ICEHOUSE

Up until quite recently, it had been a long time since we’d heard any­thing of Ice­house, but they’ve cer­tainly been mak­ing up for lost ground in the last few months. Since the release of the 30th anniver­sary edi­tion of their album Ice­house (orig­i­nally released when the band was still known as Flow­ers) in May this year, they’ve played a sur­prise show to a full house at Melbourne’s Esplanade Hotel, announced an exten­sive run of tour dates and fes­ti­val shows and, most recently, through their new pub­lish­ing deal with Uni­ver­sal Music, released White Heat: 30 Hits, a com­pi­la­tion of every one of their sin­gles ever released world­wide. Far from con­tent to sim­ply ride on the coat­tails of their for­mer glo­ries, how­ever, the band has neglected the all-too-obvious route of pair­ing up with fel­low Aus­tralian icons of yes­ter­year for tour­ing pur­poses, instead mak­ing the sur­prise move of book­ing a sup­port slot with Art vs Sci­ence. If it seems like an attempt to relaunch Ice­house for the new gen­er­a­tion, it’s per­haps not too far from the truth, as lead singer and sole remain­ing found­ing mem­ber Iva Davies explained when we caught up with him.

Was the deci­sion to tour with Art vs Sci­ence a con­scious effort to stay rel­e­vant in the minds of a younger audi­ence?
Yeah, cer­tainly. And that’s where my inter­est is, too. I’ve actu­ally been pro­duc­ing a lit­tle band from Syd­ney and those guys are barely 20, and believe it or not I’ve actu­ally seen Art VS Sci­ence. In fact, I’ve been stand­ing less than 10 feet from them. I was in the TV audi­ence about a year and a half ago when they played on Adam Spencer’s Sleek Geeks, and I’ve actu­ally seen them sub­se­quently again as well, so I’m really look­ing for­ward to it. They’re just very entertaining.

Was the sur­prise Espy gig the pre­con­ceived begin­ning of a grand come­back or just a spur-of-the-moment idea?
It actu­ally was a very late thought. We were down in Mel­bourne to do a closed char­ity event on the Fri­day night, and then this idea turned up to stay down the extra day and play at the Espy the next night. So it sort of came together right at the last minute. In fact, by my cal­cu­la­tions it’s been 18 years since we played in a pub! So it was quite a blast. The thing that was sur­real for me was the audi­ence started singing with the first song from the first line and didn’t stop singing with me the whole night. It was incredible.

It really does seem to have got­ten the ball rolling for this Ice­house revival, though.
Well, the last 14 years or so has been char­ac­terised by just get­ting one project after another, all of which was not related to Ice­house. It went from things like a bal­let in 1995 to the piece for the mil­le­nium, from that into the Olympics into get­ting a phone call from Peter Weir to work on Mas­ter & Com­man­der, and then that in turn led to a tele­movie project, and then I got a call to work on a lot of the open­ing and clos­ing cer­e­mony music for the Asian Games. So these things sort of just kept com­ing up, and a lot of them were quite a lot of work that involved big slabs of years. So really, that’s why it’s appeared to be as quiet as it’s been. Sound Relief, I think, was the first pub­lic per­for­mance we’d done since 1993.

Woah! That’s quite a while, there.
Yeah. I’m actu­ally only just start­ing to go back to the gui­tar now. As you can imag­ine, my life’s been dom­i­nated by work­ing from com­put­ers, but I’m now work­ing again with Keith Welsh, who was the co-founder and bass player. Keith’s been work­ing in the music indus­try and he’s now man­ag­ing the band and the cat­a­logue. And the other side of Keith is that he is a very keen col­lec­tor of gui­tars. In fact, what he does is actu­ally col­lect and restore vin­tage Fender ampli­fiers. This is kind of a lit­tle hobby that he has. And so one of the things that’s been hap­pen­ing there is actu­ally recon­nect­ing me with the gui­tar. And it’s been a fair while since I’ve sort of got involved with using the gui­tar as my pri­mary instrument.

It seems odd that your songs had never been pre­vi­ously gath­ered together in the form of the com­pi­la­tion you’ve just release, White Heat: 30 Hits? Was that some­thing you’d really sat down and though about before?
I’d been aware of it for a long time, and one of the rea­sons I wanted to do it was to assem­ble all the music videos into one place too. It’s not just about the songs, but the fact is that prob­a­bly most of those music videos have never been avail­able – cer­tainly not legally, any­way! But to do that needed a lot of work, because I needed to retreat the audio of those in 5.1. And just the expense of get­ting them restored – we’re talk­ing about video tapes going back 30 years. In fact, I didn’t have mas­ters of quite a few of them. We actu­ally had to track down tele­vi­sion sta­tions and peo­ple that had broadcast-quality ver­sions of those clips because I didn’t actu­ally have all of them. So that was what I thought was worth­while, to actu­ally put every­thing together in one place.

You’re back play­ing shows, back in the pub­lic eye – every­thing seems per­fectly set up for the release of the long-awaited Bipo­lar Poems album.
You know, my feel­ing on that col­lec­tion of songs, they go back to a period from 1997–1999. And a lot of them we actu­ally never fin­ished record­ing, so my instinct at the moment is to not go back and revisit them. I’d be giv­ing them away prob­a­bly before I’d be going back and com­ing to grips with those par­tic­u­lar songs. I’m more curi­ous to think about what I might do from here in terms of news songs. And I think that’s going to come out of the process of re-engaging me with the gui­tar and the band play­ing a bit. All of that stuff leads into just get­ting inter­ested in writ­ing songs as opposed to what we’ve been doing for the last 12 or 13 years, which was writ­ing sound­tracks and other major event pieces of music. So I think it will hap­pen, I just wouldn’t like to put a time­frame on it at this point!

Since you’re back play­ing gui­tar, we have to ask – what’s the axe of choice at the moment?
Well, actu­ally, through Keith I’ve got a rela­tion­ship with Fender. And of course I’ve played for most of the period with the band, right up until the last tour in 1993, a 1962 pre L Series Stra­to­caster, which I’ve now retired. But Fender have actu­ally put together vir­tu­ally a copy of it, but with cer­tain new mod­i­fi­ca­tions. So I’ve actu­ally got some very inter­est­ing elec­tron­ics in my gui­tar, which are a bit top secret at the moment, but that was all put together by Fender for me. So in essence, it’s prob­a­bly best described as a ‘60s Eric Clap­ton Stra­to­caster, but it’s got cer­tain mod­i­fi­ca­tions that I’ve made to it.

Could we be see­ing the Iva Davies sig­na­ture model in stores soon?
Ah! Well, we sort of talked about that, because in actual fact the elec­tron­ics of it are very excit­ing. It’s almost like hav­ing two gui­tars in one. There’s one very sim­ple switch that gives you a whole “un-Stratocaster” set of pickup con­fig­u­ra­tions, which sort of turns it into a Tele­caster. It’s quite bizarre. It means that it’s just got an incred­i­ble range of sounds, so much so that going into these live shows I’m hav­ing to stop myself from using half of it, because there’s too much to deal with! But cer­tainly in terms of record­ing, it’ll be incred­i­ble to use, because there’s just an incred­i­ble vari­ety of sounds.

By Mitchel Brown

White Heat: 30 Hits is out now through Uni­ver­sal Music. Catch Ice­house play­ing the fol­low­ing dates:

Sep­tem­ber 14 – Trak, Mel­bourne, VIC (with Art vs Sci­ence)
Sep­tem­ber 15 – Upstairs Beres­ford, Surry Hills, NSW (with Art vs Sci­ence)
Sep­tem­ber 29 – Evans The­atre, Pen­rith, NSW
Decem­ber 9, 10, 11 – Mered­ith Music Fes­ti­val, Mered­ith, VIC