READING, Pa. — Men at Work are back on the job.
On Friday, the group will bring their summer tour to the Santander Performing Arts Center in Reading.
“It’s really only been the last few years that I’ve gone out under the name Men at Work, so, it’s the same band,” front-man Colin Hay tells 69 News. “I love working with this bunch of musicians and really the only difference is it’s predominantly, 98 percent, Men at Work material.”
Hay is also enjoying the fact that younger generations of fans are coming out to the shows and discovering Men at Work’s catalog for the first time.
“I’m glad that it’s not music that just seemed to be there for a while and appealed to a certain age group or certain people from that time and no one else,” Hay says. “The music has kind of hung in. I would like to think that there’s enough in the music to sustain itself over generations.”
Hay is aware that Men at Work’s biggest hits — “Down Under” and “Who Can It Be Now” — are still intertwined with many people’s everyday lives. He says it’s his job to be the delivery system for those and other Men at Work tunes.
“I find that that’s the best way to approach it,” Hay says. “People have a relationship with these songs. They’ve heard them walking through the supermarket or they’ve heard them in the laundry room or however they’ve heard them, they want to hear them, so it’s my job to deliver them the best way I know how.”
Men at Work released just three albums between 1981 and 1985 before the group folded. In that time, the band won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, while their debut album, “Business as Usual,” spent 15 weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart.
But with the success came friction within the band and other issues that Hay says he and his bandmates did not have the maturity or wherewithal to figure out.
“It was an incredible time and you think that you’re handling it OK. A lot of problems bands have, they’re pretty superficial in many ways. They’re things that could be worked out. It’s a little bit like, if you’re in a marriage and you want to keep the marriage together, you go and have counseling and you work it out, so it’s the same thing with a band in a way,” Hay says.
“You first have to ask the question of whether you want to keep this thing going, whether it’s worth it, whether you really enjoy creating with these people, playing music and spending a ridiculous amount of time with these people, the same people. And so if you think to yourself, well I wanna do that, I want to spend time with these people, it’s worth getting some therapy and figuring it out and figuring out how you can move forward together. But we didn’t do that. Either we didn’t want to do that and it went the way it went or we weren’t evolved enough to seek help or to sit down with each other and figure out what the problems were and fix them.”
As he began venturing out as a solo artist, Hay says he spent years playing to sparse crowds. But, over time, Hay says word of mouth changed that.
“When Men at Work was over and I started touring, very few people came. I was playing to hardly anybody for a decade, at least, and it’s been slowly increasing,” Hay says. “The audiences for me were definitely, and still are, a lifeline in the sense that they give your work and they give your creativity purpose because you know that there’s people who are very interested in what you’re doing. You have to be interested yourself. You have to be somewhat curious about continuing to discover things about what is to write songs and I don’t really claim to know anything particularly about the process; it’s still quite mystifying to me.”
Hay says his appearances as the “Troubadour” on the hit television series “Scrubs” was instrumental in expanding his fanbase.
“It was hugely beneficial for my career,” Hay says. “It increased my audience and brought people a lot younger and even now when I play, people still say we discovered you through ‘Scrubs’.”
Hay also credits his frequent performances at the Largo at the Coronet nightclub in Los Angeles, California, for helping him keep his solo career on track.
“I started playing there when I get dropped by MCA in 1991, I think it was, ’91 or ’92, and I still play there,” Hay says. “If all else fails, I’ll always have Largo, as long as that’s still going as a venue.”
In the meantime, Hay says he would like to record more music with his current band.
“I find if I practice guitar or play things I wouldn’t normally play myself, it takes me down a different direction or different road and often times it inspires me to kind of write something that’s different from what I’ve done before,” Hay says. “I can sense songs hovering.”
Men at Work performs Friday with Jeffrey Gaines at the Santander Performing Arts Center in Reading. Doors open at 7 p.m. Show starts at 8 p.m.