A man of many colours (and notes)
Iva Davies of Icehouse talks to Michael Donaldson ahead of their three-concert tour to New Zealand this summer.
It took a disaster to bring Icehouse in from the cold. In 2009, the iconic Australian band led by Iva Davies, had been in hibernation since the early 1990s with Davies doing a number of solo projects. But when Davies got the call asking if he would perform at Sound Relief – a fundraiser for the victims of Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires and Queensland’s floods – he didn’t hesitate to bring together a new iteration of his band.
Two concerts were played simultaneously at the Melbourne and Sydney cricket grounds.
‘‘My manager from the 80s was one of those who came up with the idea and he volunteered us to play on the Sydney bill without asking me so when we appeared in the Sydney concert we hadn’t played for 15 years,’’ Davies recalled.
‘‘It was an amazing night and we looked at each other afterwards and said ‘maybe we should be doing more than this’.’’
It took another couple of years for touring to resume, coinciding with the release of a 30-year anniversary album in 2011 – the first release by Icehouse since the covers album The Berlin Tapes.
Now, Icehouse play where and when they want.
‘‘We’re in a luxurious position that we can pick and choose where we play. We’ve played some extraordinary places, such as the Masters Games in Alice Springs or in Townsville at a V8 Supercars meeting.’’
The last time he was in New Zealand was 2011, when Icehouse joined Hall & Oates for vineyard concerts in Napier and Auckland.
‘‘We’ve done similar concerts in Australia, but per head of population they were more successful in New Zealand than Australia.’’
That success prompted Davies to put New Zealand back on the itinerary and he’ll return to play such hits as Great Southern Land,
Electric Blue, Hey Little Girl and We Can Get Together. Icehouse are part of a three-act performance alongside The Alan Parsons Project and Bonnie Tyler, but Davies is promising New Zealand fans they will get around 17 songs from him – making it the first full Icehouse experience in a quarter of a century.
‘‘To all intents and purposes we haven’t played our own shows in New Zealand since 1991.’’
While 25 years is half a lifetime for diehard Icehouse fans, the hit songs sound as good as ever, despite being written at the height of the synthesizer era. Behind the electronica there’s a musical heart that doesn’t date – and much of that’s due to Davies’ classical training.
‘‘We happened to come along at a time when there was an enormous explosion of music technology – it seemed every month there was a brand new toy to play with but even in those early days of polyphonic synthesizers I could tell there were lots of songs that were going to date really badly.
‘‘So even back then I was being more scrupulous than other people were and that’s helped to sustain the credibility of some of those recordings.’’
Davies’ musical life started, bizarrely, with the bagpipes.
‘‘I grew up in Wagga Wagga [in southern New South Wales] and like a lot of country towns it had a pipe band.’’
Iva (or Ivor as he was known then before a record labelling mistake prompted the name change) was 6 when the family went into town one day to watch the pipe band march up the main street.
‘‘I heard this approaching sound, this drone, and I was absolutely mesmerised. When I learned it was the bagpipes I hounded my parents to learn and they took me to the pipe major, a Scotsman, but he said ‘his hands are too small come back in a year’. Even a year later, I was still hounding my parents to play the pipes and within another year I was marching with that pipe band.’’
The family moved to Sydney a few years later and when Davies showed up to his first music class at Epping Boys’ High School ‘‘the teacher asked if anyone played an instrument – a couple of hands went up and when he got to me I said ‘yes sir, bagpipes’. He looked horrified and said ‘I think you should learn to play something more sociable, my wife is an oboe teacher and we have a spare oboe’. From that point on, the pipes were laid to one side.
‘‘I’m not necessarily a fan of pipe bands anymore, but a lone piper from a distance is one of the most mesmerising sounds that exists.’’
Davies became a good enough oboe player to earn a seat in the Sydney Youth Orchestra and studied music composition at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music.
‘‘I’d always had a difficult relationship with the oboe and in my early 20s an instrument repairer wrecked my very expensive French oboe, which really terminated my career with it.’’
He also left the conservatorium without finishing his final exams – something he went back and completed years later after he’d become famous.
During a ‘‘limbo’’ period in the late 70s, when he was playing some pub music with mates, he was approached by a variety of music publishing companies to write the sheet music for some of Australia’s and the world’s biggest musicians.
‘‘These music publishing companies discovered there was a young fella – me – who could read and write music and they started sending me reel-to-reel recordings of every song in the Australian charts and then lots of international music as well – we’re talking about the days when sheet music was quite in demand, people wanted to buy the music for their favourite song and go home and try to play it.
‘‘I wrote entire song books for Little River Band, Dragon, Sherbet, Cold Chisel, and then Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Ian Drury and the Blockheads . . . My life was pulling apart songs and putting them down on paper which was very instructive.’’
What he learned from reverse engineering some of the greatest music in the 70s stood him in good stead when he started writing his own songs for Flowers, the band that later became Icehouse to avoid a name clash with an American outfit.
‘‘I’ve always maintained the single biggest advantage I had was being trained to a very high level when I was young. And I always say to people who aspire to be musicians ‘for goodness sake, go and learn how to read and write music’.
‘‘In the end, music is a language and if you’re trying to communicate with other musicians and you don’t speak that language it’s like dealing with a room full of infants because it takes such a long time to describe something if you don’t understand the language it was written in.’’
Now 61, Davies is as fit and healthy looking as any older rocker could hope to be and again his classical background has played a role as he eschewed the rock’n’roll lifestyle in favour of delivering memorable performances.
‘‘We always had a professional work ethic, which is the driest way of putting it. When the wheels started to spin for us, they spun incredibly fast and when the first album took off it was relentless work.
‘‘I went for 15 years without having a holiday and, as an example, the Man of Colours tour was 14 months long and seven of those months were in North America, where it was a different city every day.
‘‘My life was get up early, catch a plane, arrive in a new city, get carted around radio stations for interviews, do a soundcheck, back to the hotel, the performance, hamburger in the hotel room at two in morning, up again in the morning and do it all again. And there’s no understudy for a lead singer so if you lose your voice because you’ve been out partying, well tough – so I never did party.
‘‘We had a good time, but my lizard brain centre kept telling me I must be in shape for the next show.
‘‘I’ve been professional like that all the way through my career . . . a comparable thing is if you’re a professional classical musician you have to have the skills and technique to perform what’s written on the page because that may have been there for 300 years and everyone knows what those notes should be and there is no margin for error and you can’t just
‘I’d always had a difficult relationship with the oboe... in my early 20s an instrument repairer wrecked my very expensive French oboe, which really terminated my career with it.’ Iva Davies