Still believing, still cool: Iva Davies and Icehouse hit the road
Songwriting for Icehouse’s Iva Davies has always been about ‘exploring sounds, chasing something new’. On the road again, Icehouse is coming to Brisbane in September and touring with Jimmy Barnes in November.
It’s bucketing down in Sydney and Icehouse frontman Iva Davies is hunkered down in his studio trying to make sense of the new gear he’s surrounded himself with. It turns out the space Davies records in at home has enjoyed the same fit-out for three decades.
Finally, it’s time for a change, but that doesn’t mean we’re in for a plethora of new Icehouse records.
For years it looked as if Davies was readying himself to become the J.D. Salinger of rock. There was a near perfect back catalogue that stretched from 1980 to 1993 and then relative silence. After a 16-year hiatus, Davies was cajoled into bringing Icehouse back on the road — and he hasn’t looked back since.
“I stopped touring when my first child was six weeks old,” Davies explains. “We’d had this massive run, and I’d always been a cynic on how long bands last based on very good proof. It’s a (theory) supported by the careers of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and anyone of the luminaries I could rattle off.”
Davies didn’t vanish out of burnout or excess. He simply had other things to do. Ballets. Orchestral works. If you were wondering where the man went, he was composing music to ring in a new century on the sails of the Sydney Opera House.
His 25-minute millennium piece (The Ghost of Time) was performed to an audience of four billion and took “nearly a year to write”.
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And then came Sound Relief, the 2009 benefit concert organised by long-time tour manager Larry Ponting and the late Michael Gudinski.
“Larry said, ‘By the way, you’re headlining Sydney’, recalls Davies. “I said, ‘Larry, are you completely insane? We haven’t played in 16 years!’ But we did it. And it was extraordinary fun. It was clear that there was an audience that wanted to see us play, and we’ve been playing ever since.”
‘I’ve never been a diarist … I went the other way — tried to leave myself out of the songs. Which, of course, gave me away in different ways’
Talking to Davies, the chat inevitably drifts to songwriting and recording.
“I’ve never been a diarist,” he explains of his process. “I’m a huge Joni Mitchell fan, but I can’t imagine a more opposite approach to songwriting. She bares it all. I went the other way — tried to leave myself out of the songs. Which, of course, gave me away in different ways.”
The exception may well be Don’t Believe Anymore. It’s a song Icehouse still play and it’s the one he gets asked about more than any other.
“Everything in that song is absolutely real,” Davies admits. “And people connect to that pain. It’s probably the song I’ve had the most feedback on.”
One thing for sure, songwriting for Davies – along with exploring sounds – was never based on repetition. It was about chasing something new — a sound, a structure, a machine.
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“I lived through the biggest explosion in music technology,” he says. “Late ’70s, early ’80s — it was a new marvel every five minutes.”
One of those marvels was the LinnDrum. Learning how to use it led directly to Great Southern Land.
“The default tempo on the LinnDrum was 120 BPM,” he tells me. “I didn’t even know how to change it yet — so the song was written at that tempo. That’s how it happened.”
Then came the Fairlight — the world’s first digital sampler, invented in Australia.
“You could smash a TV and play the sound on a keyboard,” he continues. “Peter Gabriel gave a sample like that to Kate Bush. It’s in Babushka. The possibilities were endless.”
Davies even sampled a Coke bottle to mimic an African flute on The Flame, a protest song inspired by the Sharpeville massacre. “It had the right timbre. You do what you have to do.”
Davies once turned down a trifecta of judging roles on TV’s Australian Idol, The Voice and X Factor.
“I couldn’t stomach the idea of music as competition,” he says. “Reducing songs to a horse race … It’s just not how I relate to this. So, I turned down probably three of the most plum jobs in the entertainment industry based on the fact that I don’t think I ever would have been comfortable with having people compete against each other in that direct way.”
Despite the new studio, Davies won’t promise a new Icehouse album. One unreleased project, Bipolar Poems, is written into his will. “It’ll be released after I die,” he says. “So there’s no point talking about it now.”
Davies will be re-visiting the Icehouse catalogue on stage when he goes out with Jimmy Barnes on The Working Class Man 40th Anniversary Tour in November. Also joining the tour for a massive trek around Australia are Ian Moss and Kate Ceberano.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” he says. “We all came up around the same time. It feels right.”
Icehouse play Roma Street Parklands on September 5: icehouse-ivadavies.com/tour-dates
Icehouse join Jimmy Barnes on tour across Australia from November: jimmybarnes.com/tour-dates