It is a weeknight in 1979, and the beer glasses are rattling at the Cricketer’s Arms Hotel in Richmond, Melbourne.
The band squeezed into the corner of the pub has a problem that has nothing to do with music.
The hotel needs a name for the blackboard outside, the chalked sign that tells drinkers who is playing tonight.
Until now, the musicians have been an acoustic duo that grew, almost by accident, into something louder.
Colin Hay throws a suggestion into the hat, two plain words borrowed from the signs posted over every torn-up road in Australia.
Ron Strykert, his partner on guitar, seconds it on the spot.
The name is chalked up, the set begins, and nobody in the bar suspects what those two words are about to do.
Within four years, that name will sit on top of the album charts in America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand at the same time.
It will outsell nearly every established star on the planet for one long, improbable season.
And it will belong to a band that, on this night, is still being paid in pub money and applause.
This is the story of the album that carried it there, Business as Usual.
Then the whole world came knocking.
A Residency That Became a Reputation
Through 1979 and 1980, Men at Work played the Melbourne pub circuit the way other men held down jobs.
The front bar crowds were rough, loud and honest, and a band either held them or went home early.
Night after night, the five musicians learned to hold them.
Word travelled the way it always travels in a drinking city, from one bar to the next.
By the end of 1980, Australian music historian Ian McFarlane would judge them the most in-demand unsigned band in the country.
They were also, by his account, the highest paid unsigned band of that year.
Yet they had no record contract, no album and no guarantee that any of it would last.
What they had was a set of original songs tested in front of people who were free to walk away.
Almost nobody walked away.
A Single They Paid for Themselves
In 1980, unwilling to wait for permission, the band financed a single of their own.
It appeared on their own tiny label, pointedly named M.A.W., the initials of the band itself.
The A-side was a fast, country-flavoured rocker called Keypunch Operator.
The B-side was a breezy Hay and Strykert song about a travelling Australian, called Down Under.
The single did not trouble the national chart’s top one hundred.
But record men had begun drifting into the pubs, and the whispers were getting louder.
Early in 1981, the Australian arm of CBS Records signed the band, on the recommendation of its talent scout Peter Karpin.
The deal came with an American producer, Peter McIan, who would shape the sound of their debut.
The pub band was about to be put on tape, and the tape would change everything.
Into Richmond Recorders
Between March and September 1981, the band recorded its first album at Richmond Recorders in Melbourne.
Peter McIan produced and engineered, working with the five musicians on the arrangements of every song.
Colin Hay sang lead and played guitar, with Ron Strykert’s lead guitar coiling around him.
Greg Ham moved between flute, saxophone and keyboards, adding colours no other guitar band had.
John Rees played bass, and Jerry Speiser kept the beat tight, jerky and danceable.
The sessions were unhurried by debut-album standards, stretching across the Australian autumn and winter.
McIan kept the production low-key, clean and uncluttered, leaving the songs to stand almost bare.
These songs, as the world would learn, did not need to hide.
The Knock on the Door
The first single from the sessions arrived in June 1981, and it was entirely Colin Hay’s work.
Who Can It Be Now? told of a man alone in his flat, flinching at every knock on his door.
Hay has often explained that strangers kept knocking at his St Kilda flat, many reportedly looking for dealers nearby.
He wrote the song out of that jumpy, broke, who-is-it-this-time feeling, and made it swing.
Greg Ham’s saxophone supplied the nervous, unforgettable hook that answered the question in the title.
Released in June, the single climbed to number two on the Australian chart that August.
It stayed on the chart for twenty-four weeks, an eternity for a first single.
Australia had heard the knock, and Australia could not stop humming it.
But the knock was only the beginning.
A B-Side Grows Up
The second single was the old B-side, taken back into the studio and rebuilt.
Down Under had begun life in 1979 as a slower, looser performance on that self-financed single.
McIan and the band re-arranged it, tightened it and, in the words of the histories, popified it.
Hay and Strykert’s song followed a cheerful Australian traveller around the world with a battered van and a famous sandwich.
Underneath the comedy ran something sadder, a worry that the country he loved was being sold off piece by piece.
The new version opened with one of the most recognisable sounds of the coming decade.
That sound was Greg Ham’s flute, dancing over the top of the record like sunlight on water.
McIan later recalled that the famous riff began as a kind of musical joke by Ham.
Hold that detail, because decades later it would matter more than anyone could guess.
November 9, 1981
The album, Business as Usual, was released in Australia on November 9, 1981.
It ran to just thirty-eight minutes, ten songs with not a wasted bar among them.
Alongside the two singles sat Be Good Johnny, Hay and Ham’s portrait of a schoolboy forever being told to behave.
There was the shadowy Underground, and Helpless Automaton, written and sung by Greg Ham himself.
Ron Strykert contributed the wordplay of People Just Love to Play with Words.
The long closing track, Down by the Sea, stretched past six minutes and let the band breathe.
Critics noticed the delicacy of it, one Canberra reviewer singling out Ham’s flute and reeds.
Christgau’s Record Guide in America would later award the album a B-plus.
The economy McFarlane praised was the point: nothing decorated, everything earned.
Australia made up its mind about the record almost immediately.
Number One at Home
By December 1981, Down Under stood at number one on the Australian singles chart.
It stayed there for six weeks, carrying the album up the chart behind it.
Business as Usual reached number one in December and held the top for nine weeks, into March 1982.
Altogether, the album would spend one hundred and eighteen weeks inside the Australian top fifty.
At the Countdown music awards for 1981, the band swept its categories like nobody’s business.
They won Best Debut Album, Best Debut Single and Best New Talent in a single season.
In February 1982, both the single and the album reached number one in New Zealand as well.
The album was the first Australian record ever to top the New Zealand chart.
From the blackboard at the Cricketer’s Arms to the top of two countries had taken barely two years.
America, however, had still not returned their call.
Rejected Twice by America
Here is the detail that still astonishes anyone who hears this story for the first time.
Columbia Records in the United States, the parent company of their own label, rejected the album.
Then, given another chance to reconsider, the American company rejected it again.
An American producer had made the record, American hits were plainly sitting inside it, and still the answer was no.
What saved the album was persistence, personified by manager Russell Depeller and talent scout Peter Karpin.
They kept pushing until Columbia finally agreed to release it in the United States and Britain in April 1982.
That was a full six months after Australian audiences had already sent it to number one.
The most powerful record company machine on Earth had to be talked into its own success.
When America finally opened the door, there was a queue outside.
Fifteen Weeks
The invasion, when it came, began politely, through the western provinces of Canada.
By May 1982, Winnipeg radio had Who Can It Be Now? inside its top ten.
That July, the song reached number eight on the Canadian national chart.
In August, the band crossed the Pacific to tour Canada and America, supporting Fleetwood Mac.
American top forty radio picked the single up that same month, and the climb steepened.
In October 1982, Who Can It Be Now? reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
The album followed it upward, and in November it began its run at the top of the Billboard 200.
It stayed there for fifteen weeks, from late 1982 into the early weeks of 1983.
No debut album had ever commanded the American chart for anything like that long.
Then the whole world came knocking.
Down Under, released in America while its predecessor was still in the top ten, entered the Hot 100 at number seventy-nine.
Ten weeks later, in January 1983, it was number one, where it spent four weeks in total.
It sold more than two million copies in the United States alone.
Billboard would rank it the number four song of the whole of 1983.
That January, Men at Work held the number one album and the number one single in America simultaneously.
No Australian act had ever done that before.
In the same season, they repeated the double in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
In February 1983, they flew home with the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.
Six million copies of the album would eventually ship in the United States alone.
Worldwide, the little pub record sold around ten million copies.
The Song That Became a Flag
In September 1983, Australia mounted its famous challenge for the America’s Cup, yachting’s oldest trophy.
The crew of the yacht Australia II adopted Down Under as their theme song.
Television coverage beamed the song around the world as the Australians closed in on history.
When Australia II won, ending more than a century of American possession, the song felt woven into the victory.
It became, in the fond Australian phrase, something close to a second national anthem.
It has been played at Australian sporting triumphs and ceremonies ever since.
In May 2001, the Australian Performing Right Association named it the fourth greatest Australian song of all time.
The album behind it would later take its place in the book 100 Best Australian Albums.
Not bad for a B-side the band once paid to press itself.
Why the Record Still Sounds Fresh
Play Business as Usual today and the first surprise is how uncluttered it still sounds.
There are no period gimmicks to date it, no synthesised gloss to peel away.
The reggae sway, the saxophone, the flute and Hay’s anxious, elastic voice simply step forward.
The songs are short, bright and built to be sung back by strangers.
Underneath the bounce sits a real writer’s unease about money, belonging and home.
That combination of sunshine and worry has kept the record alive for forty-five years.
Every generation of Australians since has inherited it, and every visiting band hears it in taxis.
It remains the high-water mark of what a pub band can do.
America opened the door, and nobody closed it.
Men at Work: The Pub Band That Conquered the World
A Boy From Saltcoats
Colin Hay was born in the Scottish coastal town of Saltcoats in 1953.
He grew up in a Britain of grey skies and guitar groups on the radio.
In 1967, his family emigrated to Australia, settling in Melbourne on the other side of the world.
Hay was fourteen, old enough to feel the loss of one home and the strangeness of another.
That double vision, the insider who is also an outsider, would colour everything he later wrote.
Australia gave the teenager room to become a musician, and he took it.
Through the nineteen seventies he played, wrote and waited for a door to open.
The waiting would turn out to be the making of him.
The Duo in the Corner
In 1978, Hay formed an acoustic duo with guitarist Ron Strykert.
The two men played folk-tinged sets in the pubs and small rooms of Melbourne.
Along the way they even helped record the music for a low-budget stage musical called Riff Raff.
The duo format taught Hay how to hold a room with nothing but voice and guitar.
It also taught him which of his songs could survive being stripped bare.
By the middle of 1979, the duo had begun to dream of a full band.
Drummer Jerry Speiser joined them around June of that year.
The corner of the pub was about to get considerably more crowded.
Five Men and a Music Degree
The last two pieces of the classic line-up arrived within months of each other.
Greg Ham was invited to join, but he hesitated, because he was finishing a music degree.
In October 1979 he decided for the band, bringing flute, saxophone, keyboards and a trained musician’s ear.
Bass player John Rees, a friend of Speiser, completed the five shortly afterwards.
Strykert moved across to lead guitar, and the chemistry settled almost at once.
Ham became the band’s secret weapon, the colourist who could lift any chorus.
His flute would open their most famous record, and his saxophone would drive their first hit.
Every famous band needs one member the others cannot be replaced by committee.
Men at Work had Hay’s voice out front and Ham’s reeds at its heart.
The Highest-Paid Unsigned Band in Melbourne
The years 1979 and 1980 were spent the old way, in front of drinkers.
The Cricketer’s Arms in Richmond became a stronghold, its blackboard carrying their borrowed name.
Other pubs followed, then bigger rooms, as the grass-roots reputation compounded weekly.
They were nobody’s idea of fashionable, which in Melbourne counted heavily in their favour.
When they pressed their own single in 1980, it was the act of a band done with waiting.
The single failed to chart, and it hardly mattered at all.
The only surprise was how far beyond Melbourne it would run.
Two Years at the Top of the World
The years 1982 and 1983 belonged to Men at Work in a way few bands ever experience.
While Business as Usual was still climbing abroad, they had already finished a second album.
Cargo was deliberately held back, so that the debut could finish its extraordinary run.
Released in 1983, it reached number one in Australia, number three in America and number eight in Britain.
Its singles Overkill and It’s a Mistake both reached the American top ten.
The first was a song about dread creeping over a restless mind in the small hours.
The second wrapped a Cold War nightmare inside an irresistibly cheerful melody.
The band toured the world extensively through 1983, playing to crowds beyond pub imagination.
In August of that year their American label honoured them for one hundred million dollars in record business.
Canada gave the debut a Juno Award for International Album of the Year.
For roughly two years, a Melbourne pub band stood at the centre of world pop.
Cracks in the Crew
Success that fast applies pressure to every friendship inside a band.
By 1984, long-standing tensions between Hay and drummer Jerry Speiser came to a head.
The dispute, by the principals’ later accounts, centred partly on the band’s manager, Russell Depeller.
Depeller was Hay’s friend from his university days, and the rhythm section reportedly wanted him gone.
Hay refused, and instead Speiser and bassist John Rees were told they were not required.
It was a brutal way for the classic line-up to end.
The five men who had conquered America together would never record together again.
Two of them were gone before the third album had properly begun.
The centre, as it turned out, could not hold either.
Two Hearts and the Long Goodbye
The third album, Two Hearts, appeared in April 1985, made by a band in pieces.
Strykert left during its recording, leaving Hay and Ham to produce it with session musicians.
Drum machines and synthesisers replaced the old bounce, and Ham’s saxophone was pushed to the margins.
The album reached only number sixteen in Australia and number fifty in America.
Those are respectable numbers that felt, after fifteen weeks at number one, like a collapse.
In July 1985 the band still played the Oz for Africa concert, part of the global Live Aid day.
Ham departed during the touring that followed, and the line-up dissolved around Hay.
By early 1986, Men at Work had quietly ceased to exist.
Hay began a solo career, releasing his first album, Looking for Jack, in January 1987.
The loudest knock in Australian music had faded in under five years.
The Song Refused to Retire
Through the late eighties and nineties, Hay rebuilt his career the slow way, as a solo artist.
He released a string of albums and became a fixture of intimate stages, voice and guitar.
His 2003 album Man at Work revisited the old songs in acoustic form, including Down Under itself.
Those bare versions found him a second audience, helped by television exposure in America.
He also joined Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, touring with the former Beatle’s revue in 2003 and 2008.
From 2018 onward, the All-Starr connection became a regular part of his working life.
Meanwhile, the original recording never actually left the culture it had colonised.
It played at weddings, at cricket matches, at any gathering where Australians found themselves abroad.
Plenty of careers peak and vanish; this one simply changed shape.
The Knock Comes Again
In the middle of 1996, after a decade away, Hay and Ham revived the Men at Work name.
South American audiences had never forgotten them, and demand for a reunion had persisted for years.
The new line-up toured Brazil, and a São Paulo performance became a live album released worldwide in 1998.
Further tours carried them across Australia, Europe and America between 1998 and 2000.
On the first of October 2000, they played Down Under at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics.
It was a homecoming staged in front of the entire watching world.
By 2002 the reunion had wound down, though Hay and Ham still performed together occasionally.
In February 2009 they appeared as a duo for a Victorian bushfire appeal telethon.
Nobody watching could know how little time the partnership had left.
The Riff on Trial
The trouble began, improbably, with a question on an Australian television music quiz.
The question suggested that the flute riff in Down Under echoed an old Australian children’s song.
That song was Kookaburra, written in 1932 by Marion Sinclair, whose publishing rights were held by Larrikin Music.
In 2009, Larrikin sued Hay, Strykert and the record and publishing companies for copyright infringement.
In February 2010, a Federal Court judge ruled that the riff reproduced a substantial part of Sinclair’s song.
The composer herself had died in 1988, and for decades the song had been treated as public property.
Larrikin had suggested that forty to sixty percent of the song’s income would be fair compensation.
In July 2010, the court set the figure far lower, at five percent of royalties from 2002 onward.
A final appeal was refused by the High Court of Australia in October 2011.
Producer Peter McIan had always maintained that Ham included the melody as a musical joke.
It was the most expensive joke in Australian music history.
The Man With the Flute
Greg Ham had been the band’s rainbow, a multi-instrumentalist who could play almost anything.
He sang lead on Helpless Automaton and played with the Melbourne group the Nudist Funk Orchestra in later years.
Those who worked with him remembered the wit as much as the musicianship.
The court case weighed on him personally, because the disputed riff had been his contribution.
Accounts say he worried that the case would become the thing he was remembered for.
Hay later suggested that the stress of those years had taken a heavy toll on his friend.
In April 2012, Ham died at his home in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton North.
He was fifty-eight years old, and Australia mourned one of its most recognisable sounds.
The flute line he had tossed off as a joke remains one of pop’s most famous introductions.
Still at Work
Honours had already begun arriving long before the story turned complicated.
The band was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 1994.
Across their career, Men at Work sold more than thirty million albums worldwide.
In 2019, Hay revived the Men at Work name once more, touring with a new line-up of Los Angeles musicians.
The new band carried the old catalogue to audiences on several continents.
Then, in 2021, a young Australian producer named Luude rebuilt Down Under as a drum and bass record.
Hay re-recorded his vocal for the release, and the remix reached number thirty-two in Britain in January 2022.
A song written by two young men in Melbourne had charted again, forty years on.
Almost everyone has stood outside a door somewhere, hoping that the knock will change their life.
And almost everyone who has left one home for another knows exactly what Hay’s songs are about.
The band clocked off; the songs never did.
Return, finally, to that Richmond pub in 1979.
The blackboard outside the Cricketer’s Arms carried many names across the years.
Most of them belonged to bands that Melbourne remembers and the world never heard of.
This one was different, and nobody in the bar that night could have said why.
A Scottish teenager who had crossed the world at fourteen had chalked up two borrowed words.
The words promised nothing except that work was in progress, unfinished, underway.
What followed was fifteen weeks at number one in America and a song sung on every continent.
The chalk has long since been wiped from that blackboard.
The name it carried is still on the radio somewhere tonight.
Then the whole world came knocking.
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