Taste Test: Iva Davies

THE FIRST ALBUM I BOUGHT WITH MY OWN MONEY

It was probably an album called Soft Machine 5 (Fifth) by a relatively obscure Dutch prog-rock band, and the only reason I bought it was because they had an oboist in the band [laughs].

THE ALBUM I'M LOVING RIGHT NOW

Well, interestingly, I don't really listen to anything much – on very rare occasions – and it's because it's work: music is work. In the early-'80s I had a girlfriend I lived with and she used to like to go to sleep with the radio on, which drove me insane because I'd sit there and in my head I'd be pulling it apart. So the other answer to that is: I have a fantastic system in my house called the Sonos system... So I don't buy albums per se.

MY FAVOURITE PARTY ALBUM

I never was a huge kinda reggae specialist, but for some reason every time I put on a Bob Marley album it just feels like a party, hahaha. I don't know what it is about reggae, but it just has that thing and it's so foreign to me, you know. I've never referenced anything in my music and I have associations with it, too. I have had a house in Fiji on an island for 23 years and I've got a really beautiful sound system there because I actually do a bit of work there – I don't have a television set, but the button that it pushes with me is: five o'clock, gin and tonic, watching the sunset through the coconut trees and Bob Marley really loud on this beautiful sound system – it's great.

MY FAVOURITE COMEDOWN ALBUM

This is a weird one. It's quite a peculiar album. It was a soundtrack that Pink Floyd did to some quite weird little movie made by a French filmmaker in the islands of Papua New Guinea called Obscured By Clouds. They must've been so stoned and you can actually sort of smell how out of it they were when they were recording it. It's just so slow and so spacey, you can actually hear their kind of buzz – it's quite peculiar.

THE FIRST GIG I EVER ATTENDED

I used to go to import stores and buy albums on import… I wanted to go and see this band who I knew nothing about, except one album, and it's a German band called Tangerine Dream. They were an electronic band and this would've been like 1973 or something at the Hordern Pavilion. And I think Hans Zimmer, the world famous film-score writer, was a founding member of Tangerine Dream so it was all sort of instrumental and it was all sequencers and these kind of soundscapes, but they had the Pavilion wired in quadraphonic. It was amazing, because things just travelled around the room – it was incredibly trippy, but quite obscure.

THE WEIRDEST GIG EXPERIENCE I'VE HAD

I'd just broken up with a girlfriend that I'd been living with for a while, and [was] deeply regretting it, and I must've been in my very early twenties. There was a gig planned at Manly Beach, and I remember somehow or other I'd been really sick and I was full of antibiotics. And this is a lesson learned, folks – the hard way. I hadn't really drunk very much, but I'd drunk a little bit, and somehow or other we managed to blag our way into a photographer's area cordoned off at the front of the stage – I dunno how we managed to do that. I remember as soon as I got into there with Keith [Welsh], I saw this girlfriend that I hadn't seen for ages and somehow she'd conned her way into there. Split Enz was just finished and Skyhooks were about to come on, on the count of midnight, and all I remember was, 'Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one,' 'cause then I passed out and woke up in the back of the ambulance on the way to Manly Hospital.

MY BIGGEST NON-MUSICAL INFLUENCES

I think it's probably a cliché, but it's obviously my parents because from them I got lots of stuff: my mother was a very highly regarded and finely trained artist and a brilliant pianist, and my father was a singer – opera and stuff like that, but also a poet and into poetry and literature.

THE COOLEST PERSON I'VE EVER MET

Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd was pretty cool, through Guy [Pratt] the bass player. I had to go to Düsseldorf because this massive European music show, it was like the Countdown of Europe, had an anniversary get-together and we won the award for the best song of the '80s, the whole decade, with Hey Little Girl. We had to go over to perform it, so Guy was rehearsing with Dave Gilmour, and the band consisted of David Gilmour; Rick Wright, Pink Floyd keyboard player; Phil Manzanera, the lead guitarist from Roxy Music, playing rhythm guitar; and the other guys who played in Pink Floyd for their live shows. So it was Pink Floyd, basically, and they were rehearsing, and I said to Guy, 'I need a band,' and he said, 'I'll just get the guys from Pink Floyd to come.' So I went on European television to play Hey Little Girl with Pink Floyd backing me and then drove down the road to this beautiful theatre, watched the sound check, then went and had dinner with all these legends and then watched the show, the first half of which consisted of the new Dave Gilmour solo stuff, and the second half of which was the best of Pink Floyd, so Shine On You Crazy Diamond, with the original Pink Floyd sax player who played on Dark Side Of The Moon and all that stuff. It was just unbelievable. It was about the coolest night I've had, I think [laughs].   

IF I COULD HANG OUT IN ANY TIME AND PLACE IN HISTORY

I think an incredibly interesting time would have been to be in England in the mid-'70s when there were these incredible collisions of music. We used to get Melody Maker and New Musical Express and I would've only been 19 or something at that time, but you had this tradition of big rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple and so on, then they turned into prog-rock bands like Yes and Genesis and so on, and then you had this weird movement of glam from David Bowie and Marc Bolan, and then all of a sudden you had all these West Indians arriving in London with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, and then the more progressive British bands like Queen. I remember just reading the gig list and it was the weirdest set of things and then in the middle of it The Sex Pistols arrived… There was this real strange period of the biggest, messiest set of music, but it seemed like it had incredible energy and I would've liked to have been there.

IF I WASN'T MAKING MUSIC

Having a gin and tonic on that verandah in Fiji with the Bob Marley on the player.

Icehouse will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 12 January - Trevor Music Festival, Newhaven VIC
Sunday 13 January - Performing Arts Centre, Geelong VIC
Tuesday 15, Wednesday 16, Friday 18 & Saturday 19 January - The Palms at Crown, Melbourne VIC