Not all heroes wear capes – and not all recipients of music lifetime achievement awards earn it just with songs.
Colin Hay – the frontman of Men At Work for seven hit-filled years, much longer a solo artist with a deep and rich catalogue – was named on Thursday as one of this year’s recipients of the Ted Albert award, recognising his outstanding services to Australian music. He shares the award with the groundbreaking Australian agent and promoter Colleen Ironside, who died in 2022.
Officially, the award – which will be presented to Hay by the music publishing body Apra – is for a career that has sold more than 30m records, topped singles and album charts in Australia and the US and won a Grammy. This is, after all, the man who brought us one of the all-time great Australian songs: no, not the more famous Down Under, but 1983’s brilliant Overkill, which got a second life in a 2002 episode of Scrubs.
Unofficially, it also recognises his presence as a wise elder of Australian music – a role he has been performing all the way from his home in Los Angeles, which he calls a “strangely spiritual place in many ways”, capable of creating “this very strange sense of euphoria” even after 30 years.
“I tend to run into people more than anything else – I don’t really feel particularly wise,” Hay says deprecatingly, while rocking a wise man beard. He speaks with strong remnants of an accent from his birthplace, Scotland. “It’s a process of trying to become, really.”
Hay has been a sage to aspiring Australian musicians – most prominently, his goddaughter, songwriter and pop star Sia Furler.
He remembers the first time Sia stayed with him in New York, when she was 11. “That was a beautiful time, actually,” he says. “I would say, ‘If you clean your room we will have a Häagen-Dazs ice-cream and watch David Letterman’. That was the deal. Then 15 years ago I saw her on David Letterman, and that was a great moment. She was looking right down the camera and I knew what that meant.” (Did he get her to clean her room? “It was a bit of a token effort, but she did.”)
Hay has appeared on Letterman, too, as well as Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. He’s recorded 15 studio albums, toured with Ringo Starr and maintained a live presence of wit and distinction. Of the impending award, he says: “I think ‘services’ is the key word. It’s important to realise at some point in your life that it is a valuable thing to be of service, to be of some use … You can always make things better, you can always learn something else, you can always practise a little more.”
Men at Work had broken up by 1985. Hay released his debut single, Hold Me, in 1987, and relocated to LA in 1989. Two years later, he got dropped by MCA Records.
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“That ended my tenure with major record labels, so I felt a lot of rejection,” he says. “I didn’t have a record label, I didn’t have an agent, I really had nothing going on at all, so I just started going out on the road playing shows.” After years spent filling arenas, he now found himself playing to 60 or 70 people in “conversational, conspiratorial” gigs.
“I came to realise the people who came to see me play got a lot out of it. [They] would tell me that they did, and ask me to please not stop because they valued it greatly. So I came to see it is of being of some use, yeah. It made me feel useful. It still does.”
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Part of the service is to other people – but music ought to offer a service to himself as well. “To me it was about the sharing of the struggle, really,” he says. “Trying to figure out what it’s like to be alive and to get through each day and to go through the trials and tribulations we all go through. That was the connection I felt, the currency, if you like.
“[Music] is an incredibly valuable thing to have in a society: individually, and together as a group. I don’t know where we would be without it.”
If you’re lucky, you’ll meet some famous folk along the way too. One of them inspired his 1986 song, Looking for Jack, which came out of an early visit to Los Angeles.
“Everyone there seemed to be looking for something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was,” he says. “Then at a concert I saw Jack Nicholson standing by the mixing console and I went up to him and said, ‘I’m a great big fan of yours’ and he said ‘I can’t hear you’, and I got embarrassed and went into the green room.
“He came in when I was talking to these girls, and he came up to me and said ‘I just want to say I’m a great big fan of yours, too’. I got very elated and very excited, because I just met Jack.”
Hay, at this point, was understandably distracted – and kept looking over the shoulder of the woman he was talking to. “She said ‘what are you doing, Colin?’ and I said ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me, I was just looking for Jack’. She said ‘yeah, everybody is always looking for Jack.’ And I thought, ‘yes, thank you very much’. That’s who they want to be: they want to be like Jack.”
Hay and Colleen Ironside will be presented with the Ted Albert award at the Apra awards, which are being held in Sydney on 27 April
