On a recent Monday evening on Market Street, the great cut-crystal chandelier inside Sydney’s State Theatre cast its warm glow over a crowd that looked less like a rock audience and more like a particularly well-dressed strata committee meeting. The nineteen twenty-nine picture palace is a grand mix of Gothic and Art Deco styles, bringing old-world Sydney in from the pavement, and it has a curious way of enforcing good posture. In the plush red velvet seats sat hundreds of people in their late fifties and sixties, with only a few younger faces scattered through the rows. Good linen and sensible spectacles dominated
Slightly past the scheduled start time, the current touring band of Men at Work simply wandered onto the stage with the unhurried air of tradesmen returning from a long lunch. At the centre was Colin Hay, the seventy-three-year-old Scottish-born frontman and only remaining original member. Before the music had properly settled, Hay spotted the blue glow of a raised smartphone in the stalls and paused to address the man directly. Filming the show, Hay observed with dry pragmatism, was entirely pointless. The man would take the phone home, leave the footage in his phone, and almost certainly never watch it again.
For the next hour, the Sydney crowd took Hay’s request for presence and turned it into a deep, motionless silence. Although the band was sharp and the acoustics in the grand old theatre were clear and acceptable, the audience remained almost lifeless. For most of the night, they sat with the polite stillness one usually sees at a children’s Sunday afternoon piano recital.
To understand this quiet reverence, it helps to remember what Men at Work actually sounded like when they formed at the Cricketers Arms Hotel in Melbourne in nineteen seventy-nine. Beginning as an acoustic duo with Hay and Ron Strykert before expanding into a five-piece featuring Greg Ham’s famous flute, they created a nervous, bright fusion of new wave pop and reggae. While the original members were Baby Boomers, their nineteen eighty-one debut album, Business as Usual, was the unavoidable soundtrack of a Generation X childhood across Australia and New Zealand. Today, however, the current lineup relies heavily on actual Generation X talent: the Los Angeles session musicians who back Hay, including his wife, Cecilia Noel, sit squarely in the Gen X bracket.
Noel was a woman of action all night. While the Sydney crowd sat politely on their hands, she moved constantly across the stage, playing percussion, singing backup, dancing, and tirelessly encouraging both her bandmates and the crowd.
Between songs, Hay filled the grand room with funny, candid stories about his past and the origins of the music. He was remarkably open about his earlier drinking issues and drug use, speaking without self-pity, and expressed genuine gratitude to the crowd for their decades of support. His songs have always carried a dual appeal: the left still hears "Down Under" as a sharp warning against overdevelopment and selling off local culture, while the right embraces it as an anthem of national grit.
It was only during the final three songs that the polite spell finally broke. As the band launched into their biggest hits, including "Who Can It Be Now?" and "Down Under," the fifty- and sixty-somethings finally got to their feet and crowded down toward the stage. When the house lights came up, the foyer was buzzing with patrons telling one another how great the show had been, even if, for the first ninety minutes, they had kept the secret entirely to themselves.
