“It started off with me trying to make sense of why I was on stage,” Hay admits, “and I was looking out into the audience and they seemed to be thinking the same thing – you know, ‘Why are we in the audience?’ Because, when I first started to go out on my own, there was hardly anybody there at the shows, and so it was, by definition, conversational, because it was a very small room usually, and usually the audiences were quite small.

I was looking out into the audience and they seemed to be thinking the same thing – you know, ‘Why are we in the audience?’

“There was something conspiratorial about it or something like that, so I would just talk to them and tell them about what happened to me as a way of, in a sense, getting it out of my own head, because that was relatively interesting, going from playing to many, many, many people to playing to hardly anybody. So it was almost like, well, you’re telling someone about it, and it just happened to be people I chose to tell were,” he chuckles, “small audiences 25 years ago. That’s really what it developed from.”

What started happening – as Hay quietly clawed his way back into a music career as a solo artist who has now, since 1991, released 11 albums – was that the stories and the way he told them started to get laughs. And why not? For a while there, before the untimely suicide in 2012 of his longest-serving fellow Men At Work comrade Greg Ham, Hay found himself performing solo shows to 250-capacity room while at the same time playing as Men At Work to more than 5000 screaming Brazilians, Peruvians and Mexicans. The irony was certainly not lost on Hay.

“I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing for the past 25 years or something, but I hadn’t really done the comedy festivals so much. I’ve done Edinburgh Festival a bunch of times, and I played the Melbourne Comedy Festival last year, but mainly I’ve just done gigs and part of a gig is really just talking to people which sometimes ends up being amusing. I’m happy to be doing it but I haven’t really actually thought about it in those terms.”