To say that Colin Hay‘s musical career has been a long and winding road would be an understatement. In just over a decade, the Scottish-born musician went from an unknown musician playing folk clubs in Melbourne, Australia, to fronting early ‘80s hitmakers Men at Work, to languishing in Los Angeles after his solo record deal fell through.
The “Down Under” and “Who Can It Be Now?” singer discovered that the fame from being part of a multi-platinum band didn’t easily transfer to a solo career. Men at Work broke up after — or during, depending on how you look at it — the recording of their 1985 album, Two Hearts. Hay regrouped and released solo albums for Columbia Records (1987’s Looking for Jack) and MCA Records (1990’s Wayfaring Sons). Disappointing sales caused MCA Records to drop Hay, leaving him without a record label, a manager or a booking agent. “No one was interested really in anything that I was doing,” he tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast.
People began to take notice of his solo work — slowly. In 1992, Hay was asked to play at a new Los Angeles venue, Largo, by its owner, Mark Flannigan. Hay took to the stage with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a body of work from three Men at Work albums and two solo albums. The shows were a hit with local audiences, and Hay became a frequent guest. “Largo was really instrumental” in building the next phase of his career, Hay says. “It’s like a home, really, where I could just be myself and play whatever I wanted to.”
Nearly 40 years old at the time, Hay says he knew record labels weren’t interested in him despite having Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits in 1982 (“Who Can It be Now?”) and 1983 (“Down Under”) and an album, Business as Usual, that spent 15 weeks atop the Billboard 200 albums chart. So, Hay decided to set about finding his own audience and take the one-man show honed at Largo on the road. It was a big adjustment for a musician whose previous band dominated radio and MTV in the early ‘80s and won a best new artist Grammy in 1983. “Thirty years ago, there was hardly anyone there,” he says of those early solo shows. “There might be 30 people, 40 people. Not so very long before that I had been playing to, like, 150,000 people.”
Those early solo shows were a valuable step in creating a second career as a solo singer-songwriter. Initially facing small crowds of 30 or 40 people, Hay discovered that he had a knack for storytelling that captured the audience’s attention between songs. “I think people were a little embarrassed for me in the audience,” he says in a Scottish accent softened by his upbringing in Australia. “I could see this kind of quizzical look in their face, like, ‘Why is he doing this?’ And so I just started to talk to people because they were just there, you know? And so I just started to talk to them and tell them what had happened to me. And as I did that, I noticed that people leaned in a bit closer.”
A big break came in 2002 when Hay was featured in an episode of the television show Scrubs. Through a mutual friend, Hay met Zach Braff when the actor landed the starring role. “He said, ‘I’ll see if I can get some of your songs on the TV show,’” Hay recalls. “I didn’t think anything of it.” But Braff made good on his pledge by taking Hay’s music to show creator Bill Lawrence, who ended up writing an episode called “My Overkill” in which Hay performs the 1983 Men at Work hit “Overkill.” “That was very … that was a huge thing for me, especially playing live,” says Hay. “It had a big impact in terms of my live audiences, people who discovered me through watching that show.”
A year later, Hay was performing in Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, a gig he held intermittently over the years and consistently since 2018. Hay was introduced to The Beatles as a child by his father, the owner of a music store in his native Scotland. After a decade rebuilding his career as a solo artist, Hay was sharing a stage with the Beatles’ drummer. “When you turn around you think, ‘Wow, I’m playing with Ringo!” Hay exclaims. “’He was in the f–king Beatles!’”
More than three decades later, Hay continues to entertain audiences with his solo acoustic shows filled with anecdotes and wry humor. The venues have grown considerably from sparsely filled clubs to crowded small theaters and performing arts centers. He also tours under the name Men at Work, although he is the lone original member. His vast catalog of solo albums haven’t been commercial successes, Hay points out, constant touring has been the key building his shows from 30 or 40 people in the early ’90s to 1,000 or so a night today.
“The success that I’ve really managed to achieve has just been through going out and playing live. So it’s a valuable thing for me. And also, I kind of treasure the audiences in a way because — people say that a lot — but really they kind of saved me in many ways. Because even when I first started to go out and play live in the early ’90s, people could sense my kind of slight sense of desperation about what the f–k is going on. And they would just encourage me [to] just keep going.”
Hay has indeed kept going. Nearly 50 years after Hay began to play at folks clubs in Melbourne, he says he’s in his natural state as a traveling, guitar-toting troubadour. “All I’m doing is trying to make sense of the time that I’ve got left and enjoy myself as much as I can — and also to hopefully give people a good night out,” Hay says. “I think that’s kind of a useful thing to do.”
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