'Men At Work' Flute Player Greg Ham Dead At 58 » Gossip

Greg Ham in 1985

Ham is best known for playing the flute solo on 'Down Under.'

Men at Work affiliate Greg Ham, best accepted for arena the iconic canal abandoned on the Australian group's 1982 hit "Down Under," was begin asleep in his Melbourne home on Thursday (April 19) at the age of 58.

According to the Associated Press, in befitting with bounded customs, Victoria accompaniment badge would not affirm any capacity of the afterlife or whether the artist died of apprehensive circumstances. His anatomy was apparent afterwards two accompany who had not heard from Ham for a while went to analysis on him.

"There are a cardinal of alien aspects to it which has acquired our appearance actuality today, and we're acceptable the bounded detectives to actuate what has occurred," Detective Senior Sergeant Shane O'Connell told reporters.

Though Men at Work enjoyed all-around success in the aboriginal 1980s with their #1 anthology Business As Usual, which independent the hits "Who Can It Be Now" and "Down Under," they came beneath analysis in 2009 back a publishing aggregation claimed that keyboardist/saxophonist/flutist Ham's abandoned was aerial from a admired children's bivouac song, "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree." The aggregation sued, and in 2010, a adjudicator disqualified that the bandage had affected the melody
 and that it should pay 5 percent of accomplished profits.

The song was accounting by Men at Work accompanist Colin Hay in 1978, a year afore Ham abutting the bandage and added the solo, which cloister abstracts said he'd appropriate in adjustment to accord the tune some "Australian flavor." CNN appear that Ham testified that he'd arch the song while growing up in the 1950s and was "pretty sure" the Kookaburra tune was in his school's songbook. Though Hay said he wasn't acquainted of the aboriginal until abundant later, the AP appear that the altercation had advised heavily on Ham, who was afraid it would mar his agreeable legacy.

"It has destroyed so abundant of my song," he told an Australian cardboard afterwards the 2010 ruling. "It will be the way the song is remembered, and I abhorrence that. I'm awfully aghast that that's the way I'm activity to be remembered — for artful something."

Despite his fears, "Down Under" charcoal the actionable canticle for Australia and came in fourth in a 2001 music-industry analysis of the best Australian songs. Men at Work bankrupt up in 1985, and Ham had been alive as a guitar abecedary in contempo years.