How To Feels To Bring The Old Icecream Hands Firm Together Again

"The old firm exactly,” singer, songwriter and guitarist Charles Jenkins concurs at the idea of Icecream Hands reuniting to play their third album, 1999’s ARIA nominated Sweeter Than The Radio in its entirety. “What prompted it?” he laughs. “Were we of sound mind and body?

“I’m actually in my office looking at this Winter Ball poster that Charles Jenkins & The Zhivagos used to do. We did about four and they were lots of fun and the next came around last year, when the Leaps & Bounds Festival started, and I didn’t want to do the Winter Ball again, I thought I’d do something else, so I did the Amateur Historians thing. I got Doug [Robertson, bass] from the Icecream Hands and [drummer] Dave Milne from The Zhivagos and wrote a bunch of songs about Yarra and Melbourne and Victoria, and it was a one-off kind of beast and it all went swimmingly. 

"1999 — it was a completely different world. You’d lick stamps and put them on envelopes and shit like that!"

“And then this Leaps & Bounds turns up and it was suggested, ‘What about the Icecream Hands thing?’ We’d been asked to do other things many times in the past, but it just presented the opportunity to be, how shall I put it, well publicised, and we were asked nicely,” Jenkins laughs, “there was a ‘please’ somewhere in the email. And I knew the other guys were keen for it, except the guitar player actually, who couldn’t do it, and so I asked Davey Lane, who I knew loves that record — I think he replied to the text before I’d even sent it. So it was just a combination of things.”

Another thing was the fact that their label at the time, Rubber Records, is releasing Sweeter Than The Radio on limited edition vinyl for the first time.

“Rubber wanted us to get together to play last year, at their 25th anniversary, but it couldn’t kind of happen, and they had mentioned around that time about releasing the album on vinyl, so it just made sense to focus on that. It’s easily the most well known Icecream Hands album. It was fortuitous for the band that at the time, Rubber had just signed a distribution deal with BMG so it was the only album that had the promotional muscle of a major label behind it. So there were film clips galore and five singles — it was like Thriller or something, there were so many singles off the thing [among them Dodgy, Nipple and Yellow And Blue].”

The ARIA nomination for Best Adult Contemporary Album didn’t hurt either; Sweeter Than The Radio, with three bonus tracks, also seeing release in the US. 

“Triple j had been kind to us prior that record,” Jenkins admits, “but they really jumped all over that thing, and 1999 — it was a completely different world. You’d lick stamps and put them on envelopes and shit like that! The good thing about listening back to the record whilst I’m driving around in the car trying to remember the lyrics, the sound is incredible.”