Men At Work Who Can It Be Now

So You Heard That Song Somewhere and Now You Need to Know What It Is

The song is "Who Can It Be Now?" by Men at Work. Released in 1981, it was their breakthrough hit and topped charts in at least ten countries. The lead singer and primary songwriter is Colin Hay. If you need the bare facts, that's most of them. I ran into this question more often than I expected when I was helping people clean up ripped MP3s back in the late 2000s. Metadata was often missing or completely wrong for older tracks, and this song especially showed up with garbled tags. One time, a batch of files had it listed as "Who Can It B?" by an artist field reading "men_at_work_1981." I ended up writing a small Python script using the pyd3 library to match tracks against the MusicBrainz database by audio fingerprint instead of relying on whatever garbage metadata was attached. Saved me probably six hours of manual tagging. Worth mentioning because the same problem comes up regularly.

Men At Work Who Can It Be Now - The Basics

The track runs about three minutes and fourteen seconds on the original single version. It appears on the album Business as Usual, released March 1981. The distinctive flute riff was played by Greg Ham, and yes, that flute part is in the public domain dispute that got dragged through court for years. The copyright case was about the "Cookie Monster" flute motif sampling a children's folk song called "Clip Ships," which the band had written separately. The case settled out of court, but it's one of those weird legal footnotes people still argue about. The chord progression is straightforward. Verse runs on Em-C-G-D, then the chorus lifts into C-G-D-Em. If you're trying to learn it on guitar, that's about as easy as it gets. The flute line is trickier. It's mostly sixteenth-note runs with a descending pattern that repeats every two bars. Don't try to learn it by ear alone unless you have a lot of free time. Sheet music exists on sites like MuseScore and 8notes, and it's only a few dollars on Sheet Music Plus if you want something clean. For listening, the official audio is on YouTube under the Men at Work VEVO channel. Spotify and Apple Music both have the album in their catalogs. I don't recommend any of the sketchy download sites that pop up in search results, by the way. They're full of malware and the audio quality is usually terrible. If you want a legal download, Bandcamp sometimes has old catalog items, or you can buy the MP3 from iTunes at standard pricing.

One thing people consistently get wrong is the year. Search results often show 1982 because that's when it hit number one in the US, but the single came out in Australia in late 1980 and early 1981 depending on the region. The album dropped in February 1981 in Australia and March 1981 internationally. If you're citing this for anything formal, double-check your source. The band dissolved in 1986, reformed in 2001, and went through lineup changes until Colin Hay kept going with touring versions. Greg Ham passed away in 2012, which ended any realistic possibility of the original lineup returning. That's about where the story stands.