It's always amazing to talk to a legend. To talk to one so down to earth and easy going doubly so. Iva Davies has been writing hits with the legendary Aussie band
Icehouse (formerly known as Flowers) for well over three decades. Icehouse have released eight hit studio albums, numerous greatest hits albums and compilations, scored many Australian top 10 hits and won many awards for their all round musical excellence, including being inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2006. To name but a few of their achievements. The man himself lives in a magnificent house in Sydney overlooking the Pacific Ocean, however even with all of the above, he remains grounded as they come, and our allotted 15 minutes veritably flew past in the blink of an eye.
The band are shortly to be one of the feature acts on the 2011 version of the famed
Meredith Music Festival, which takes place on December 9th, 10th and 11th at the so-called Supernatural Amphitheatre, a natural amphitheatre located on private farmland near the town of Meredith, just outside Geelong. They have also recently released the greatest hits compilation White Heat: 30 Hits. Davies was only too happy to discuss the festival, the compilation many other Icehouse related issues.
Indeed, what's happened is that in the last six months I've been working with Keith Welsh who was the co-founder and bassist of Flowers," Iva begins, regarding how involved he was in the selection of tracks for the compilation, "he's been heavily involved in the music industry for the last 30 years. He's extremely experienced. He's been managing me and the band and the catalogue, which is of course great because he was in the band. What that means is that we've been working as a team, as we were in the Flowers days. So he and I have been trawling through all this material, and a great deal of work has gone into, for example, restoring all the songs … it's basically 30 chart hits, which is about the number of the amount of charting hit songs that we had over the 30 year period. So we've spread those across two CDs of course. But (it's) also a DVD of all the music videos for those. Most of those have never been made available before.
So it's a very comprehensive package," he continues, "and we've re-mixed all of those in 5.1, so they're very much sonically superior to the originals. So Keith and I have been working very closely together on that."
The band are playing a number of live dates across the country shortly in support of the compilation's release, including the aforementioned Meredith Festival. Long gone are the days of endless touring for Davies and the band, and so he is very much looking forward to bringing these classic numbers to the masses again.
It should be great," he enthuses, "a few weekends ago we were in Melbourne … doing a charity function. But the following Saturday we did an unannounced show at the Esplanade Hotel, an iconic hotel in Melbourne. Word did get out the day before, and it was just massive, and it was just a huge night. It probably fired up everybody in the band. It really is a great crew, we're working again with Larry Ponting who was our tour manager for eight years, and some of these guys I've been playing with for 25 years. It really is exciting for us, because we don't really get to do this very often. And Meredith should be an absolute blast! Really looking forward to that one"
Despite his massive success, Davies is still self effacing about his musical journey, almost putting it all down to good fortune, as opposed to skilled songwriting and good management, which at the end of the day is what did it for him. "Well, in a lot of ways it's just a great deal of good luck!" he states with modesty, "but I suppose the other part of the equation is the massive amount of work that went into it too. I've been very lucky that a lot of my instincts have paid off, I guess."
As far as the immediate future is concerned, Iva still isn't focusing on creating anything new, rather ensuring that Icehouse's classic material is available to a brand new generation of Aussie music punters, as it so richly deserves to.
That's not my focus at the moment," he says, regarding new material, "our priority at the moment is to make all these albums available again. You literally can't buy anything except the Flowers album, which is of course a first release. And that's going to be a lot of work, because Keith's discovered that I've got a lockup full of live concerts and Top of the Pops performances and God knows what…so what we now have to do is dust off all those tapes, and there's a great deal of work in getting these things restored and transferred. For example, a live album we did packaged with the (re-release of) the Flowers album came from about nine different concerts. So of course Keith and I had to sit down and wade through all this, and make a shortlist of all the various versions and so on. So I think the immediate task will be getting those albums back out again, and all the background work that goes along with that. So I guess I'm not really in a new song headspace at the moment."
With a back catalogue as large and prestigious and illustrious as the one he's working on at the moment, bringing all of those classic recordings back to life sounds like a full time job in itself.
