Colin Hay
Colin Hay
Colin James Hayis a Scottish Australian musician and actor who made his mark during the 1980s as lead vocalist of the Australian band Men at Work, and later as a solo artist. Hay's music has been frequently used by actor and director Zach Braff in his work, subsequently leading to a career rebirth in the mid-2000s...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth29 June 1953
CountryAustralia
base glad journey leads particular people seem songs talk thread travel wrote
I try to take people on some kind of journey during the show and people seem glad to travel with me. There is some kind of thread through it. I base it on the songs really, I'll think where I was when I wrote a particular tune, and the song leads me to what I want to talk about.
face found grateful hear people songs songwriter ways
Let's face it, ... I'm not the most marketable songwriter out there today. But there are still some people who want to hear those songs. I'm grateful I've found ways to get the songs to them.
song writing rocks
I do like writing songs in a band. When it's rock, it's such a different kind of dynamic, obviously.
song writing thinking
I suppose ever since I was about 14, I remember listening to "Sgt. Pepper's," and I remember thinking, "how do you possibly write songs like that?" I remember starting to try and write songs around that age, but just sitting around with an acoustic guitar, and try to come up with ideas for songs, and that's just what I've done ever since. I just never really stopped doing that, I suppose.
song men thinking
The Men at Work thing is always there, it's always going to be there. It's not something I consciously think that much about anymore. The thing that stays with you is the songs, which is a good thing for me, because the songs are the things that stand the test of time.
mother song features
My mother features quite heavily in a lot of my songs.
song writing feel-good
I like the process of writing songs. It makes me feel good.
song play kind
I like to let the songs speak so that they can go through some kind of rebirth as you play them.
great men songs work
I do everything from Men at Work right through to the songs I'm working on at the moment, ... It's great when you have new songs to play.
associate bit hit people playing problems string
I have no problems playing (Men at Work) songs, ... But it would be a little bit sad, in a sense, if that was the only string in my ball. I play them because they're hit songs. I play them because I like the songs. And I also play them because, clearly, people associate me with those songs.
audience audiences building change coming decade five gone hundred night people playing six somewhere tour
Sometimes I'm out on tour and you feel you're really getting somewhere and the audience is building and there's five or six hundred people coming to see you every night just from word-of-mouth. And then you go somewhere and you feel like you've gone back a decade and you're playing to 15 or 20 people. You think to yourself, 'Should I change my life, get another job?
bit four later people playing three
I had a very strange career. I mean I went from playing to 150,000 people in 1983/84. Three or four years later I was playing to four people, you know, in Melbourne. I thought - bit strange, you know bit odd, bit erratic.
honest remember wish
I can't remember too much about the '80s, to be honest with you, ... I wish that weren't true, but it is.
couple happened mainly people sadness sources thinking
There were only a couple of people I would really trust, which has a kind of sadness to it. It doesn't really have anything to do with you, just to do with other people's perceptions of what's happened to you. It mainly had to do with people thinking you had untapped sources of wealth.