Colin Hay

You've got to have songs.

And I had songs.

And I knew that Ron had songs or ideas for songs that we could work on together.

So that was exciting to me.

Well, it took about 40 minutes.

40 minutes well spent, I would say.

My girlfriend and I at the time, Linda, we'd bought this land.

Well, actually, I say we'd bought this land.

She bought it because she had money.

She was a teacher and I had nothing.

And...

We had some friends that had this land up in Bermagui and there was this block of land for sale next door.

55 acres of land cost $9,000.

So one time we were up there and we were just sitting there, dusk I think it was, and I'd had the idea kicking around in my head but I just kind of...

had the chords and played the chords, had the words, and just it came out.

It took about 40 minutes to put the thing together, the words and the chorus and everything.

After I finished writing it, she said to me, oh, that'll be, um... That'll be your first hit record.

So she was quite... ..sure of that.

Um...

but interestingly this is a song where it uses something which is quite a common thing but it's called a drop D tuning where you tune both E's down to down to D and you get a kind of a