Who Can It Be Now

This was the first single Men at Work released, and it became a huge hit. The group started as an acoustic duo with singer Colin Hay and guitarist Ron Strykert. After a few years playing pubs in Australia, they were discovered by an American who worked for CBS records and signed them.

Colin Hay wrote this song. Here's what he told us about it:

"I was up in the bush in Southern New South Wales with my girlfriend, just sitting outside at night. We had this little tree hut in the middle of the bush. It was a great place to kill the time, mess around with ideas. It was just an idea that popped out, it took about half and hour to write that song. I was living in St. Kilda in Melbourne, which is a great part of Melbourne. At that particular time it was a very interesting area, it was frequented by everybody from the high Jewish population, punks, drug movers, all kinds of different people. It was about 6 or 7 hours drive away, sitting in the middle of the bush in New South Wales and that song just popped out. My girlfriend at the time said, 'that will be your first hit, that song,' and she was right."

The album was #1 in the US for 15 weeks, a record at the time for longest stay at #1 for a debut album.

The group won the Best New Artist Grammy for 1982.

The video went well with the lyrics about a paranoid man in his house. MTV didn't have many videos at the time, so intriguing and distinctive ones like this got a lot of airplay. Colin explains how they made their videos: "It was usually 3 or 4 people involved, and we just roughed a storyboard of what we wanted to do. We didn't have much money to make the videos, only $5000-$6000 to make the who thing, so we would find friends in that department that we could use or we would find a good location and just shoot it. There was a certain amount of narrative involved as well. We would play to our strengths, whatever each one of us could particularly do, we would cater to that. Really it was kind of spontaneous in the sense that it wasn't that thought out. It was more trying to inject the personality of the band."

Colin Hay recorded an acoustic version for his 2003 album Man At Work.