Colin Hay Quotes

The States still has the best audiences by far.

I love watching live music. It's one of the reasons I love living in Austin, Texas, because there is so much live music.

The climate suits me, and London has the greatest serious music that you can hear any day of the week in the world - you think it's going to be Vienna or Paris or somewhere, but if you go to Vienna or Paris and say, 'Let's hear some good music', there isn't any.

And I can do the rock clubs if I have to.

I've been a live performer longer than I've been a television performer. For me, live is where it's at.

My most favourite gigs that ever happened were solo, before The Monkees ever happened.

I'm pretty sure that the Walkmen are the band that I've paid to see the most in my life.

I wake up late, say 10 or 11, because we've usually been out and about town until 2 or 3 A.M. listening to music at the jazz clubs or hitting the jazz clubs post-theater.

If you had a successful TV show, people wanted to see you live. Promoters had had practice with pop groups, and 'Python' achieved a similar status. We also had lots of rock star fans - George Harrison, Pink Floyd, Robert Plant. Promoters saw that and liked it.

All of the sudden the audiences started getting younger and the spread of the attendance was really wide. I think it's as a result of the records selling more that they started following our careers.

When I go to M Bar there's all kinds of agents there, looking for people who doing good stuff.

I don't know if I miss it per se, but I do miss the fact that there just doesn't seem to be any rock 'n' roll out there anyplace. Everything does seem kind of tame. It's even hard in Manhattan to go out and find a good band to go see.

I've never been in a band, but I've hung out with a lot of musicians and helped them with their shows. It's something that I'm really drawn to.

I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.

I didn't really buy LPs or go to concerts.

Nowadays I get complaints about long drum solos, but in those days they wanted me to keep on going so they could go over to the bar and have a drink.

I think doing more live stuff's made us feel a certain way about that particular point. I quite like small clubs. I don't really like playing in big clubs, and I think I'm really into the idea of a few people being together.

And the live show is still our main thing.

Most recently we've been working in concert situations rather than clubs. because there aren't too many rooms there like Ronnie Scott's, that are pure music rooms, where people come specifically to listen to music.

But live shows are cool. I just got back into the idea of enjoying it live.

Anything you can do to get more people to come to your live shows is good, because that's where you can really do what you do. Everyone's on the same page, and you don't have to win strangers over as much.

I'd gone through periods where I didn't work live performances for probably seven or eight months at a time.

There are a lot of singers who cannot sing to save their lives. We have to accept it, but thank God there is such a thing as live shows. It's only when people are faced with live shows that the world gets to know how good or how bad they are.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

People have said I played some pretty amazing gigs in the seventies, but in all honesty, I probably played one good show in three.