Icehouse | Adelaide Festival 2022 review

Iva Davies delivered a much-needed trip back to the carefree sounds, vivid spectacles and sheer, unbridled fun of the 1980s.

Iva Davies, centre, performs with Icehouse at the Village Green, Adelaide Oval, as part of the 2022 Adelaide Festival. Picture: Andrew Beveridge, supplied.

Icehouse

Contemporary Music – Australia

ADELAIDE FESTIVAL

Village Green, Adelaide Oval

March 8

If there was ever a tonic for the past two years, it was being outdoors at a rock concert and transported back to the carefree singalong sounds, vivid primary colour spectacles and sheer, unbridled fun of the 1980s, courtesy of frontman Iva Davies and his band persona Icehouse.

In fact, when the group last performed at the Festival in 1988, double the audience capacity of Elder Park turned up, blocking surrounding streets and spilling into adjacent spaces.

It may have been a smaller, older and slightly more sedate crowd this time around, but there were still punters peering over the fences and watching from surrounding vantage points.

Pity those who thought guest Kalkadunga artist William Barton’s frenetic fusion of blistering rock guitar solo and pulsating didgeridoo bass rhythm was another support act, and therefore a good time to head to the bar or bathroom.

Instead, it segued into the sinister synthesisers of the song titled Icehouse, which also opened the 1980 debut album by the band when it was still called Flowers, and the stage lit up in a kaleidoscope of mutating sci-fi graphics projection and stadium-style lighting as its musicians took position.

Davies’ lyrical references to “the old ones” and a devil who “came here a long time ago” suddenly took on new significance with this riverbank setting and cross-cultural collaboration.

Early material continued with perhaps the band’s most compelling and dramatic song, Walls, complete with an extended, squealing solo from longtime guitarist Paul Gildea and its dramatic “fake” ending.

From there it was fast-forward into the big hits and big hair of Icehouse’s most successful period with Electric Blue, as phenomenal multi-instrumentalist Hugo Lee reminded everyone that there’s just not enough saxophone in today’s pop-rock.

Street Cafe, Hey Little Girl, Crazy and No Promises evoked David Bowie’s commercial output of the same era, while Davies handed over the high-pitch lead vocal duties to phenomenal guitar-keyboard player Michael Paynter on Touch The Fire and Man of Colours.

Another big sax solo led into Don’t Believe Anymore, then it was back to a more electronica vibe for Don’t Believe Anymore, followed by a bluesy T-Rex style glam stomp on Baby You’re So Strange.

Adelaide Festival 2022. William Barton performs as part of the Icehouse concert at the Village Green, Adelaide Oval. Picture: Andrew Beveridge, suppplied

Barton – probably the only artist to have a rock concert and the premiere of a new composition with an international classical ensemble at this year’s Festival – rejoined the stage as it lit up with a flaming sunset, to provide the deep didgeridoo rumble and wildlife sounds which underpinned an awesome, epic, up-tempo 40th anniversary rendition of the unofficial anthem Great Southern Land.

The punky new wave of Can’t Help Myself and uplifting, crowd participation energy of We Can Get Together brought the main set to a rousing close and standing ovation.

Two unusual cover versions followed as encores – a note-perfect cover of Midnight Oil’s Put Down That Weapon and Adelaide band The Angels’ chugging Marseilles – before the full-blown rock finale epitomised exactly what we had just experienced and needed so badly: Nothing Too Serious.