Q+A: Colin Hay

Friday, Aug. 10, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS MORRIS

Who: Colin Hay; The Motels featuring Martha Davis

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: The Cannery

Tickets: $12.95 to $27.95; 617-5585 or cannerycasinos.com

Colin Hay rocketed to fame with Men at Work.

MTV helped push the Australian group to stardom with hits such as "Who Can It Be Now," which reached No. 1 in the United States in 1982, and "Down Under," which piqued Yanks' curiosity about Vegamite sandwiches.

The band flamed out after four years, but Hay continued to write songs and record. His latest album, "Are You Lookin' at Me?" came out earlier this year. Hay and his band perform Saturday at the Cannery.

"It hasn't been all roses, but I've been lucky in that I had Men at Work, which permitted me to have a solo career," Hay says. "A lot of people didn't have that opportunity."

Hay spoke to the Sun recently after a concert in Springfield, Ill., where his tour bus had broken down and he was waiting for it to be repaired.

Q: Do you get tired of people asking you about Men at Work?

It's a lot of people's point of reference. Of course people always will ask about it because it was so successful so that's people's point of entry, but there's been more talk of other things lately. Different things are happening, like my new album. But yeah, Men at Work was a big thing in my life. I don't get tired of it, but it's not of any particular interest to me.

Why were you together for only four years, given your huge success?

I suppose the easy answer to that is the personnel involved. If it had been different personnel, a different chemical combination, it might have been different, but the people in the band ended up being like the cliche of people not really getting along. It's easy for other people to look at it and say "Why couldn't you just get along?" - which is a reasonable question, I have to say. But there's no real easy answer to it. It was this person didn't like that person and that person didn't like this person. It was just counterproductive a lot of the things that happened within the band. I think the success kept us going longer than it would have if we had not been successful. It basically would have exploded before that.

What have you been doing?

I've just kept working forward. The sequence of events with Men at Work was that we had six people involved in the band, five musicians and one manager. The manager was my friend, not really an established manager, somebody we asked to manage us. The rhythm section got sacked - the drummer and the bass player. Then there were just three of us. We made another album that didn't really do anything and so the band faded out over the course of a year or two. I've been out on my own now, making records, putting them out on my own to varying degrees of success. The last four years I managed to work with a small label out of Nashville, where I seem to be getting a toehold again.

Any regrets?

You can always look at things in retrospect. It would have been nice to have had a psychologist on board with us - men in their 20s trying to communicate when you really don't have sophisticated communication skills. Small things become big things. Grievances that could have been aired and worked out. But I think no matter what we would have done we eventually would have broken up. Because of the personalities involved it would have been impossible for those people to stay together for any great length of time. But I must say I'm very happy with who I am now. I don't go around wishing Men at Work could have gone on longer.

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