Waiting For His Real Life To Begin Again:

The Ongoing Saga of Colin Hay

By Will Harris

Colin Hay, former lead singer of Men at Work, gets around.

            Though it may come as a surprise to some, the man who wrote of vegemite sandwiches was actually born in Scotland.  (Once you’ve engaged him in conversation for a few minutes, the lingering brogue is quite noticeable.)  Hay didn’t actually move to Australia until he was in his teens.  After spending the better part of two decades “down under,” however, he moved to California, which is where he currently resides.

He’ll be leaving his home soon, though, in order to perform a one-man show, “Man At Work,” at the Village Theater, in New York City.  Reminiscent of what Ray Davies did a few years back, Hay will be performing songs from throughout his career, telling stories between them.

The show came about, Hay says, when “HBO invited me to go to the Aspen Comedy Festival.  I did two 45-minute sets where I played songs and told stories between the songs, and this guy was there named Arnold Engleman.  He’s a theater producer in New York, and he immediately thought that it could work in an off-Broadway situation in this theater that he runs on Bleecker Street.

 “To be honest with you, the show has, in many ways, been in development for the last 15 or 20 years.  It’s actually something that I’ve been trying to work toward, because, I mean, this is what I’ve been doing for that length of time.  But it’s quite difficult to change people’s perception of what it is you do.  ‘Cos people think of you, ‘Oh, that’s that guy who sings those songs,’ and that’s it.  They think you’ve got just the one string in your bow.

The title of the show, Man At Work, shares its name with Hay’s debut album with the Nashville-based Compass Records.  It’s a mixture of solo material from throughout his career (some re-recorded, some heretofore-unreleased) sitting alongside new recordings of some of Men At Work’s biggest hits.  The most interesting of the Men At Work songs are those done acoustically...”Down Under,” “Who Can It Be Now,” and “Overkill.”

“It wasn’t really my idea, I must admit,” concedes Hay.  “I was trying to get another album called Company of Strangers released, trying to get a deal for that a couple of years ago, and wasn’t really making much headway with it.  And Compass Records came along and were interested in working with me...but they expressed concern about the fact that the last couple of albums that I had, even though they hadn’t formally been released, they’d kind of been released, in that I’d released them myself.  And they thought that if they released one of those albums, then the impact wouldn’t be what they felt it could be.

“The truth of the matter is that no-one in the mainstream has really been aware of anything I’ve done since Men At Work, really.  That’s their reference point for me.  So Compass asked, ‘Would you consider doing a combination album...a compilation, if you like...of some of the re-worked songs from Men At Work, some songs from all your solo albums, and maybe three or four new songs, just to give people an idea what you’ve been doing for the last 20 years, and as a way of reintroducing you to people who haven’t perhaps been aware of anything you’ve done since then?’  So it seemed like a good idea.  And, plus, I’d played the Men At Work songs acoustically, anyway, and they knew that and said, ‘Look, this might be interesting for people.’”

The re-worked versions, compared to the versions played on Flashback Lunches around the United States on a daily basis, are positively sublime, adding new depth to these songs, no matter how many times you may have heard them before.

“There’s a level of intrigue to them,” Hay agrees.  “That was the way they were originally written...songs you play on acoustic guitar and sing.  The band recorded them the way they ended up on the record, but this is the way they’ve always been to me.  But to other people, they sound new and fresh because they’ve never really heard them like that before.”

Hay and his former bandmate, Greg Ham, actually re-teamed in the late ‘90s for an series of tours as Men At Work.  It wasn’t so much an episode of Bands Reunited, however, as they were the only two members of the band in the new line-up.

            “When we broke up in ’85, I felt that that was pretty much it, so I just started working solo from that point on, though I always remained friends with Greg (Ham).  And in ’96, the pair of us just kinda felt like going out on tour and playing those songs again...well, not so much playing the songs, but performing with each other again.  Then we got an offer to go to Brazil, and we thought, ‘Well, this is quite fortuitous!’  So we did that.

“But the idea was always to try and see whether a band, with the name Men At Work but basically Greg and I and three other guys, would form,” explains Hay.  “For instance, we’d work with different people over a year or two, see which players worked or not, and see if a band would form around us, as opposed to actually trying to put it together.  So that was the idea.  And we had a great time, a floating bunch of musicians.  But the original idea was that we’d also write new songs and record new material...and we never did.  So after six years...from ’96 until 2002...we did that.  And, then, to be honest, I just got a bit sick of it.  As much as I love Greg, I just thought, well, this is really going nowhere.”

Among the other songs re-recorded for Man At Work was “Looking For Jack,” the title track from Hay’s 1986 solo debut.  “I was reasonably happy with that album.  When I went back to it later, I felt there were a couple of songs that were kind of rubbish, you know, but I like most of it.  But, of course, it’s unavailable now and I have no control over it, which is a little bit frustrating, because it’s dead product.  I really wish (Columbia) would do something with it, but...”  He drifts into silence.

I suggest the possibility of a label producing a limited-edition reissue of the album, a la Rhino Records’ Handmade series, but Hay indicates that Columbia owns the rights and, he adds angrily, “they haven’t done anything about it, ‘cos it’s fucking hopeless.”

They did, at least, reissue the first two Men At Work CDs...

“Yeah, of course they did!  But, I mean, fuck, what else are they going to do?  It’s, like, how much brain power does that take?”

...but they couldn’t be bothered to reissue Two Hearts, the band’s final album.

“No, because it wasn’t a hit in the first place.  They’re only going to reissue something if it was a hit the first time around.  That’s how they think.  So if something’s not a hit, why would they re-release something that didn’t work the first time?”

With that, Hay drifts into angry silence, and it’s obvious that he’s seething mad about the matter...and given how many times Columbia has produced compilations of Men At Work material in recent years (there are at least four in the US alone, one more than the number of studio albums the band released) in lieu of reissuing out-of-print material, who can blame him? 

Hay can take some comfort, at least, in the fact that Company of Strangers, the album Hay referenced earlier, did manage to slip into release (as a so-called “Brown Bag Edition”) via his own company, Lazy Eye Records, albeit with limited distribution.

“It’s nothing, really,” he shrugs.  “It’s just me making it available through the internet and through different internet outlets.  The reason why I called it the Brown Bag Edition was because all my internet fans were hassling me for months because they knew that I had it, knew that I’d finished it, and that I was looking for a deal for it. But because it took months for me to get nowhere with getting a deal for it, they said, ‘Oh, please, just put it out through your site!  We won’t tell anyone!’  So I just put it out, and that’s just the way it ended up, so I don’t know what’s going to become of that album, really.  But I quite like it; there’s some good things on it.”

Among those “good things” is a lyrical co-write with fellow Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly on the song, “Lucky Bastard.”  “It was actually done over the internet,” Hay admits.  “I first wrote the song in response to something he said when I was ‘round his house one night, three or four years ago.  We were talking about something, and he said, ‘Yeah, but you’re a lucky bastard!’  And so I remembered that, and then I wrote the first verse and E-mailed it to him and said, ‘Here, write the second verse.’  So he wrote one back, and then I wrote the third one, sent it to him, and so forth...until we had too many verses.”

            Another co-write on the album comes courtesy of Chad Fischer, of the band Lazlo Bane, a group who first drew media attention by scoring a cameo by Hay on their cover of Men At Work’s “Overkill.”  “He’s my favorite musician that I work with,” gushes Hay.  “He’s extremely talented and does everything really well:  songwriter, producer, musician.”

Fisher was the best man at Hay’s wedding, in fact...though, oddly, they first met because they went out with the same girl.  (Not, however, the one who Hay married.)  “We both stopped going out with the girl,” explains Hay, “but he and I continued to see each other.”

            Lazlo Bane’s more recent claim to fame has been through their song, “Superman,” otherwise known as the theme from Scrubs.  In fact, those with a keen eye might have spotted Hay show up on the series as a wandering troubadour who, by no small coincidence, performs a stellar version of “Overkill.”

            The Lazlo Bane connection, however, was only tangential when it came to Hay making his appearance on the show.  “Chad knew Zach Braff, who plays J.D., and, before he got the lead in the series, Zach would come down to the Largo, in Hollywood, and see me play.  He liked my stuff, bought some CDs, and then he got the gig on the show and took my stuff into the producers.  So that’s how that came about.”

            A later episode of Scrubs featured the entire cast of the show trading lines on a solo Hay composition, “Waiting For My Real Life To Begin,” which is undeniably one of the strongest songs in his catalog.  Certainly, it’s one of his finest lyrics.

 “Any minute now, my ship is coming in 

I'll keep checking the horizon 

I'll stand on the bow, feel the waves come crashing 

Come crashing down, down, down, on me 

And you say, be still my love 

Open up your heart 

Let the light shine in 

But don't you understand 

I already have a plan 

I'm waiting for my real life to begin.” 

As a result of its use on the show, the song has become somewhat of a cult hit.  “I certainly hope so,” says Hay, proudly.  “I really like that song, and a lot of other people do to.  I think that song will have its day.”

            Despite occasional moments of public exposure, Hay’s fought many battles to get his albums released over the years.  In 2000, he recorded Going Somewhere “in 5 days with my friend Dave Dale, also in response to E-mail pressure, to record an album as close to the live show as possible...without the stories, but just the guitar and voice.  I was just going to sell it at shows and release it through my website, but then KCRW (home of the show Morning Becomes Eclectic) started playing ‘Beautiful World,’ I think, and this label Music Blitz contacted me and asked if they could put it out.  And I said, ‘Sure.’  So they put it out.  And they went out of business.”

Prior to that, Hay released the album Transcendental Highway on his own Lazy Eye Records, through Ferrum Music, but the distributor they used stopped paying everybody.

“At least I got all my albums back,” Hay sighs.  “I sell them through my site and through Amazon.  It trickles away.  I’m always selling them.  But it’s frustrating.”

(originally written for PopMatters.com)