COLIN HAY sat down with Pete Ganbarg on the Rock & Roll High School podcast to reflect on his extraordinary journey from the frontman of Men at Work to a respected solo artist. The band's debut album, Business As Usual, famously spent fifteen weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, but the meteoric rise took an immediate internal toll. "You always think that you’re handling things really well but of course you’re not," Hay admitted. "We made a couple of classic blunders but I think more than anything else it just wasn’t a band that was destined to go the distance... It very much turned into an episode of Survivor, who's gonna get voted off the island. That really just soured me on the whole thing. I thought, well what is the point of conquering the world together if you can’t enjoy it together."
Following the band's fracturing, Hay found himself navigating a new path. "I must say I was happy to be on my own. I just didn’t have to deal with anything else that had gone on," he shared. His transition to a solo career in California also coincided with a major personal milestone. "When I finally really thought ok I gotta really do something about this was towards the end of the 80s," Hay said regarding his battle with alcoholism. "I finally stopped in January ‘91 which coincided with me really committing to coming to live in California, in Los Angeles so that really was the start of my new life."
His solo work gained a massive second wave of global recognition after catching the attention of actor and director Zach Braff. "That was a big thing for me… it was a very important thing for me and helped me a lot when I was out there on the road, still til this day," Hay remarked regarding his music featuring heavily on the hit television series Scrubs. The enduring legacy of his catalog even surprised his contemporaries, including System of A Down's Serj Tankian. "That was a shock for me, it was a very pleasant shock I must say," Hay reflected. "There was something ecstatic about our music in a strange way. It wasn’t like anything else and I think a lot of people recognized that."
The songwriter also addressed the devastating six-year copyright lawsuit over their signature hit "Down Under," which deeply impacted those closest to him. "It was horrible and it went for so long as well," Hay stated. "At the end of the day the sadness for me was the fact that Greg, who wasn't in great shape anyway at that particular time, felt a sense of guilt about the fact that he played the line and yet he wasn’t sued... And it had a great effect on my father... he knew the song was clean in terms of composition so smoke would come out of his ears…I’ll never forgive them for that." New episodes of the podcast launch every Thursday.
