atwork

Rip It Up, Issue 55, 1 February 1982, Page 10

atwork

Melbournites Colin Hay on vocals and guitar, Ron Strykert on guitar, Greg Ham on sax and flute, Jerry Speiser on drums, and John Rees on bass formed as Men At Work in August 1979, and since then have shot from being the "biggest thing in Bendigo," to one of the biggest things in Australia, and now NZ. The Business As Usual album sat at number one in Australia for at least six weeks, and hit the top spot here two days after their Sweetwaters' gig. "We've played a few festivals on the last day, and invariably things go wrong. I mean you've had all this equipment that's had 200 different road crew set up 200 different ways, and I was just glad everything was working," says Greg Ham. "It went really quickly. There's all these people, and you're playing, and suddenly it's all over." "And you spend weeks getting passports," adds Colin. "And you sit around for hours afterwards and talk about it," Greg carries on. "It's a big shock too, going onto a large stage after you've been playing your average pub-sized stage. It's like a big paddock, with all this space to fill in." "And no sheep," quips Mr Colin Hay. The last six months have been constant live performances in pubs and clubs, with the occasional support thrown in. "Pubs are the bread and potatoes, or meat and carrots, or whatever you call it, of rock and roll," Greg says.

"There's no band in Australia," continues Colin, "that can survive doing concerts. You have to do pubs. Booze is where it's at." The Business As Usual album is a curious blend of light, uplifting, sometimes funny songs with a reggae backbeat. "Some of the songs are stories, and some are just nonsense," Colin comments. "Some are real stories, and some are real nonsense." So just where does that leave a tune like 'Be Good Johnny'? "It's an observation," Greg says. "A tale," says Colin. "A little situation, an idea. Greg came up with the music, and I came up with the story to put to it

which was based on a nine year old boy named Johnny who gets hassled by all these daggy uncles that come around and ask him about playing sport. That's basically what it is about." And where does the band's humour fit in? "Yeah, we like to laugh at it," Greg says. "If you can't laugh at it you may as well put your leather jump suit on, slash your wrists, bite the heads off doves or something. "I think we've all been bored by bands that take themselves too seriously. It just gets tedious when people can't laugh at themselves and what they're doing." "And the relative unimportance of rock and roll," adds Colin philosophically. Back to the album, and a look at the whys and wherefores behind 'Down Under'. "It was a very quick process," Colin explains. 'The first verse developed out of a bass riff, the hook 'Down Under', and the second and third verses are situations which were related to me by friends. Situations which you store in the back of your head. For example, the Brussels thing. It was a friend of mine who went and tried to speak French in a bread shop, and the guy behind the counter was from Brunswick in Melbourne. There's nothing new or revelationary about the song, but people think that having words like vegemite sandwich, and chunder in a song are really hysterical. They love it."

Greg: "Some people pick up only certain words in a song, and ignore the real story, or some of the more subtle things. But for instance, when we play the song live, if they're going to join,in anywhere they're going to join in on vegemite sandwich'. In fact someone threw one on stage in Hobart, with a bite taken out of it." . The question of the band going to the States hinges on record sales. "If they say come here, we'll go," says Colin. "We'd even support Toto," he jokes. Ann Louise Martin