Colin Hay: The PopMatters Video Interview

[Video directed by J.C. Sciaccotta]

Colin Hay has had a remarkable career. Actually, he’s had two of them.

The first one was as part of Men at Work, his merry group of Australian pop perfectionists who absolutely dominated the charts in the early 80s, winning a Grammy for Best New Artist while also conquering the charts with catchy hits like “Down Under” and “Who Can It Be Now?” The band’s two subsequent albums failed to match the intense level of success that their first album Business as Usual achieved, and the group split shortly thereafter.

Colin Hay, however, was not a man to be idle for long, and in short time he was working on solo albums. A prominent guest spot on the TV show Scrubs and a prominent placement on the soundtrack for the movie Garden State helped give Hay a whole second life to his career, and to this day he still tours and records.

Earlier in the year Hay released Gathering Mercury, one of the more emotional and subdued discs of his career, looking at his relationship with his father following his passing. Prior to a show at Park West in Chicago, Hay sat down with PopMatters to discuss his new disc, the lawsuit over the flute line in “Down Under”, and so much more …