Creativity Quote by Colin Hay

It lands like a laugh that curdles halfway through. Colin Hay’s shrugging confession about the ’80s plays with the audience’s expectations: we want the decade packaged as neon nostalgia, big choruses, clean anecdotes. Instead he gives us absence - memory as missing footage. The phrase “to be honest with you” is doing quiet work here, signaling that the fun version of the story exists, but he’s choosing not to perform it.

Hay came up inside a period that chewed musicians up with equal parts fame, touring, and chemical lubrication. Saying he “can’t remember too much” is the classic rock-star line, but the second sentence flips it from boast to bruise. “I wish that weren’t true” drains the glamour out of the amnesia. It’s not “look how wild I was”; it’s “look what it cost.” The subtext is regret without melodrama: he’s not staging redemption, just admitting a gap he can’t fill in.

There’s also a cultural tell in the way we mythologize the ’80s as a brand. For artists who actually lived it, the decade often wasn’t a curated vibe; it was work, pressure, and coping mechanisms that don’t photograph well. Hay’s honesty punctures the consumer-friendly story of the era and replaces it with something more human: the idea that success can be real and still feel partially unrecoverable, like you survived your own highlight reel but lost the tape.