Must Be Some Kind Of Mistake

Icehouse reactivated back in 2011, with a greater sense of permanence than we'd seen in decades: albums were reissued, a greatest hits compilation released and the band booked big shows around the country. It went well, and the band has continued with relative regularity ever since, but founder and creative core Iva Davies wasn't certain this would be the case. “I was unsure whether there'd be any market for it,” Davies says. “It's been a really pleasant surprise that there's such a demand for it, and I think one of the most pleasant surprises is that the music has travelled down a generation, or perhaps even two!”

Beginning life as Flowers in 1977, the band marked former classical musician Davies' first flirtation with rock music. “[It was] the first electric band I ever played in and the first time I'd ever been into a pub, let alone played in one.” They would bash through covers of songs that were moving them at the time, focusing on the punk genre in its various guises. “Anything from Sex Pistols to T-Rex and Brian Eno,” he recalls. “It was a strange collection of material within the framework of what was then the tail-end of the punk movement and the beginning of the synthesiser period of new wave.

“The original sound of the band was formed by those covers and those styles; we were a punk band with synthesisers. It was not a usual kind of combination – we didn't fit into the camp of the new romantics and didn't fit into the more hardcore punk movement with the Sex Pistols and The Damned – it was this odd hybrid.”

Then came an influx of ever-changing music technology. Davies has always eagerly embraced new ways of making music with machines and relished in the fact that he, frankly, didn't know how most of them worked.  “Generally speaking a lot of the songs I wrote were the byproduct of me learning how to use a new machine,” he says. “When I [returned] to Australia to start writing the second album I brought back from America a brand new piece of technology called a LinnDrum, which was a drum machine that used digital recordings of real drums.

“The first thing I did when I was learning how to program it turned into Great Southern Land and the funny secret about that is that the tempo of Great Southern Land is 120BPM, which is the default tempo setting of the LinnDrum, because I hadn't actually learned how to change the speed of it at that point.

“[But] a huge number of important bits of those songs were a result of mistakes,” Davies continues. “The Fairlight, which was the first sampler ever invented – I was one of the lucky few who could afford the first version of it at the princely sum of $32,000, a massive amount of money in 1982 – was an absolute killer at producing happy accidents because of the way you had to load the sounds into it.

“A huge number of my songs were the result of me coming back the next day and accidentally loading the wrong set of sounds in and having these amazing things happen – drum parts that ended up being mandolins and things… [1986 single] Baby You're So Strange has some extraordinarily mad edits in it as a result of me getting messed up and putting things in the wrong order.”

Does he still get excited by new musical toys? “It's interesting you should ask that – I'm having an entirely new Pro Tools system installed in the studio, which will be my new set of toys. I've been using that stuff for years now but I haven't been deeply submerged in the very latest, so this is me kinda giving myself a kick into the future.”

Davies is reluctant to say this means he's planning on writing new material (fans have been waiting for the proposed Bi-polar Poems for 12 years, after all), but it's the best sign we've seen in a while. “I tend not to plan things; my plans are as loose as getting a new Pro Tools system.That doesn't sound like a plan, but it's quite a deliberate plan in a funny way. Believe me, there have been massive projects that have come out of much smaller investments and smaller technologies.”