Hard Work

Rip It Up, Issue 97, 1 August 1985, Page 16

Hard Work

George Kay

Men At Work's Colin Hay Explains It's Virtues

“We always had a lot of confidence in what we did, and I know this sounds like bragging, but it didn’t really surprise us when people liked our music because we’d been playing live for a long time and we got a lot of people at our shows, which kept us going and feeling positive.” Two years ago Australia’s Men At Work cleaned up in America with ‘Who Can It Be Now?’ and ‘Down Under’, two songs that hardly warrant a look in the singles’ hall of fame. But there it was in green and white, the dollar confirmation that overnight sensations do exist. “I don’t think they’ve ever existed," contradicts Colin Hay over a mid-July trans-Tasman phone

link. ”1 suppose in a time scale we were an overnight sensation but we still had to work really hard. Our manager was in America for months trying to get them to release the fuckin’ first album and it got rejected twice although it had sold three to four hundred thousand in Canada. It was our first album and although it became really successful we didn't know about that as we were there in the middle of it and we’d been working two to three years every night of the week. So for us it was Thank God something’s happening.’ ”

The commercial attention that hit Men At Work led to the over-exposure of a band that was, at best, mediocre. Their marriage of reggae and colonial vulgarity in ’Down Under’ didn't improve with constant and displayu neither did the more acceptable but still brash and obvious blare of 'Who Can It Be Now’ and 'Be Good Johnny! "We never worried about over-exposure but in America they’d had us played for about a year and we felt fuck, they could do with a bit of a break, plus we needed a break. Not so much over-exposed, because when you’re hot you’re hot and we didn’t stop to think about the situation because things were just happening to us. We needed time off because we didn’t want to fall into the rut of recording-touring, recordingtouring. We wanted more time to develop." What about record company pressure to repeat the successes of past hits? “I think that’s largely a myth. We received no

pressure at all for our new album. We produced it ourselves and nobody in the record company really knew what we were doing, we just kept sending them tapes and they said they liked it. So we recorded the album and presented it to them. They’re not that stupid as to ask us to repeat the success of the first one as all that happens then is that a huge level of paranoia creeps in or we would have told them to fuck off." The new album in question, Two Hearts, is an improvement on their past efforts. Its midAustralian pop has more restraint and taste: “There was more spontaneity with the songs as they developed more in the studio and they are more reflective and personal. They reflect the extraordinary experience of the last few years. We produced it ourselves so you have to be selfcritical and none of the songs have been roadtested so we don’t know which ones work live.” The album was recorded with only three of the original band Hay, Greg Ham (keyboards) and Ron Strykert (guitars). The rhythm section had been sacked: “We parted company, they quit."

But you would’ve fired them anyway? ‘‘l don’t wanna get into it. The band, when we finished touring, didn’t really exist at all as we all wanted out as it all kind of exploded at the end. We all ran away and hid in our houses and we didn’t see each other for a while. I wanted to carry on with Ron as he and I felt that the direction we wanted to go in wasn’t compatible with the rest of the band and so we kept Men At Work going. Jerry and John went their own ways, I don’t know what they’re doing now. Then when we started touring, Ron said ‘fuck it’ and he quit as well. He didn’t want to deal with touring, so he’s in Greece somewhere." Back In the USA "A lot of Aussie bands in the 70s treated Aussie as their boundary and they’d never dare venture out into the wilds of the world as they thought they’d get eaten up. A band would come from overseas and people would say 'oh, they must be good’ and often they were fuckin' shit. That attitude still exists." It’s an attitude, until recently anyway, that’s been encouraged by the British press: “Yeah, pretty much. We toured with the British Beat and they’d only been gone for six months and the press were saying 'What happened to the Beat, oh good riddance, they were terrible anyway! This attitude comes from the fact that it’s the end of the Empire, it’s the last outpost for their superiority. The English people are a strange breed, they're very violent and heavy at the moment, but they still have that fuckin’ superiority thing about Britain, a little country that’s running out of time and money. “As for us, we’ve never been the darlings of the rock press, we’ve never been a fashionable band, which is quite understandable as we’ve never really chased the press and they’ve never really chased us.” Have you met with any resentment for your success in America? "Everyday I get resentment but it happens in little ways. Everybody has a preconception about what a person’s like after he becomes successful they immediately think that that person becomes a shit, but I’ve always been a shit so I haven’t changed at all! (Laughs) In America they believe just go for as much success as you can and they don’t resent it, they just think that’s fantastic. They*ask ‘hey, what’s the formula?' because bands over there are so into what it takes to become a hit.” Did you see your breakthrough in the USA as another triumph for Ock Rock? “We didn’t really feel a triumph as an Australian band as we’re a band first and Australian second. We didn’t go away flying any flags but when I thought about it having a song like ‘Down Under’ was pretty obvious, but we didn’t think about that at the time. “When we went away a couple of years ago it was when there was a very high level of fascination for things Australia, especially from America. That’s died down but we still get telexes from America that say ‘put another shrimp on the barbie! That’s the way they relate to us; they think that every Australian every day goes and lights up his fuckin' barbecue and puts these prawns on it.” So what is Australian rock ‘n’ roll? “You can’t put your finger on what is Australian or New Zealand. I think it was Reg (Mombassa) from the Mentals who said that we take music from Britain and America and send it back with a few corrections.”