Iva Davies on life inside the Icehouse

One of Australia’s most successful and enduring rock bands, Icehouse, is coming back to Adelaide to play a summer festival on Glenelg beach. Frontman Iva Davies says the 1980s hit machine has found a whole new audience in the age of the internet.

Iva Davies from Icehouse. Picture: Ian Currie

• Review: Icehouse at Thebarton Theatre in 2017

For one of Australia’s most beloved bands, Icehouse has always been surprisingly tricky to pigeonhole — a little bit rock, little bit new wave, little bit alternative. Their most iconic song, Great Southern Land, is over five minutes long and starts with one extended synth note; hardly a typical choice for a single aiming for radio airplay in the early 1980s.

Underpinning their success has been frontman Iva Davies’ mastery of crafting complex, atmospheric songs with a spiky rock edge. Fascinating, then, to learn that he regards himself as “the most reluctant and accidental songwriter you can imagine”.

Indeed, despite being a professional classical musician from age 16 and gaining a cult following with pub covers band Flowers, he only started writing unique material after an ultimatum from the group’s new manager.

“I kind of got the job by default and that’s why those songs on that first Flowers album are in reality the first songs that I ever wrote,” Davies says.

In the 1980s and early 90s, Icehouse’s popularity was even more enduring than their singer’s legendary mullet. Only a few elite Aussie bands can match their combination of domestic and international success — eight Top 10 albums and twenty Top 40 singles in Australia, plus multiple hits in Europe and the US.

Iva Davies in 1987, at the peak of Icehouse’s commercial success with the Man of Colours album.

Then, just weeks after the birth of his first child, Davies walked away from the life of a hard-touring rock star and for a long time, never looked back.

“We went for a long time without really playing at all, about 16 years. I went and did a whole lot of other weird and wonderful things like writing ballets and film scores and all sorts of stuff,” Davies says.

Now, with the internet having completely upended the music industry, Davies is gratified to find how many young people are discovering the band’s back catalogue.

“We did 35 shows last year and played for over 300,000 people … we now look out and we don’t just see people who are our age or slightly younger, we see 20-year-olds and it is quite extraordinary. A whole new audience has suddenly appeared out of nowhere.”

While he’s recaptured the passion for performing, he doesn’t feel driven to create new music.

“The contractual obligation to produce another album was really the thing that motivated me,” Davies says. “I can honestly say I wish I was the sort of person that Paul Kelly appears to be for example, who keeps his diary as songs and it’s a genuine outlet for him. I’ve never been that person.”

A lot of the emotions that fed what Davies calls those “tragically youthful” early songs are now just a blur — but every now and again he is overcome on stage by the echoes of emotional memory.

“I remember very clearly last year I got to the beginning of one song and I was having quite a lot of difficulty singing it and I don’t know where that came from, it was kind of peculiar because I’ve sung that song hundreds, potentially thousands of times. It’s the song I’ve probably had the most correspondence about in my whole career — Don’t Believe Anymore (from 1984’s Sidewalk album). I’ve had lots of people say that song saved their life, which is an extraordinary thing. It’s probably the most honest and personal song I’ve ever written.”

While Icehouse had something of a reputation for a revolving door of musicians in the 1980s, the current line-up has remained stable for years.

Icehouse performing in Adelaide in 2017. Picture: Michael Owen-Brown

That came in handy when they last played Adelaide in 2017. The band put on a scintillating 40th anniversary show despite being challenged by 50C-plus temperatures inside Thebarton Theatre, plus an ill-timed arm injury that forced guitarist Paul Gildea and keyboardist Michael Paynter to switch instruments at very late notice.

“Michael Paynter, the young man in question, turned that whole thing around in a week. That meant constructing all the guitar sounds from scratch, learning all the parts from scratch and then delivering them at that level — it was an incredible feat.”

Icehouse plays the By The C festival at Glenelg on February 10 with Sunnyboys, The Church, Do Re Mi and Mental As Anything.