COLIN HAY

I don't walk off and come back for encores. I figure I can add four weeks to my life that way.

My mother features quite heavily in a lot of my songs.

I'd love to have a hit record. I don't believe anyone that says they wouldn't like that.

I've got a long-term plan.

It strikes me there's a bunch of people in power who have really strong intentions of running the world and adjusting the world to exactly how they see it.

I used to drink a lot. I had to stop drinking because it was getting the better of me, and I replaced that with really doing shows.

I feel pretty comfortable in a lot of different musical styles. I like rhythm, and I like melody and so forth.

I had a very erratic career. I got very famous for a minute and then it just all went away, you know?

I don't think I'm going to change jobs at this point.

There's a fine line between character building and soul destroying.

Well, my thoughts about California are kind of mythological. To me, as well as being a real place, it's a place where people go to find something - to find happiness or to realize their dreams. So it has that kind of quality of heroism and heartache, and Australia has that, as well.

It's frustrating to do albums that you think are worth listening to, but it's just so difficult to cut through.

In certain ways I still feel like I'm finding my way. I feel pretty comfortable playing acoustic guitar and singing, but then I feel pretty good sitting on a reggae groove as well.

I was brought up west southwest coast of Scotland and my mother and father had a music shop, and so I was surrounded by pianos and drums and guitars, and music, of course.

I just found over the years that it's very hard to change people's perception of what it is that you do.

The thing with playing live is, most of the audience is in their 20s and 30s. If you're older than that, you don't tend to go out to shows anymore. So it's good if you can attract a younger audience because they've got the energy to get up off the sofa and go out.

It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.

I got very famous for a minute and then it just all went away, you know? And for the last 20 years - you've got to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and then go on your merry way and start again, in a sense, and that's what I've been doing.

I had a very strange career. I mean I went from playing to 150,000 people in 1983/84. Three or four years later I was playing to four people, you know, in Melbourne. I thought - bit strange, you know bit odd, bit erratic.

The Men at Work thing is always there, it's always going to be there. It's not something I consciously think that much about anymore. The thing that stays with you is the songs, which is a good thing for me, because the songs are the things that stand the test of time.

People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven't changed since time began. We're still the same. We've obviously made some changes. When we started, it was all about food, clothing and shelter. Now we watch 'Top Chef', 'Project Runway', and 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.'

I play in a lot of empty rooms.

I just want to be a better guitar player, really.

I can't remember too much about the '80s, to be honest with you... I wish that weren't true, but it is.

In Scotland, beautiful as it is, it was always raining. Even when it wasn't raining, it was about to rain, or had just rained. It's a very angry sky.