Songoftheday 7/14/12 - all I wish is to be alone, stay away, don't you invade my home...

Men At Work - "Who Can It Be Now"

from the album Business As Usual (1982)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (one week)

Weeks in the top-40: 17

Today's song of the day is the debut single from Australian rockers Men At Work. The band came together under Colin Hay, who has born in Scotland and came to Australia as a teenager, in the late 70s. Along with guitarist Ron Strykert (a porn name if I ever heard), John Rees on bass, Jerry Speiser on drums, and Greg Ham on the saxophone, the band released Business As Usual in their homeland in the fall of 1981, where they had a #1 out of the box in the summer with "Who Can It Be Now".  It took a year to cross over to the States, but when they did, they repeated their charttopping success here, helped by the now-mainstream new wave movement on the radio...

"Who Can It Be Now" also topped the US rock radio chart, and even made the top-20 on the adult-contemporary (soft-rock) chart. It also was a #1 record in Britain, and the album started a 15-week stay at the top in the US in November, going on to sell over six million copies. Their next single, "Down Under", would go on to even be more successful, and Men At Work would grab the Grammy Award for Best New Artist the following year. Sadly, Greg Ham, the man behind the instantly recognizable sax riff, died in April of this year.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


In 2005, that same saxophone hook was sampled for a dance track called "Sax At Work" by Congaman...

and Jason Derulo incorporated the song into his "Love Hangover" on his first album...

And here's Colin Hay by himself having fun with the song in 2007...

Up tomorrow: a little ditty.