Colin Hay Quotations

There's a fine line between character building and soul destroying.

Well, my thoughts about California are kind of mythological. To me, as well as being a real place, it's a place where people go to find something - to find happiness or to realize their dreams. So it has that kind of quality of heroism and heartache, and Australia has that, as well.

I just want to be a better guitar player, really.

In certain ways I still feel like I'm finding my way. I feel pretty comfortable playing acoustic guitar and singing, but then I feel pretty good sitting on a reggae groove as well.

In Scotland, beautiful as it is, it was always raining. Even when it wasn't raining, it was about to rain, or had just rained. It's a very angry sky.

I was brought up west southwest coast of Scotland and my mother and father had a music shop, and so I was surrounded by pianos and drums and guitars, and music, of course.

It strikes me there's a bunch of people in power who have really strong intentions of running the world and adjusting the world to exactly how they see it.

I had a very erratic career. I got very famous for a minute and then it just all went away, you know?

I can't remember too much about the '80s, to be honest with you... I wish that weren't true, but it is.

Most people remember me for a couple of tunes.

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.

I just found over the years that it's very hard to change people's perception of what it is that you do.

I don't think I'm going to change jobs at this point.

I don't walk off and come back for encores. I figure I can add four weeks to my life that way.

I feel pretty comfortable in a lot of different musical styles. I like rhythm, and I like melody and so forth.

I play in a lot of empty rooms.

I used to drink a lot. I had to stop drinking because it was getting the better of me, and I replaced that with really doing shows.

I'd love to have a hit record. I don't believe anyone that says they wouldn't like that.

It's frustrating to do albums that you think are worth listening to, but it's just so difficult to cut through.

My mother features quite heavily in a lot of my songs.

I got very famous for a minute and then it just all went away, you know? And for the last 20 years - you've got to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and then go on your merry way and start again, in a sense, and that's what I've been doing.

It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.

The thing with playing live is, most of the audience is in their 20s and 30s. If you're older than that, you don't tend to go out to shows anymore. So it's good if you can attract a younger audience because they've got the energy to get up off the sofa and go out.

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.

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.

I can't remember too much about the '80s, to be honest with you, ... I wish that weren't true, but it is.

I find that, rather than the cities, I'm very lucky because the audiences that come and see me are very, generally speaking, truly kind, so I have a great time playing everywhere.

I do like writing songs in a band. When it's rock, it's such a different kind of dynamic, obviously.

I tend to write, either myself, or I sometimes write with a co-writer, my friend that lives up the road. It's usually a relatively solitary thing, but I do like coming up with ideas.

I love going up the West Coast of the U. S. because it's one of my favorite parts of the world to tour.

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.

I sit around and play acoustic guitar - usually acoustic, sometimes electric, occasionally piano, but more often guitar, just trying to come up with tunes. Ideas kind of pop into your head.

I like the process of writing songs. It makes me feel good.

You don't want to get worse at something.

As you get older you don't want to just do the same thing, otherwise there's not much point. I think it's more or less trying to write things that, perhaps, say more by doing less, or you're always trying to refine things, make things a little simpler, a little more essential.

I tried talking to Jesus, but he just put me on hold...

Sometimes there's a general arc that you want to try and get better the longer you do something.

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.

I like to let the songs speak so that they can go through some kind of rebirth as you play them.

I tend to write pretty much by myself. I always did that anyway. I used to write with Ron Strykert 'cause he was the only guitarist and we played well together. We lived in the same place. I would play a certain style and he would kind of dance around what I did, in a sense. I learned from him and also vice-versa. With this band, I think I bounce ideas off everybody. Perhaps on the next album they'll be more collaborative stuff, but for the last 2-3 years, I've been pretty well writing by myself.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

These are just weird times, but then the last 20 years have been kind of weird for me. It's just a matter of doing what you can. You just have to play the cards you're holding and letting your audience know where you are. I've been on my own pretty much for the last 20 years. I've just been touring and you could call the albums that I've been making my calling cards. I haven't even had a label until the last two or three years. Then Compass Records came along. They're out of Nashville and they liked the stuff, so I guess they could see some kind of potential in me. They decided to get involved and I like them. They're nice people. These days, every battle won is like hand-to-hand combat.