Colin Hay – An Xperience Interview

Colin Hay – An Xperience Interview – by Rob Smittix.

RRX: I’m very excited to talk to you today I look forward to April 10th at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. It’s been so many years that these songs that we love and grew up with have been released but you’re still out here doing it. I imagine sometimes maybe you get tired of playing those hits  because you’ve written so many songs since. But at a show people want to hear the classics no matter what. How does it feel inside to see how happy it makes people?

CH: Yeah. I mean the songs that were big hits are interesting because they live inside me, you know? That’s where they came from. I relate to the songs perhaps in a different way than other people do.

They hear the songs, whether it’s on a disk, computer or radio… however they hear the songs coming at them. But when I think about the songs they’re coming from inside me.

You know? They’re kind of part of who you are.

So, I don’t really get sick of playing them because they’ve been very good to me and they’re kind of… I don’t know… different from a lot of the other songs simply because of the fact that they were so hugely successful. I mean my old band was only together for four years and those albums did really well.  I’ve been very lucky, I suppose because I’ve been touring for 35 years or something.

I’ve made 15 albums or so since then and none of those albums have been anywhere near as commercially successful as the Men At Work records. But you have to remember that a lot of people that have come to see me over the years weren’t necessarily coming to hear Down Under or the Men At Work songs.

Because no one was telling them to come and see me. When I started going out on the road not very many people were coming and if they were coming it’s because they were truly fans of what I was doing. So a lot of the people that come to see me play wanna hear the song I wrote last week, opposed to the song I wrote 40 years ago.

But those big songs, you can’t ignore them because they’re just, there, you know?

Obviously you play them because there’s always a certain amount of people in the audience who’ve come to hear those songs. But I’m lucky because a lot of my audience  have been following me since then.

So, I mean, I think it would be a little bit glum if I was going out on the road and only playing those Men At Work songs.

I probably wouldn’t enjoy that too much and I probably wouldn’t even do it to be honest. But I’m just very lucky because I’ve had a loyal, growing and passionate audience. I’m lucky in that sense.

RRX: Absolutely and you’re still writing I imagine?

CH: Yeah. I released a couple of albums in the last couple of years. I did a covers record and I also did a record called “Now And The Evermore” and that’s the last thing I did. Yeah, I mean, it’s what I do.

I’ve always just been writing songs and recording them, it’s very different now from how it used to be. It’s more for me anyway, it’s like a cottage industry. But there’s a cycle that happens, it’s not that dissimilar from how you used to do it in the sense that you put a record out and you go on the road to promote it.

I still do that. It’s rather an old fashioned approach but now you have the advent of social media and the internet. So it’s a whole different way of exposing yourself and your music to. But essentially… I think that my strength is going out on the road and playing for people that seems to be what people respond to with me.

RRX: It’s funny because I totally forgot about it until someone mentioned it to me but you did that “Scrubs” episode. That was amazing and I imagine it might have really made a resurgence bringing younger people in that weren’t alive during that decade to kind of say… hey, this is a really good song. That must have been a lot of fun to film.

CH: Yeah, I can’t remember it all that much, to be honest, it was just a day in television. You go there and sit around for eight hours and then you do something for 15 minutes and then you sit around for few more hours and do something else.

But it was very good Zach (Braff) and Bill Lawrence who created that show.

Zach brought him along to see me play one night. He got a little bit incensed actually that he wasn’t hearing any of my material on the radio.

So he said, I’m gonna feature your songs on my show and see if it can make a difference. And it did! It made a huge d

ifference. As you say, it increased my live audience by a lot and many of them are younger people.

The power of television, especially if it’s a cool show that was interesting. It was written well, so it was a nice show to be part of. It really helped me a lot and established a whole other group of people that weren’t necessarily aware of me before that.

RRX: Absolutely. Honestly, it’s one of the best episodes of Scrubs ever and that’s a great show. I think about Blue Oyster Cult and how people now show up to their concerts wearing the “more cowbell” T shirt because of the Saturday Night Live sketch but they had nothing to do with it. At least you were totally involved in this. So it probably wouldn’t be unheard of to see Scrubs T shirts in your audience.

CH: No, people do that. Yeah.

RRX: That’s pretty cool. So was there anything that you wanted to say to the people that are coming out to see you April 10th in Troy?

CH: I’ve just really been enjoying this tour. As I said before, I mean, everyone says this…

but I have great fans and it really started off when I got dropped by MCA Records in 1990 or 91. That was the end of my life with major record labels.

So the only thing I really had were the live audiences that really inspired me to keep going. They would come to the shows and they’d say we support you. So, it has nothing really to do with having big hits or having huge success.

It has to do with the struggle that everyone has in their lives and people can relate to that. Whether you’re playing to 40 or 50 people and a couple of years before that you were playing to 50,000 people.

They recognize that you don’t have to do this. Why are you doing it? Well, I was doing it because I wanna still be a part of people’s lives in a musical sense. That’s really what’s kept me going. I have a great deal of respect and I take going out on the road and playing for people pretty seriously.

I’ve gotten great feedback from people. So it’s a very nourishing thing but I would just say that I look forward to playing for whoever comes up to see me.

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