Iva Davies reflects on ‘baffling’ enduring popularity ahead of Lighthouse Rock

Sitting back in a Bundaberg beer garden, Icehouse’s Iva Davies reflects on the band’s enduring popularity and the Covid moment that inspired the Great Southern Land singer’s “mad” project.

Iva Davies' band Icehouse is one of the “lineup of legends” billed for October's 2023 Lighthouse Rock event at the Lighthouse Hotel in Bundaberg.

Like many, Iva Davies had a moment of clarity during a Covid lockdown.

While enduring a bout of the virus at his home at Whale Beach in Sydney’s northern beaches, Davies saw anew an old guitar amplifier he had used to record Great Southern Land.

“I’d had this thing sitting in my son’s bedroom as he was growing up, and I hadn’t used it for years,” Davies said.

“And I looked at it one day recently, and I went ‘why did I stop using that?’”

Davies then embarked on a “completely mad project” to track down more of the amps in Paris and Perth, leading to him spending “a small fortune” to have them shipped to Sydney and restored.

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“I was carrying these amplifiers halfway across Sydney to my guy, and then at one point I had these three amplifiers in my bedroom,” he said.

“It really does look like a bachelor house when you start having guitars everywhere and three 100 Watt amps in your bedroom.”

Reflecting on this episode now while sitting in the sun-drenched beer garden of Bundaberg’s Lighthouse Hotel, Davies rejects the idea he was motivated by a desire to recapture his sound from 1982 when Great Southern Land was released and Icehouse was on the cusp of becoming a household name.

Icehouse produced eight top-ten albums and twenty top-forty singles in Australia.

“The overall idea was really, ‘why did I abandon this in the first place?’,” Davies said.

“When you’ve got the distance of years to evaluate (choices), you kind of go ‘no, that was that was a really bad idea’, or ‘that was a really good idea, why did I forget about that?’”

Davies is in Bundaberg promoting October’s 2023 Lighthouse Rock event – Icehouse is one of the “line-up of legends” billed for the event, along with other 80s and 90s soundtrack staples including the Baby Animals, Screaming Jets and The Living End.

The idea that Icehouse songs such as Great Southern Land, a regular feature of DJ sets throughout the country on any given weekend and subject to countless remixes, has attained a timeless status in the pantheon of Australian hits surprises Davies.

“I’m still baffled by it, and part of me remains unconvinced,” he said with a smile.

“The last thing that was in my brain when I wrote any of those songs was … ‘what will this song look like in 40 years time?’

“Not that I ever wrote anything I thought was expendable, or worthless, but certainly not timeless - that whole concept is completely foreign.”

Apart from some acoustic reinterpretations, fans going to an Icehouse show will hear their favourite hits played closely to the original recordings.

Fans going to an Icehouse show will hear their favourite hits played closely to the original recordings.

Rather than wanting to give fans what they expected, Davies said this drive to remain faithful to the original version stems from the group’s first incarnation as Flowers, which started as a band playing Bowie and T Rex covers on the Sydney pub scene in the late 70s.

“A song like ‘You Really Got Me’ by The Kinks is a classic, and the reason it’s a classic is because they got it right – so don’t even think about trying to do a new take on that, let’s just do the original,” he said.

“This sort of ethic goes back right to the beginning; I remember really early in the piece getting a very, very rigid mindset on to the other guys in the band.”

According to Davies, Icehouse has two generations of fans - the earliest fans of Flowers, and the majority that came to know the band as Icehouse from the 1988 ARIA album of the year Man of Colours, including the hits Crazy, Electric Blue and Nothing Too Serious.

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He explained the enduring popularity of the band bringing new generations of fans to Icehouse shows as being “probably the fault of the parents,” but also due to the work of DJs such as Sydney’s Cassian.

Long a staple of his sets in clubs throughout North America and Europe, Cassian has recently released his remix of Great Southern Land – the track has been played more than 167,000 times on Spotify since its release a week ago.

And the theme of new generations is extending to all parts of Davies’ life – his daughter, Brynn, has recently had a boy, Davies’ first grandchild.

His son, Evan, after a childhood growing up with Davies’ amplifier in his room, almost inevitably became a musician himself.

Iva Davies' son Evan has a degree in sound engineering and is a guitarist playing in Sydney bands, occasionally joining his father onstage on tour dates.

Evan has a degree in sound engineering and is a guitarist playing in Sydney bands, occasionally joining his father onstage on tour dates.

Davies speaks of a fascination held by Evan and his friends with analogue sound equipment that he seems to find as baffling as the enduring popularity of his music.

“It’s quite interesting to witness through (Evan) and his friends, there’s a whole generation that has a reverence for microphones that were built in 1947,” Davies said.

Davies was an immediate convert to the digital revolution in sound recording and production that occurred through his career.

“I welcomed with open arms the full digitisation of things that just appear on a computer screen, that you don’t have to oil and lubricate,” he said.

“It’s a very interesting view of the world I have now through this up and coming generation – what’s old is new again.”

The 2023 Lighthouse Rock event will be held on October 14, 2023 at the Lighthouse Hotel, Burnett Heads.

Tickets are on sale now through lighthouse.com.au.