Ted Albert Award Colin Hay

By Jeff Jenkins

The Australian Music Vault is proud to honour Colin Hay as the 2023 recipient of the Ted Albert Award for Outstanding Services to Australian Music. The prestigious Ted Albert Award is awarded annually by the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) in memory of pioneering independent record producer Ted Albert, whose company, Albert Productions, was home to music icons The Easybeats, AC/DC, The Angels, Rose Tattoo and John Paul Young. Previous winners of the award include The Seekers, Ian “Molly” Meldrum, Fifa Riccobono, Archie Roach, and The Wiggles.

When 14-year-old Colin Hay moved to Melbourne with his family in 1967, he dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player, a wish that continued until his coach told him, “You know, Colin, you’re really very good, but you’re really not that good.” The young player – who dreamed of emulating the feats of George Best and Denis Law – was crushed.

Fortunately, he had music to fall back on.

Colin started a band with his mates at Beaumaris High School. “We were called Deep Impression,” he recalls, “which was funny because we made no impression at all.”

But Colin started writing songs and played at the Beaumaris Folk Club. His love affair with music had started when he was just a boy in Saltcoats, a seaside town in Scotland, about 30 miles from Glasgow. His parents owned the local music store – Hay’s Music Shop on Hamilton Street – where Colin would longingly gaze at the Rickenbacker in the front window. “I wasn’t allowed to play that one because it was too expensive (£159).”

Colin has fond memories of his first music teacher, Alison Bell, who taught him to play ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ on the guitar. “The F chord was hard,” he remembers. “But once you master the F chord, you’re off and running.”

In Scotland, Colin fell in love with The Beatles. “They hit with such strength and power – there was really just The Beatles and then everyone else.” In his new hometown, he became a fan of The Seekers, Daddy Cool, Mike Rudd and later Skyhooks and Cold Chisel.

He met a guitarist named Ron Strykert at a friend’s place in West Melbourne. They formed an acoustic duo and wrote a song that would change their lives. In the winter of 1978, Colin was driving down Power Street in Hawthorn with the line, “living in the land down under” running through his head. “I thought to myself, ‘That could be something, better finish that.’ And I’m glad I did.”

Colin knew that a record company would be reluctant to sign an acoustic duo, so they enlisted Greg Ham, Jerry Speiser and John Rees, calling the band Men At Work.

Colin started writing another song, ‘Who Can It Be Now?’, in Bermagui. His then girlfriend Linda predicted: “That’s going to be your first hit record.”

She was right.

‘Who Can It Be Now?’ went to number two in Australia in 1981 and topped the US charts the following year.

One of the Australian Music Vault’s founding patrons, the late music mogul Michael Gudinski, was once asked what his biggest regret was. He placed his head in his hands and revealed that he had passed up the chance to sign Men At Work – not once, but twice.

“That was something I had to have therapy about for a while,” the Mushroom Records founder said.

Gudinski always dreamed of having a number one record in America. Men At Work had two chart-topping singles in the US – ‘Who Can It Be Now?’ and ‘Down Under’ – and their album, Business as Usual, which cost just $30,000 to make, spent 15 weeks at number one, a record for a debut album at the time.

No other Australian act has come close to matching Men At Work’s remarkable chart achievements.

When ‘Down Under’ replaced Phil Collins’ ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ to take top spot on the UK charts on January 29, 1983, Men At Work became the only Australian act – and just the fifth in music history – to have the number one single and album in the US and UK in the same week.

Four decades later, it’s a feat that just 12 acts have achieved.

As Colin Hay would reflect in his solo single ‘Are You Lookin’ at Me?’: “When I flew across the ocean, I was number one / People gave me everything, and I didn’t need a gun.”

Men At Work were also the first Australian-based band to appear on the cover of the US edition of Rolling Stone. In the article, Men at Work: Out to Lunch, Kurt Loder pondered their chart-topping triumph: “There must be some auxiliary explanation for Men At Work’s extraordinary success,” he wrote, “beyond the undeniable appeal of their music, with its carefully crafted melodies, chugging guitars, sunny rhythms, stick-in-your-head horn lines and rich, throaty vocals. Somehow, the whole of their commercial achievement seems greater than the sum of its artistic parts.”

Men At Work had the world singing about Vegemite sandwiches and fried-out Kombis and wondering about a faraway land where women glow and men chunder.

After Business as Usual, another Australian album wouldn’t top the US charts for 25 years, until AC/DC’s Black Ice hit number one. And since Men At Work, only one Australian artist, Sia, has had a number one single and album in the US. Coincidentally, Sia calls the Men At Work singer “Uncle Colin” – her dad, Phil Colson, played slide guitar on the Men At Work single ‘Everything I Need’.

A month after their chart-topping grand slam, Men At Work became the first Australian act to win one of the so-called “big” Grammys – Best New Artist. Accepting the award, Colin declared: “We are the Men and we’ll see you again.”

But the band would never again grace the Grammys stage.

Too much success? Colin Hay pondered the question at the end of the Rolling Stone article. “It’s a reasonable sort of problem to have,” he concluded.

After their second album, Cargo, provided two more Top 10 hits in the US – ‘Overkill’ and ‘It’s a Mistake’ – Men At Work parted with their rhythm section, Jerry Speiser and John Rees. “Sacking one member of a group was a distraction,” noted the band’s lawyer Phil Dwyer. “Sacking two was self-destruction.”

“It was,” says Colin, “very Spinal Tap.”

Ron Strykert quit the band while they were recording their third album, Two Hearts, which cost $450,000 to make. And soon after the record was released, Greg Ham also exited – Colin Hay was a Man at Work.

Asked for his take on why the band burned out, Colin says: “A lot of bands spend years building up a live following, they build a foundation. We didn’t have a foundation; we just had all the top – beautiful furnishings and walls and a roof, but it was built on nothing. There was no foundation. When that was taken away, there was nothing there.

“It was always a quirky, odd group of people, so it just wasn’t one of those bands that was destined to go the distance.

“But we did have something magical for a minute or two.”

Men At Work were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1994.

Colin released his debut solo album, Looking for Jack, in 1987. It peaked at number 126 in the US. When its follow-up, Wayfaring Sons, missed the charts altogether, an American recording executive told Colin: “There are peaks and valleys in everyone’s career. And Colin, you’re in a fucking big valley.”

He called his third solo album Peaks & Valleys.

Since the late ‘80s, Colin has been living in the US, in Topanga, California. But he thinks of where his music career started whenever he picks up a guitar on the road.

Colin likes to travel with three Maton guitars. “It’s a connection to that part of the world, which I dearly love,” Colin says of the instrument, which is made in Melbourne, with timber from the Otways. “When I take them with me, it means I still have one foot on the ground back there.”

At a gig in Los Angeles, Colin had a fortuitous meeting with actor Zach Braff. “When I first moved to LA, a girl I was dating took me to see Colin Hay,” Braff recalls. “It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen.”

Braff championed Colin’s work, which led to acclaimed appearances on Scrubs and the inclusion of ‘I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You’ on the Garden State soundtrack, which introduced Colin to a new audience.

More than four decades after he started out, Colin continues to tour and make new music – his 2022 album, Now and the Evermore, was his 15th solo album.

He accepts that his records now sell in the thousands, not millions. Looking back at the start of the ‘80s when Men At Work could lay claim to being the biggest band in the world, Colin says, “I still reel from it sometimes, you know. It was a very amazing thing to happen in your life. There are blurry aspects to it … it was just insane, really.”

Whether you’re Michael Gudinski or Colin Hay, not every dream comes true. Colin might not have become a soccer player, but he did get to play with one of the Beatles – he’s the only Australian to have been a member of a band with a Beatle. Colin is a regular part of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band.

“One of the best experiences I’ve ever had,” he smiles. “Every night, I turn around and think, ‘Wow, there’s Ringo!’ And he’s always looking at me as if to say, ‘Yeah, I know, it’s Ringo.’”

After travelling on Ringo’s private jet, Colin will then head out on his own solo tour. “Straight from a Gulfstream IV to filling up my own minivan with gas in St. Louis. It’s quite a shock.”

But that’s the thing about Colin Hay. Whether he’s playing for huge crowds at a stadium, or a few people at a tiny pub, he just loves to play.

“This is my chosen profession,” he says simply. “It’s what I do. Ultimately, I believe in effort. Sometimes you make a lot of effort and nothing happens. But sometimes it does happen. If you don’t make the effort, there’s much less possibility of something happening.”

To hear more about Colin Hay’s career, watch his Long Play Series interview with Brian Nankervis: