Colin Hay in Conversation

It’s kind of strange to think that the writer of one of the most iconic Australian songs is in fact as Scotsman who has lived in California for the last twenty years. But its true and we just have to deal with that. The song of course is Down Under and its writer is Colin Hay. And while that song has been the subject of some controversy lately it’s not the most interesting thing about Colin Hay. I did this interview late last year and with Hay playing some shows around Australia this week I thought it was a good time to bring it back to the front page (with the new gig dates on the end!)

What makes his heritage and current place of domicile acceptable to our nation of  jingoistic, pop culturalists is that he does make regular visits here and that he always brings with him an impressive collection of new songs.

Colin Hay is perhaps under-rated as a writer of songs. He has had some pop hits and they have been big ones, but plumb the depths of his recorded output and you will find song after song of extremely high quality. He combines an acute eye for detail with a wry sense of  humour and a mastery of many genres of music. He proves this again with his new album American Sunshine.

Hay returns to Australia for some shows in the next few weeks and I found him in Denver, Colorado on tour.

HHMM : Are you touring solo at the moment or with a band? I understand you alternate between then two

CH ; This is a band tour in the US. I have five musicians with me. I do alternate between the two – its about half and half, although maybe a little more skewed toward the solo shows. People have come to like that in a way. They tend to respond to the “tampering with the truth” I do between the songs.

HHMM : I like that description of ‘stage patter’ . Congratulations on the new album. The immediate thing that strikes me is the way it showcases you dipping your toe in a lot of different musical genres.

CH : I think that’s true although it wasn’t necessarily intentional. There’s some different things in there that have popped up. Maybe it’s from touring so much across this land that some things sink in after a while.

HHMM : This album is another example of you writing songs specifically about places – all the way back to Down Under. You’ve written songs about Scotland, Mandalay, Puerto Rico, Melbourne, and this album is very much about your relationship to California.

CH : A lot of places are really inspiring. I think that its because we are always wandering around the place, not necessarily trying to find a place, but searching for something that feels it could root you to the ground. It’s a bit of a luxurious thing to think about – some people don’t have a place to live and most people don’t have any choice about where they live but I’ve been pretty lucky all my life to be able to go to different places and experience them.

HHMM : And now its California.

CH : I went to California twenty years ago not necessarily because I wanted to be there but because that’s where my record deal was based and things were pointing me away from Melbourne at the time. I liked it a lot. It’s the sort of place where you have to make things up as you go along. You know that if you create something for yourself that feels right then you know you have done it by yourself because you don’t have a history there. There’s a lot of people in the same situation. There’s a lot of people there from ‘somewhere else’ and I quite like that environment. I was struck by the possibility that I might come back to Melbourne and base myself there because my Mum and Dad are both there. They are  both healthy but at some point I might need to come back and be a bit closer at hand. I was quite traumatized by the thought that I might have to leave California – even though I wasn’t actually doing it. It’s a place that gets in your blood.

HHMM : In retrospect was you time in Australia a case of just passing through on you way to being a citizen of the world.

CH : No, I don’t think so. I was very happy in Australia and I still love Australia. I love going there and I love many things about it and I feel quite at home there. It’s a hard place to beat in terms of a place to live. I left there because of my work and because I was given an opportunity. Not that many people receive the opportunity of having an international success where you become known in many parts of the world. You either respond to that or you don’t. You either go after it with everything you can or you stay home. There’s nothing wrong with staying home but I decided to have a crack at it and see what happens. And I’m still here. I’ve still got a lot of things to do. There’s no great plan. I just stumble along and do what I can do to get things going.

HHMM : There’s various songs on the album that remind me of people like Jimmy Buffett, JJ Cale and Tony Joe White. Do you see yourself as an artist of that ilk – clearly not trying to be a pop singer and write songs in the hope of cracking the charts, but rather writing songs for their own sake.

CH : I like pop songs too and I do like all those people you mentioned and I like people like Randy Newman. I think they are inspirational. I just try to get better as a songwriter, performer and a singer. I like writing songs. I like the way it makes you feel. Sometimes I think that maybe I do it from the force of habit because that’s what I’ve been doing for the last thirty years, but whenever I get back from tour and back home I find myself wandering downstairs to the studio and messing around with ideas. And I do it not for any particular reason, but as you say, just for the sake of writing songs.

HHMM : Having had US success on such a large scale do you find as you travel around that there are pockets of people who know every song you’ve ever written and are quite obsessive in the way they follow your career?

CH : There’s lots of people wherever I go that come and see me – which is nice. Its interesting that five or six hundred people will come and see me wherever I go now and it used to be one or two hundred. So it is growing in a lot of different parts of the world and I’m quite happy with that.
I like the challenge that being in this place presents because it’s a huge, huge market. You can keep going around here and never really get to it all. I have in a sense ‘hung in’ for the last twenty years or so. It’s people discovering what you do and liking what you do without it making its way into the mass media.

HHMM : I like the song Pleased To Almost Meet You on the new album about those “fans” that seem to exist in every town that pop up at every show of every touring artist.

CH : That’s kinda funny but its kinda true. Those guys are at every city you go to. Somehow I think they are all connected on some strange frequency level and they all talk to one another and they all know when to at soundcheck and at the stage door in their strange t-shirts with a massive bag of albums for you to sign. They never come to the actual show, they just come and get their albums signed and then fuck off home. But in all honesty they always say things like ‘I thought you would be taller’. There’s no malice in it, its just that they seem to always make those kind of observations.

HHMM : Pat DiNizio of The Smithereens has a theory that the way to survive as an artist is to find a small number of serious fans and you basically play and record for them. It’s almost like the old system of patronage of the arts. Do you get a sense that you have an identifiable group of people that are effectively your artistic patrons?

CH : Oh yeah absolutely. That’s really what I have been doing the last fifteen or twenty years is trying to find those people. Because trying to make your way through what people call the music industry is just impossible. I think it’s a kind thing to even call it an industry to start with. But the inefficiency of the record industry when they all had their head in the sand before the internet hit was amazing. When the internet did hit it made it possible to actually tell people what you were doing without having to rely on some idiot who had no idea of who you were, what you were doing and what you wanted to do.  When I got dropped from my last large label record deal in 1991 I realised that I had to go out and find people who liked what I did. Now its growing all the time and there’s a real connection to those people.

WED 10 MARCH : VIC: YORK ON LILYDALE

THU 11 MARCH : VIC : CHELSEA HEIGHTS HOTEL

FRI 12 MARCH : VIC : HOTEL SHOPPINGTOWN

SUN 14 MARCH : VIC : CORNER HOTEL

WED 17 MARCH : SA  : THE GOV