’m too busy being 26, you know?
You spent the summer with Toto and Christopher Cross and that was billed as a Men at Work. Because you were opening, did that mean your set was short?
Well, Christopher and I would split it. We would alternate. I would go on first one night, and then Chris would go on the second night, so we alternated. Toto always headlined. We did 45 minutes each, Christopher and I.
Was it all Men at Work stuff, or were you including some of your solo stuff?
I think we did one or two songs that were just solo songs. I think we did “Can’t Take This Town,” which is a solo song. Yeah, I think that was it.
When you’re doing a solo tour, as opposed to a Men at Work tour, do you have a setlist in mind? How do you determine what the setlist is going to be?
Well, I started kind of thinking about it a few weeks before I went out, and I had a really long setlist, with way too many songs that would be impossible to play. I just kind of would rehearse some songs and play them to get to know them again. That was a whittling down process as well, of going, “Okay, well, maybe I’ve done that song a lot. I don’t need to do that song again,” you know.
There’s certain songs that I will always play in the setlist. I’ll always play “Who Can It Be Now,” and I’ll play “Overkill,” and I’ll play “Down Under.” And I’ll play “Beautiful World,” and I’ll play “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,” and I’ll play “Waiting For My Real Life To Begin.” So there’s probably about seven or eight songs that I will always play. I guess what you’d call big songs. They kind of demand to be played in a way, you know? So you’ve got to respect that.
On this tour, I started off thinking that I would play one song from every record, and if I possibly could, I’d make it the title track. That didn’t always work, but it worked to a degree. Like, I played “Next Year People,” and that was the name of an album. I played “Gathering Mercury,” which was the name of an album, and I played a couple of other things as well. But I ended up just playing songs that I feel a personal connection to.
From a solo tour perspective, it’s literally you and a guitar on stage on this leg of the tour?
Me and a few guitars, although, obviously, I only play one at a time.
Is this tour a storytelling type show where you’ll talk about songs before you play them or is it mostly music?
Well, it’s a music show but there’s a thread, if you like, a connecting thread, which I guess you can call storytelling. I always feel a little bit odd about that expression, I don’t really know why. I talk to people in the audience, and I amuse myself, and hopefully amuse them in the process. So yeah, it’s stories and songs, but I always think of it more as a music show.
I think it started off many years ago, and it was really accidental. It wasn’t really by design, it was more circumstance that I was playing to hardly anybody, I was playing to 40 people and 50 people. I think the audience was a little embarrassed for me at times because there were so few people, so I started to talk to people and just tell them what had happened to me, and I noticed that people leaned in a little closer, and they liked that aspect of the show. So it’s just something that’s kind of developed its own life without me really trying to.
Sometimes there’s more songs than stories, and sometimes it goes the other way. It really depends on the audience. It depends on each particular night. There are similarities in the setlist, but every night is different because it’s a different audience.
From a tour logistics perspective, touring solo has got to be a lot different than touring with a band. What are some of the similarities between solo touring and band touring, or are there vast differences?
Well, there’s differences and similarities. I only have two people with me when I go out solo, because there’s no need for a bigger crew. I have traveled in a tour bus solo, but this tour is usually just a Sprinter van although they don’t have the Sprinter vans with the captain’s chairs anymore, they’re bench seats, which is a lot less comfortable. I’ve had the same tour manager, front of house guy for the last, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years now. He’s fantastic, and I rely on him a lot. You don’t meet that many people who can do what he does so, that works really well.
I love playing with a band, I love going out on the road with a band, but I also love the solo thing. The solo thing is probably a little bit dear to my heart because when I really had nothing going on in the early ’90s and had no deals or no agent or anything like that, the only thing I really had was the live audiences. I’d go out on the road, and the people who turned up to see me play, even though they were relatively few, maybe 80 people, or 70, or 100, whatever, that’s what really kept me going, and they were very supportive. I have a lot of gratitude for that period of time, because they really gave me a lot of inspiration to keep going with what I was doing.
Of course the Men at Work hits still get played today but I’m wondering if you have a whole legion of fans of your solo work, who discovered you more recently, who aren’t aware of Men at Work?
Not really. I think that people who come along to see me play had some connection with Men at Work. And then, you know, things like Scrubs came along, and people knew me from Scrubs, and then they discovered Men at Work. But all the songs live happily together, and I think that there’s a lot of younger people who come along, who discover Men at Work and discover a lot of the solo things too.
I’m lucky in the sense that ever since I started going out solo, there’s a lot of people who’ve come along to see me because they like the album. They would buy an album that I recorded and have for sale at the show. They’ve, in a sense, grown with the records that I’ve done, and they want to hear the new record. They enjoy the Men at Work stuff, but they’re not coming to hear “Down Under” for the thousandth time. They want to hear what you’re coming up with last week, and I’m very grateful for that, because that doesn’t happen all the time.
I think it would be a whole different experience going out on the road if I was just going out and playing the Men at Work hits. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with that, and I enjoy doing that, it’s not as creatively stimulating as having new records and going out and playing them for people and endeavoring to move forward. It is a difficult road to travel, because people tend to go along and see shows, and they want to hear the songs that they know and the songs that they’ve grown up with, but I’m very lucky in that sense that people come along and they pretty much take whatever I want to give them.
Your album, I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself, came out during the pandemic. I bought the vinyl and because I was working from home, did a lot of very intentional music listening where I’d put an album on, flip it to the other side when the first one was done. It’s a different experience than streaming where I can flip between songs, albums, playlists. Did you get any sort of feedback from fans, after things started opening back up, that the album helped them get through the pandemic?
I haven’t really heard that in particular. I think that fans of mine have that record, or are aware of it, but I’m not really sure that it made much of an indentation into the market, you know, the covers record. I think that when people discover it, they like it, because I think it’s a really cool record. And it was recorded in an interesting way, and I think the song choices are good. The way it ended up had a lot of cohesion to it, and I can listen to it, which is something. I can listen to it and not walk out of the room.
No joke, one of my favorite MTV moments was seeing Lazlo Bane cover Men at Work’s “Overkill.” As someone who grew up with that song as part of the soundtrack of my childhood, it was so great to hearing a “modern” version of the song in 1997. And, then and now, I get goosebumps when you make a cameo and add vocals in the video. I interviewed Chad Fischer of Lazlo Bane a few years ago and he told me about the relationship the two of you have and how he plays shows with you on the West Coast.
That was a great moment for me as well. It was powerful, and I think the video is really great in that sense. Chad was the one that I made this covers record with. We couldn’t be in the same studio. I was in my studio, and he was down in Santa Monica in his, and I would just send him my recorded guitar and vocal, and he would add stuff to it and send it back, and that’s how we made the record. So we made it, and neither of us were in the same room at any point. It was an interesting way to make a record.
Barry Gibb did a Bee Gees cover album where he got other artists to sing with him. Have you ever thought of doing a Men at Work covers album where you bring in friends to perform on it? Like, say, getting Miley Cyrus to sing “Down Under” with you or something like that.
No, I haven’t really thought about that. There’s people I’d like to work with, but not doing Men at Work songs. I think the songs are just what they are, you know. I don’t need to, “Come on, get up and walk again!” It’s not something that really interests me that much.
Is there a song, an artist, an album that you can hear, and it takes you back to a very specific moment?
I think that happens all the time. I remember hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and I think that was released in maybe the beginning of ’67, or maybe it was ’66 or ’67. I remember it was just before I left to go to Australia, and I remember thinking, “Oh, I’m leaving all this behind,” and that included the Beatles. I was going to the other side of the world, Australia, and at that particular time, I really knew very little about it there, and for all I knew, they had never heard of the Beatles. Of course they had, and they were just as huge down there as they were everywhere else. But I didn’t really know that then, so I just remember “Strawberry Fields” being a song that I related to, leaving everything behind.
