The Intro

Men at Work’s Down Under is viewed by many Australians as their unofficial national anthem. However, the band wrote their biggest hit as a statement on the plundering of Australia by greedy people. However, it made them a victim of their own success when a copyright lawsuit eventually led to the untimely death of their multi-instrumentalist Greg Ham.

Before

Men at Work had formed in Melbourne during the summer of 1979, initially featuring Colin Hay on lead vocals and guitar, Ron Strykert on bass and Jerry Speiser on drums. Ham joined the band, which was yet to have a name, a few months later, playing flute, saxophone and keyboards. Soon after, John Rees became their bassist and Strykert switched to lead guitar. When the band needed a name to put on a pub blackboard advertising their concert, Hay suggested ‘Men at Work’.

With their new name, Men at Work quickly built a reputation as a formidable pub rock band. In 1980, they financed their own debut single, Keypunch Operator, released on their MAW label. The B-side was an early version of Down Under.

The genesis of Down Under came from Strykert, who had recorded a bass riff on a home demo, backed by percussion on bottles filled with varying degrees of water. Hay was entranced by the riff, and would listen to it in his car all the time. One day, while driving in Melbourne, he came up with the chords, and lyrics spilled out a few days later.

The premise of the song was partly inspired by Barry Humphries. Better known in the UK as Dame Edna Everage, Humphries also had a character, Barry McKenzie, who was a comically stereotypical Australian, travelling abroad. Hay put his own experiences of travelling into the song, specifically the second verse, in which he recalled meeting a tall baker from Brussels who gave him a Vegemite sandwich. Vegemite is to Australia what Marmite is in the UK, and wasn’t readily available in Belgium at the time – but the baker had emigrated from Melbourne. ‘Fried-out Kombi’ was a reference to a broken-down VW Kombi, which was a popular mode of transport for surfers and hippies in the 60s and 70s. ‘Head full of Zombie’ was about a particularly potent strain of marijuana available in Australia at the time. And ‘chunder’ was Aussie slang for throwing up.

The original Down Under is a fascinating glimpse at a song that hadn’t reached its full potential, but is nonetheless appealing. Slower and more primitive, its reggae roots are on greater display, and you could imagine The Police recording it.

By the end of 1980, Men at Work were Australia’s hottest unsigned band. That quickly changed when they signed with CBS Records in early 1981. With the help of US producer Peter McIan, they recorded their debut album, Business as Usual. They hit the ground running when the first single Who Can It Be Now? was released in June 1981. It peaked at two in their home country, but went one higher in the US.

The next track to be lifted from the album was a remake of Down Under. It was sped up, doused in pop sheen and sparkle, and Ham added some beautiful flute parts. McIan later recalled that he had based some of this on the Australian nursery rhyme Kookaburra. A harmless decision from Ham at the time, and one that definitely benefitted this version of the song – but it would come back to bite the band.

Review

Down Under is an excellent single and it’s always a pleasure to hear it. I must have heard it plenty of times in my childhood, but it only truly impacted on me when I was 19 and would hear it regularly at the 80s night in the Gallery nightclub when I was at university in York. Week on week, this was one of my favourite songs every Tuesday.

Don’t be fooled by the quirky, funny video and wry lyrics of Down Under – you can also hear Men at Work’s concerns about the heritage of their country becoming increasingly up for sale to white corporate greed. And that is partly down to Ham’s flute, which undercuts the celebrations and adds a melancholy edge – as does ‘Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?/You better run, you better take cover’.

Like many of the best number 1s, Down Under is a great mix of fun and serious messaging, which can be enjoyed by all. The tune was already there in that mesmerising first version, but hats off to McIan’s production, which updated the song for 80s mass-consumption, without rubber-stamping a time period to it. Down Under still sounds very fresh.

The video also helped Down Under greatly, coming about just as MTV, then a year old, was becoming increasingly important to a song’s success. It may have taken away some of the seriousness (Ham is sat in a tree playing his parts) and played up to stereotypes of Australians as being fun-loving jokers and it may have even made the public view them as one-hit wonders. But what a hit. Incidentally, that’s Speiser playing the ‘6 foot 4’ man from Brussels, but he’s stood on something to look that way.

After

Down Under went to number 1 in many countries, including the US and UK. Simultaneously, Business as Usual was the chart-topping LP in both countries. No Australian group had achieved such a feat before.

Business as Usual was actually old news to Men at Work by then, and in April they released their follow-up Cargo in Australia. However, Business as Usual was still selling well in the UK, so another single, Be Good Johnny, was released. It did well in the US (number eight), but got nowhere near the UK top 40.

When Cargo was eventually released in the UK, its singles did chart here, but Dr Heckyll & Mr Jive only reached 31, Overkill peaked at 21 and It’s a Mistake shuffled in at 33 – their final UK charting single.

In 1984, tensions between Hay and Speiser led to a split. Hay, Ham and Strykert used session musicians to record their next LP, Two Hearts. Released in 1985, it was a commercial failure, failing to even reach the Australian top 20. Men at Work downed their tools in 1986.

A decade later, Hay and Ham returned to Men at Work and toured South America. A live album, Brazil, was released worldwide in 1998. A world tour followed, culminating in a performance of Down Under at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Summer Olympics, held in Sydney. They continued to perform sporadically.

In 2007, the Australian music-themed TV quiz Spicks and Specks played Down Under and posed the question ‘Name the Australian nursery rhyme this riff has been based on, as well as the name of the man playing it’. Their answer was Kookaburra. The song had been written in 1932 by Marion Sinclair, but in 2007 the rights were owned by Larrikin Music, who pursued legal action. You only have to listen to Kookaburra once to know that the resemblance isn’t actually that strong.

However, in 2010, the judge ruled that Larrikin should be paid 5% in royalties since 2002 and any future profits. The band challenged this but lost their appeal in 2011. Ham was crushed, and concerned he would only be remembered for copying another song. He suffered from depression and anxiety, and in 2012 was found dead from a heart attack, aged 58.

Hay has since toured with session musicians as Men at Work, had a solo career and performed with Ringo Starr & His All-Star Band. Strykert, Rees and Speiser have also dabbled in work with new bands.

In 2021, Australian producer Luude remixed Down Under as a drum and bass track. Credited to Lude Ft Colin Hay, it peaked at five in the UK in 2022. A nice tribute. It’s just a shame Ham wasn’t around to enjoy.

The Outro

With the dawn of the video age and Australia’s increasing global visibility, Down Under couldn’t have come at a better time. That September, Australia became the first ever country to defeat the United States in the America’s Cup yacht race. Down Under had been their theme song. Their Prime Minister gave the whole country a day off and pronounced that any boss who was to sack their employees for not working was ‘a bum’.

A year later, Aussie stand-up comedian Paul Hogan starred in the first of many Australian Tourism Commission adverts that aired in the UK and US. ‘Shrimp on the barbie’ became a phrase in both countries – even though few Australians said it themselves (they prefer ‘prawn’ to ‘shrimp’. A few years later, he was the star of Crocodile Dundee (1986), just as Neighbours-mania hit the UK.

The Info

Written by

Colin Hay & Ron Strykert

Producer

Peter McIan

Weeks at number 1

3 (29 January-18 February)

Trivia

Births

31 January: Actor James Sutton
16 February: Model Agyness Deyn
18 February: Model Louise Glover/Footballer Jermaine Jenas

Deaths

4 February: Actor Reginald Denham/Cyclist Ron Johnson
6 February: Rugby union player Cyril Lowe
18 February: Author Robert Payne

Meanwhile…

31 January: Seatbelts for drivers and front seat passengers become mandatory.

1 February: Breakfast television began on the ITV network with the launch of TV-am.

3 February: Unemployment stood at a record high of 3,224,715. Bad enough in itself, but also worth considering that the previous high reached in the Great Depression of the 1930s accounted for a higher percentage of the workforce.

10 February: 37-year-old civil servant Dennis Nilsen was arrested on suspicion of murder, after dismembered sets of human remains were found at a block of flats in Muswell Hill, London. 

11 February: Dennis Nilsen was charged with the murder of 20-year-old Stephen Sinclair, who had been last seen alive in January. Police worked to identify the other sets of human remains found at Nilsen’s flat, in order to press further murder charges against Nilsen.