Iva Davies
LUCY SWINSTEAD
Any excuse to go back to the ’80s. And to one of that decade’s biggest acts. Icehouse was perfectly of its time, and so was its lead singer (most notably with his magnificent mullet around the Electric Blue era).
With cheekbones you could slice paper with, the huge moo-cow eyes that stared out at you from the record sleeves and his background as a classically trained oboe player, Iva Davies seemed to come across as a cut above other bands such as the new-wave, wide-eyed, robotic Mi-Sex, the consciously unfashionable Mental As Anything and the uber-dagginess of Mondo Rock. Icehouse seemed a little more knowing, a little more technically proficient and, to me, a little colder and harder to love as a rock act.
Anyway, these are the impressions of a young pop fan immersed in that world back then. And writing about it. For someone who prided himself on going out seven nights a week – often to report on rock gigs – and then interviewing the sleepy-eyed performers, always well after midday the next day, I strangely cannot remember meeting Davies along the way when he was a big star.
So perceptions can linger. And now, 30 years after they burst out of the Sydney pub scene, I have finally caught up with him – at the Crown Promenade Hotel at Southbank – to talk about Flowers/Icehouse, an album and DVD commemorating the 30 years since they changed their name from Flowers to Icehouse.
He’s in pretty good nick, Iva. The hair’s grey and the cheekbones have lost their razor’s edge, but he’s a credit to someone who’s made music a career for three decades. He says he’s happy to be back doing his old stuff. In a few hours he’ll play St Kilda’s Esplanade Hotel, a much smaller gig than he was used to at the height of his Icehouse fame.
It’s just like the old days, which he remembers with affection, including the band’s relentless touring schedule after they had developed a big live following in Sydney pubs. “These songs represent the time that (bassist) Keith (Welsh) would go to a pub that had never had a band on before and asked the publican whether we can set up in the corner on a Friday night,” he says. “That’s how the beginnings were.”
Management had them endlessly moving around, playing lots of gigs at places in Melbourne such as the Tiger Lounge, Hearts, Bananas and Bombay Rock.
“(Management’s) policy was to play everywhere we could and we were playing relentlessly,” Davies says. “I think it was not uncommon for us to do nine shows in a week – that’s doing at least two nights with two shows.
“I can remember when we did two shows in Melbourne. We loaded out ourselves because we only had one friend who was a roadie at that point (and) that involved carrying organs down about four flights of stairs being loaded into this HiAce (van) at three in the morning and then driving to Sydney overnight. We arrived in Broadway at about five o’clock in the afternoon just in time to set up for the next one.”
How did they deal with all that? “It was just the energy of youth, I think. You know now I see 21-, 22-, 23-year-olds and just go ‘Well, I had that much energy too, and you know it’s probably not a bad way to burn it off, but it was incredibly hard work.”
Flowers/Icehouse worked alongside Radio Birdman, Mental As Anything and INXS, all slogging it around the country hoping to make it big.
There was great camaraderie, especially with the Mentals, which shared their record company. The two bands played pool upstairs at Macey’s, in Toorak Road, South Yarra, and shared culinary tips for the travelling musician, including the Mentals’ Reg Mombassa’s tips on how to make dinner with an electric kettle.
Greedy Smith of the Mentals told Davies recently he remembers visiting Davies’ flat back then and being impressed that he had two television sets.
“I said, ‘You know why I had two television sets, don’t you? The picture worked in one and the sound worked in the other. They were both broken so I got the picture from one and the sound from the other so every time you changed the channel you had to change two sets’.”
Icehouse was everywhere back then, and made lots of appearances on Countdown. Davies reflects on his appearances on that iconic rock show. “Countdown was sort of terrifying because you had to wait behind this black drape coming from the dressing rooms and you could hear the crowd in the actual room. Then you got led through the crowd to get to the stage, so it was sort of like running the gauntlet with these squealing girls.”
A lot has changed since Davies was a big pop star. He is interested in how his teenage son and daughter access and experience music, and how their generation have an eclectic relationship with songs and their performers.
“It’s interesting observing the way my children consume music because they have so much of it, tens of thousands of songs on their iPod or whatever and their taste is incredibly diverse,” he says.
“In my recollection from those periods you sort of belong to one tribe or another. Disco people didn’t get on with punk people. If you were into heavy rock and AC/DC and Cold Chisel and whatever, then you weren’t interested in these new-wave types or whatever. These days there doesn’t appear to be any of that at all.
“My children listen to incredibly diverse range of music. (And) I have noticed something interesting about them too – they never actually listen to a whole song, which I find quite disturbing and annoying at the same time. The concept of the album is almost an ancient idea. It’s one which I have taken a long time to let go of.”
Davies remembers an “absolutely pivotal moment” in 1972 while doing his final year at school. “I had a couple of friends when I was in high school who were older than me and they used to save up and buy records from import stores. These imports were albums from overseas that arrived prior to the actual local release.
“We listened to a lot of Pink Floyd albums, very early ones. I remember (these friends) got their first share house and they had a party on and I walked into this house and before I even got through to the lounge room to out the back where everybody was hanging, I stopped and was listening to this sound, helicopters and whatever. I sat down in that room on my own and listened to both sides of Dark Side of the Moon. At that stage Pink Floyd were an obscure psychedelic underground English band, so we had no idea that that would become an iconic success story.
“It was an incredibly powerful moment. It was at that moment I (thought) ‘If this is what you can do in a recording studio – make stuff fly around the room like this – this is what I want to do’. An album was an entire work and (that album) sort of defined for me how to approach an album … I did want to kind of link things together and go, ‘OK, this is a whole body of (work) that belongs together’. It’s a very difficult idea to get used to that. People (now) are just buying one song at a time.”
Davies’ daughter Brynn is 17 and his son Evan is 15. “They love music. (They and their) friends are revisiting very old music (like) Jimi Hendrix. My daughter was playing Jimi Hendrix back to me and I thought ‘Well, where did you get hold of this?’.”
He says he has enjoyed introducing music to his children. Did he consciously introduce them to the Beatles, the Stones, Pink Floyd?
“I thought about it all very carefully. I thought about where I would start (them) because they’d grown up with a lot of classical music (since) they were very small. I remember driving them to school playing Strauss, which is what you know as just the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a massive 25-minute piece … and it’s a very cinemagraphic piece, so that I actually used to narrate stories. I (would) make up stories to the music.”
It’s an interesting image: Iva Davies telling stories to the kids as they drove along, the car pulsating with Richard Strauss. “They got completely lost in it. It was like being in a Harry Potter movie. That kind of music is very dramatic and can be dissolved to something very quiet and beautiful and pretty and something very threatening. It’s like a movie score.
“When they got to that little bit older and I thought ‘Right, we’ve put it off long enough, where am I going to start them?’ and I started them on Dark Side of the Moon because I think it was a place to grab their attention. Once again (that album) is very cinematic. It paints pictures very graphically.”
His children share their passions with him, too. “My children now bring me music and say ‘This is what I’ve discovered, you should hear this and you should know about that’, and I am probably far more resistant than they are. I actually preferred it when there was less choice because I just find the whole task of dealing with the massive body of music that’s being generated now as actually very daunting.”
Does he feel a little disengaged with new music? “I think I do generally. The problem is that music for me is work. Other people listen to music to relax by and I can’t listen to music to relax by because I am always analysing it. I know people who put music on to go to sleep with. I could never do that in a million years. I would be just lying there pulling it apart and making notes.”
So music is not a relaxant for you? “It is, but I have very particular times when I go ‘OK, I actually really feel like hearing some Bach solo violin’ … or you know something very particular. I’ll know exactly what it is – ‘I will now need to listen to this Schubert string quartet or I really feel like putting Led Zeppelin on and turning it up really loud’, which I do, you know, reasonably often.”
On Sundays Davies often opens up his house at Whale Beach, north of Sydney, where he has lived for 20 years, and cranks it up. “I open all the doors and windows and put on Led Zeppelin really loud and mow a lawn … There’s something incredibly therapeutic about doing that. God help my neighbours.”
There was a long period when Davies didn’t perform any Icehouse songs, instead writing films scores and other diverse projects. “The last time we toured was 1993, and since then I’ve ended up doing a whole lot of projects, none of which were really planned, they just sort of appeared.” In 1995 he released a covers album. “I didn’t want to go through the angst of writing songs so I thought I’ll do a covers album.”
He wrote the score for Peter Weir’s 2003 film Master and Commander and for a two-part telemovie in 2005 called The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant. He was commissioned to write a song for the opening ceremony of the 2006 Asian Games in Doha.
“All that sort of stuff sort of just kept happening,” he says. “I would be sitting there with nothing on the horizon and then suddenly something would happen.”
So it’s an uncertain life being a musician but rewarding because things always work out all right? “Well, thus far, yeah.”
Davies says it is fun being on stage again. “Keith has directed my attention back to where I started.” But Davies has had to do re-learning. “Since about 1994 my main instrument has been a computer so I don’t spend time with a guitar, and Keith, on the other hand, is passionate – he is a passionate collector.”
Is his technique on the guitar a bit rusty? “No doubt it is. The third disc on the (album) is a DVD and we’ve included on that all the Countdown performances but also some fantastic footage from a big outdoor show that we did in New Zealand … It was right at the peak of that particular line-up of the band. We’d just released this first album and we’d been playing non-stop for three years, so to watch myself playing guitar solos I can only dream of playing now …”
The CD/DVD is a required document for Icehouse fans. The good songs are all here – Can’t Help Myself, Walls, Sister, We Can Get Together, Icehouse – and on the DVD there are some great Molly Meldrum moments from Countdown. There is an interview with Davies where he talks about songwriting. He’s articulate and even a little shy, maybe. The sunglasses might have helped disguise the modest personality that didn’t quite fit with the brazenness of the times.
The whole thing made me feel 30 years older than when I had the pleasure of enjoying the pineapple rings and other delights of the buffet turned on at Macey’s Hotel and catching Icehouse.
It’s been delightful to meet a true rock survivor. Davies has been interesting company. The iceman, in my mind anyway, seems to have thawed.
» Flowers/Icehouse is out now on Universal.