Colin Hay

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“Most people remember me for a couple of tunes.”

“I tried talking to Jesus, but he just put me on hold...”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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