Hitting The Hay

If ever the journey metaphor was genuinely illustrative, it must surely be in the case of former Men At Work frontman Colin Hay. From Scotland to St Kilda, share flats to stardom, obscurity to LA, and demon battling to lawsuits, Hay and his music have played to both deafening acclaim and shattering silence. No wonder he's still trying to find his dance.

It is perhaps fitting that Hay begins by recounting the tale of his teenage migration to Australia. “We came by ship and we had four weeks, so it definitely felt like a big, big journey,” he recalls. “One of my strongest memories is of being in the middle of the ocean on this massive ship, but the water was like a mill pond and the only thing breaking the water was the ship cutting through, and I remember thinking how small I was in this huge universe.”

However, there was a time when Hay and his band were anything but small. The success of 1981's Business As Usual album and its headline singles Who Can It Be Now and Down Under was as staggering as it was unexpected. For a while Men At Work were the biggest band in the universe, with a simultaneous number one album and single in both the US and UK.

Aside from making him a star in his twenties, success had an entirely predictable impact on the rest of his life and career. “I don't think people realise how incredibly, awesomely fucking huge that thing that happened to us was. So, I came off that and I thought, now what? I mean, there was no way I could ever top it.”

In commercial terms, of course, he hasn't. None of his eleven solo albums since, including 2011's Gathering Mercury have had anything like the sales impact of the old band. For Hay, this could easily have represented a terminal crisis of confidence. “It was like, 'How do I compete with myself?'” he muses. “So, in many ways, I treated it like a recovering alcoholic – which I am. When I used to drink I tried to fight it with my will, and that involved picking up the sword every day and trying to slay the dragon. But after a while you realise that you can't and you just have to not pick up that sword; just leave it there and say, 'Just for today I won't drink'. In a lot of ways I treated the competition with my past in the same way.”

Rather than search for sales, Hay has concentrated on building up a solid live base. “In Melbourne in 1988 I was playing at a place called Madigan's and I was playing to four people. Two or three years before that I'd been playing to one hundred thousand people. That fall from grace was remarkable,” he admits. So he moved to LA and started again. In 2013, after two solid decades on the road, he can now safely say, “It's like I'm starting again, y'know, and I'm on the way up.”

Starting in January, that upward journey will see Colin Hay's Finding My Dance tour traversing the continent, playing both city and country venues. Whereas cynics might scoff at the idea of playing towns like Bunbury, Frankston and Cessnock, Hay wears it like a badge of honour. “The reason I'm doing them is because I can do them,” he observes. “And anyway, I'd like to know who those cynics are who say your career is finished when you're 'reduced' to playing country venues because it's a particularly parochial way of looking at things. It's quite insulting to talk about country audiences in that way, as if it's somehow demeaning to play to them. So, fuck those guys.”

As for the ongoing journey, Hay simply says, “Lately I've been thinking, 'Well, you've already arrived' and it's really a matter of how that sits with you.” And that, folks could well be a dance inadvertently found.

Colin Hay will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday February 13 - Lighthouse Theatre, Warrnambool VIC
Friday 15 February - Arts Centre, Frankston VIC
Saturday 16 February - Athenaeum Theatre One, Melbourne VIC
Tuesday 19 February - Capital Theatre, Bendigo VIC
Wednesday 20 February - Riverlinks Performing Arts Centre, Shepparton VIC
Friday 22 February - Concourse Theatre, Chatswood NSW
Saturday 23 February - Canberra Theatre, Canberra ACT
Sunday 24 February - Evan Theatre, Penrith NSW
Tuesday 26 February - Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong NSW
Wednesday 27 February - Performing Arts Centre, Cessnock NSW
Friday 1 March - Memorial Hall, Bellingen NSW
Saturday 2 March - Glasshouse House, Port Macquarie NSW
Sunday 3 March - West Tamworth Leagues Club, Tamworth NSW
Tuesday 5 March - Opera House, Sydney NSW