Men At Work will perform at Salina’s Stiefel Theatre on Monday.
The group, led by vocalist and songwriter Colin Hay, is currently on tour with the legendary Japanese pop-punk band Shonen Knife and Toad the Wet Sprocket, offering an evening of smart and sonically diverse music that celebrates three distinct streams within popular music.
Men At Work formed in Melbourne, Australia, in 1979 and released its first album, “Business As Usual,” in late 1981 in Australia, with the LP arriving in the U.S. and Canada early the following year. By early 1983, the debut recording had topped the U.S. album chart and the single “Down Under” climbed to the same position on the singles chart. That song, which celebrated the peculiarities of the group’s home country, was accompanied by a popular music video that spotlighted the outfit’s sense humor.
Men At Work earned a Grammy Award and widespread airplay, and the group’s sophomore release, “Cargo,” arrived in early 1983, featuring hits such as “Overkill” and “It’s A Mistake.”
Despite the success — or perhaps because of it — internal tensions created fractures in the band. By the time their third album, “Two Hearts,” appeared in 1985, it received less notice as critics and radio also failed to embrace it. A year later, the group was no more.
Since then, there have been occasional reunions, although Greg Ham, who died in 2012, and Hay remained the sole original members. Scottish-born Hay had long since moved to Los Angeles and embarked on a solo career, releasing a series of albums to critical acclaim and experiencing a different visibility, thanks to appearances on shows such as “Scrubs” and joining Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, of which he is still an active member.
Hay says that the focus of the current Men At Work concerts is the music he made with the original group in the ’80s, but fans can also expect a select smattering of his solo songs in the sets.
He recently spoke about Men At Work’s history and the band’s continued appeal.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
There’s a dynamic in popular music that fascinates me, which is how music transcends generations. I was still in my single digits when the first Men At Work album, “Business As Usual,” came out, and all these years later those songs are still part of the culture and there are multiple generations who have discovered them.
If you take a country like Brazil, where the old band was successful right from the start, we never toured there until the ’90s. When [late saxophonist] Greg [Ham] and I went there in ’96, we played 17 shows to between 10,000 and 15,000 people a night. Ridiculous after 11 years of inactivity. That’s even a long time ago now! That’s 30 years ago. That’s ridiculous.
There’s lots of different ages. Kids come because they’ve just discovered the music and they like it, so they come along. Older people come along because it’s part of their past. I like that aspect of audiences. You look at them and think, “Wow, this is very interesting!” There’s teenagers down in the front weeping. I’m not sure why, but tears are apparent.
What do you think is at the core of the enduring appeal of those songs?
I think the strength of the songs. There’s a density in the songs that perhaps on first listen or perhaps when the records came out that people didn’t tend to notice. Especially with a song like “Down Under,” which tended to polarize people, especially in Australia. A lot of people loved the song, but there were detractors who didn’t think it had much merit because of what you would call the cultural cringe associated with that song.
But it was ultimately a song about celebration and, I think, a good song at its core. I think if you take songs like “It’s A Mistake” or “Overkill” or a bunch of other songs, there’s a lot there for people if you want to listen to the song multiple times. I would argue that perhaps you could find different things in that music, which has contributed to the success of the songs over a long period of time.
If you put on the songs now, they still sound pretty good after 45 years. That had a lot to do with the record producer we had as well [Peter Mclan] because he got really good sounds in the studio, and he knew what he was doing. That really helped us a lot.
There are a lot of records that came out in that period, say from ’80 to ’84, that have a time stamp on them. With “Business as Usual” and “Cargo,” especially, I don’t hear that. They hold up in the contemporary setting.
There’s a lot of space in the records. There’s not a lot [of extra stuff] on the records, it’s just the people playing their parts. There’s air in it. I think that’s a good thing ultimately. There’s a drum part, a bass part, a couple of guitars and maybe a little keyboard thing, Greg doing what he did and vocals and that’s basically it.
I think a lot of records now have all the space and all the frequencies filled up. There’s very little there for the listener to enter the music, get inside it. It’s very in your face. Whereas, I think, our thing had an innocence to it or something.
You mentioned the power of the songs, and “Overkill” in particular. I was maybe 10 when that came out. I didn’t have a concept of the lyrics, I just knew that I liked the music. Now, these years later, I think I understand the lyrics more, but I’m not always quite sure. I keep returning to it and find myself asking what it’s about, and that’s part of the appeal for me, that it has this depth to it, maybe a little bit of mystery.
I discovered over a period of time, too, that there were things about it that I didn’t really understand either. There were a few things as well. I think that song I came up with when we started to get really famous and we were in a sense diving into the unknown. It’s a decision you make. “Here we go, it’s now or never, this is what we wanted.” You walk down the street and you’re no longer anonymous, you’re no longer observing things. People are reacting to just seeing you, and everything was very different.
That was one thing that struck me at the time, and the other thing was my encroaching addiction to alcohol that was causing me a lot of dark periods and stuff like that. I think that was in that song as well, about the ghosts appearing. I was trying to figure out how to not get lost in that world, the world of addiction that really I was feeling was taking over my life.
You got through it.
It was quite a lot of work. It took me about five or six years to eventually stop drinking, where I knew I was OK, where I knew I was going to stop and I knew I wasn’t going to start again. I didn’t have that desire to start again. It made me realize that I couldn’t use my willpower to stop. I had to not use my willpower. I had to surrender. That was the big difference, and to realize that no matter how I tried, alcohol was always going to win, so I had to not pick up the sword.
It was a hard-learned lesson, but I got there in the end where I didn’t feel a need or a desire to drink, and that’s still with me, so I’m grateful for that on a daily basis.
Men At Work was one of those bands that didn’t sound like other bands. It’s not like there was a wave of imitators. It’s the chemistry of people coming together and creating something new.
I think that was the case with old band. [Guitarist] Ron Strykert was the other most important creative part of that band for me, the way he thought about music, the way he thought about playing guitar. The way he wrote, the soundscapes that he came up with were really brilliant, so he was very inspiring to me. Gregory I knew as a friend for years, and so I related to him in a very familial sense in a way. He played different instruments, saxophone and flute and keyboards and guitar. He played everything, anything really.
On the saxophone, the tone he had was very unique. I’ve worked with a lot of saxophone players since Greg passed away, and that seemingly simple line he played at the start of “Who Can It Be Now?” is more challenging than you think, to make that sound authentic and to make it sound good. Same with his sounds. Jerry Speiser had a very unique way of playing drums. A very skilled drummer. Everyone had their contribution and made the band sound, like you say, not like anyone else.
There’s also a sense of humor in the songs, but humor married to weighty subjects.
That was a combination of things. Greg was a very funny man. The humor thing wasn’t something where we thought, “Oh, we’ve got good sense of humor.” It was just kind of that things are funny. We found things funny. When Monty Python came out they seemed to take over from where The Beatles left off. We would watch Monty Python and we would say, “That’s so innovative and funny,” so we always would see the absurdities of life.
I think that also there was something about shrouding weighty subjects in humor because you didn’t want to be seen to be preaching. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t quite sure about what I was saying, I’m not quite sure about that. It was just a natural thing to inject humor into the blackness of whatever you were really feeling, the chasm of life, what it means, trying to come to terms with one’s lack of understanding of what this whole world is all about.
I think that there’s something about being Scottish as well that’s funny in that regard, too. There’s lots of Scottish examples of people being funny at the height of bleakness.
