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Men At Work's Colin Hay Responds To Plagiarism Case

11:38 a.m. · February 9, 2010 · by Andrew Winistorfer

A few days after being found guilty of plagiarizing "Kookaburra," Men At Work's Colin Hay has issued a statement regarding his position, which unsurprisingly, takes the position of "we didn't steal anything." 

When Men at Work released the song Down Under through CBS Records, (now Sony Music), in 1982, it became extremely successful. It was and continues to be, played literally millions of times all over the world, and it is no surprise that in over twenty years, no one noticed the reference to Kookaburra. There are reasons for this. It was inadvertent, naive, unconscious, and by the time Men at Work recorded the song, it had become unrecognizable. It is also unrecognizable for many reasons. Kookaburra is written as a round in a major key, and the Men at Work version of Down Under is played with a reggae influenced “feel” in a minor key. This difference alone creates a completely different listening experience. The two bars in question had become part of a four bar flute part, thereby unconsciously creating a new musical “sentence” harmonically, and in so doing, completely changed the musical context of the line in question, and became part of the instrumentation of Men At Work’s arrangement of Down Under.

The whole statement is wicked long, and it discusses turning songs into mathematical formulas, since that's essentially what happened in order for Men at Work to be found guilty. Go here to read it. I think Hay should be issuing statements apologizing for rhyming "man from Brussels" with "muscles."