Australian electronic musician and rock singer
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Je vous ai déjà raconté comment tant de chanteurs étaient arrivés d'Australie dans les années 60 et 70, des Bee Gees aux Easybeats en passant par Flash and the Pan. Et ça ne s'est pas arrêté dans les années 80 avec Kylie Minogue, Midnight Oil et Icehouse.Et justement, Icehouse, ça, c'est le groupe typique dont on connaît au moins une chanson par coeur, du genre qu'on monte le son sans savoir exactement ce qu'on aime en elle mais dont on ne sait rien. Je ne savais même pas qu'ils étaient Australiens ! C'est vrai que leur fameux single a fait un sacré tube fin 1982, début 83 et que cela leur avait valu d'assurer la première partie de la tournée du retour de David Bowie, la même année. Alors cette voix qui a sûrement dû vous accrocher avec son léger grain quand il descend dans les graves et sa clarté dans les aigus, c'est celle d'Iva Davies. Oui, comme les frères Davies des Kinks mais rien à voir, son père Neville a été garde forestier toute sa carrière dans la région de Sydney. Un père qui chante lors des festivités, alors son fils à qui il a inculqué l'amour des arbres, chante lui aussi, et joue de la guitare. On ne s'étonne pas que son premier groupe se nomme Flowers et qu'il rencontre un joli succès en Australie, avec sa voix, proche de celle de Bryan Ferry de Roxy Music. Alors, un jour de 1981, sa firme de disques décide de le lancer en Grande-Bretagne et par conséquent, le reste du monde. Le nom de Flowers étant déjà pris dans tous les sens, il en faut un nouveau, Iva demande :Que pensez-vous de Icehouse ? Icehouse ? Quelle idée ! Ben, c'était le nom que j'avais donné au flat que je louais à l'étage d'une vieille maison et où je me les suis gelés durant des mois.Icehouse ? vendu ! C'est d'ailleurs le titre du premier single qui paraît en 1982 et qui, au milieu de la New Wave des Ultravox, Depeche Mode et Human League serait sans doute passé inaperçu si la vidéo n'était pas tournée par le réalisateur australien, Russell Mulcahy, hyper célèbre, il est l'auteur du premier clip diffusé sur MTV : Video killed the radio stars et futur réalisateur de Highlander. Le gros succès arrive quelques mois plus tard avec Hey Little Girl, tellement New Wave, et puis un second titre de l'album plus tardivement, chanson d'un film intitulé pour ado Young Einstein, comme on en a tant tourné dans les années 80. Alors voilà, vous savez désormais que la voix de ce groupe mystérieux qu'il était à lui tout seul, appartenait à un certain Iva Davies, immense célébrité dans son pays de l'autre côté de la Terre, mais pour nous, simplement Icehouse, qui nous a offert un des très bons moments de ces années 80.
Iva Davies was born and raised in regional Australia, where his early exposure to music set the stage for his remarkable career. Trained as a classical musician, he excelled as an oboist. However, the allure of rock music and the emerging punk and new wave scenes in the 70s inspired him to shift gears. Influenced by artists like David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Brian Eno, Iva began exploring electronic and experimental sounds, which would later define Icehouse's unique style. In 1977, Davies formed Flowers with bassist Keith Welsh, marking the beginning of a significant chapter in Australian music. Originally a covers band, Flowers soon began incorporating original material. Their raw energy and Iva's charismatic stage presence quickly made them a favourite in Sydney's pub rock circuit. The release of their debut album, Icehouse, in 1980, was a game-changer. Featuring tracks like "We Can Get Together" and "Can't Help Myself," the album showcased a blend of new wave, punk, and synth-driven rock. Its success led to an international record deal but a legal conflict over the name Flowers prompted the band to rebrand as Icehouse. As Icehouse, the group became a vehicle for Iva's creative vision. Their 1982 album, Primitive Man, marked a major turning point. The album included the upbeat "Great Southern Land," a song that became an unofficial Australian anthem. The next album, Sidewalk (1984), showcased Davies' maturing songwriting and reflected his growing interest in themes of isolation and urban life. Though less commercially successful than its predecessor, it set the stage for the band's magnum opus, Man of Colours (1987). Man of Colours was Icehouse's most commercially successful album, cementing their place as global stars. Tracks like "Electric Blue," co-written with John Oates of Hall & Oates dominated international charts. The album resonated with fans worldwide. In Australia, Man of Colours became the highest-selling album of 1987 and earned multiple ARIA Awards, including Album of the Year. Iva's passion for technology and experimentation was evident throughout Icehouse's career. He embraced cutting-edge digital synthesizers and recording techniques, creating a sound that was both innovative and timeless. In addition to his work with Icehouse, Iva composed scores for films like Razorback (1984) and collaborated with the Sydney Dance Company on Boxes (1985) and Berlin (1995), blending classical and modern musical elements. Despite lineup changes and shifts in the music industry, Icehouse remained a beloved act. In the 1990s, the band released Code Blue (1990) and Big Wheel (1993), which explored deeper and more personal themes. Although these albums didn't match the commercial heights of earlier works, they reinforced Davies' reputation as a versatile and introspective artist. By the 2000s, Icehouse focused on live performances, reconnecting with fans through nostalgia-fueled tours. Davies also reworked classic tracks for the 2011 album Icehouse: White Heat 30 Hits, which celebrated the band's enduring legacy. Iva Davies and Icehouse have left an indelible mark on Australian music and beyond. Great Southern Land is regularly cited as one of Australia's greatest songs, and Icehouse's albums continue to influence generations of musicians. Davies' fusion of classical training, electronic innovation, and rock sensibility has made him one of Australia's most iconic and enduring musical talents. Today Icehouse remains active, with Iva at the helm, performing to loyal audiences and to new fans. The band are celebrated as pioneers of Australian music and continue to bridge the gap between the past and the future of rock and electronic sounds. Catch Icehouse when they headline the RED HOT SUMMER TOUR starting January 2025. Supported by several other notable Australian bands in Noiseworks, Wolfmother, Eskimo Joe, Baby Aniamls, Killing Heidi and Bachelor Girl - this is sure to be an incredible outdoor music festival.
In Pt 1 of Rick Grossman's “How's That? – The Podcast” episode, the Oz music legend talks to the boys about : Growing up in Sydney's east to immigrant parents from the UK, his first bass guitar, seeing Led Zeppelin live in Sydney, playing with Matt Finish, good mate Rob Hirst, Midnight Oil, living with Paul Kelly in Melbourne, Iva Davies, touring with Aerosmith and meeting Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, drugs, Shannon Noll, Dave Faulkner, Jim Mogine, Eric Grothe Snr, and much more…. This is one cracking episode!
Tom Rehn, Movie Bowl, Tim Lester, Matthew Abraham, Sound Off, Ali McLean, Iva Davies and AFL Grand Final Comp.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Russell Clarke spoke to Iva Davies as Icehouse prepare to headline next year's Red Hot Summer Tour. Iva also told Russell how their hit Electric Blue came about and the reason John Oates from Hall & Oates threatened to take it from him.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Iva Davies joins Jonesy & Amanda ahead of Icehouse's Australian tour.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Woodsy's List of GOATS for every NRL club, Xavier Cooks joins us, legendary Iva Davies is in the house and when did it not look like the photo?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Icehouse is one of Australia's best-known and beloved rock bands.
Today on the Daily Bespoke Podcast, Matt and Jerry are joined by Iva Davies, the lead singer of Icehouse and Aussie music legend. They discuss his composition of the soundtrack for the 2003 film "Master and Commander," the fan he has set up at gigs just to give his mullet some volume, and his upcoming trip to NZ! Available now wherever you get your podcasts...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jay and Dave for Breakfast - Triple M Mackay & The Whitsundays
Icehouse are the headliners for Legends On The Lawn this year, and it will be the first time since 2011 they've been in MackaySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is 2023 and I'm having some time on my hands so I'm remastering the old episodes. This means re-inserting all the music taken from proper sources and other minor tweaks to make it better. The original music was just recorded as played in the room from some shitty PC speakers. I went into the master and put the tracks in properly. I also tweaked some other parameters of the audio and converted it to mono as should always be the case for podcasts. The original ep was uploaded in 2015. Here is the original description: Broken Chair Scores Episode 6 is the best episode so far. Believe me. We deliver a concise and kind of bizarre one hour and thirty minutes of soundtrack goodness. [Update from 2023: It's 2 hours now due to including the tracks in proper quality as well as the voice-over ones.] As always we review our favorite tracks from one film and one game soundtrack. In this episode we talk about the soundtrack to the 1995 Sega game "Alien Soldier" written by Kazuo Hanzawa as well as the soundtrack to the 2003 Peter Weir Film "Master and Commander" written by Richard Tognetti, Iva Davies and Christopher Gordon. If you want to support us you can always write a comment here. This would be highly appreciated. If you're interested in a more relaxed podcast about mostly (city-) building game soundtracks for the PC (think Anno, Settlers, Tycoons from the 90's and onwards) then check out Aufbaumusik. Enjoy!
Rai from Thirsty Merc, James Reyne and Iva Davies from Icehouse and Jim Kerr from Simple Minds ALL on the 1 BIG Rock Star Friday show!!!!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Behind The Hits of Australia's greatest rock band and this month marks 50 years since their first gig. This 3-part series delves into the eras of AC/DC's remarkable career. Hear the inside story from the band themselves, and key players behind the scenes during crucial moments. This episode details the rockstar life of one of Australia's greatest frontmen – Bon Scott.Hear from AC/DC band members Bon Scott, Angus and Malcolm Young, Mark Evans, Cliff Williams, plus music industry legends Iva Davies, Molly Meldrum, Michael Chugg, Michael Browning, Mark Opitz and Fifa Riccobono. Hosted by Triple M's Matty O. Episode 2 – AC/DC: The Brian Johnson Era – coming 13 December 2023Episode 3 – ACDC: Beyond a Band of Brothers – coming 20 December 2023Warning: Language and drug references.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Join Gleeso on Triple M Nights for an unforgettable episode as we dive into the world of rock legends Iva Davies of Icehouse and Jim Kerr of Simple Minds. In this exclusive interview, Iva and Jim discuss their thrilling new collaboration on the iconic T. Rex hit ‘Get It On'. Discover how these renowned frontmen brought their unique styles together for this much-anticipated cover, recorded across continents with the help of cutting-edge technology. Hear from Iva about his passion for live, outdoor performances and what it means to co-headline the upcoming Red Hot Summer Tour 2024 with Simple Minds. Jim Kerr opens up about his excitement for Simple Minds' return to Australia after four decades, sharing details of their extensive tour plans for 2024. This episode is a must-listen for fans of classic rock, music collaborations, and anyone excited about the fusion of iconic musical talents.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Clairsy & Lisa opened the phones about the most unusual funeral you've ever been to. Jim Kerr from Simple Minds and Iva Davies from Icehouse called Clairsy & Lisa ahead of the Red Hot Summer Tour next year plus they've released a cover of T-Rex's get It On. They told the guys how it all came about. In The Shaw Report, Ozzy Osbourne gets a lesson in what a Karen is plus yet another book about the Royal Family is on the way. Another big weekend in sport and Clairsy & Lisa had your wrap up of what went on.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Clairsy & Lisa spoke to Iva Davies from Icehouse & Jim Kerr from Simple Minds, the two 80's powerhouses are coming together for a show in King's Park in February plus they've released a cover of T-Rex's Get It On.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Iva Davies followed an unconventional path to pop-star status. Initially immersed in the world of classical music (he even did a stint in the ABC Training Orchestra) he went on to pioneer Australia's electronic music scene with his band Icehouse and has become one of the country's most highly regarded composers and multi-instrumentalists. He's currently on tour and if you want buy tix head to this website - https://icehouse-ivadavies.com/tour-dates/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
One of the big acts on the 80's glam metal scene was Cinderella. Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tom Keifer and bassist Eric Brittingham formed the band in suburban Philadelphia. Gene Simmons of Kiss tried to get the band a deal with PolyGram, but was unsuccessful at getting the label to take interest. Jon Bon Jovi was more successful with getting them a contract with Mercury/Polygram Records. Keifer and Brittingham added guitarist Jeff LaBar and drummer Jim Drnec to the band. Their debut album entitled Night Songs was released in 1986, and it achieved triple platinum status. Shortly after the recording of that album, Jim Drnec left the group. This, their follow-up album Long Cold Winter, would continue the band's progression in the glam metal genre, but would see a subtle shift towards more blues rock. It would also see the introduction of Fred Coury as drummer for the group, though this would come after the album was recorded utilizing percussionist Cozy Powell for almost all tracks on the album. This second studio album would be a commercial success as well, reaching number 10 on the US charts and achieving double platinum status before the end of the year. The album included the rock ballad “Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone),”which would reach number 12 on the Billboard charts, the highest charting single for the band. Video was a significant factor in the success of the band, and they released a video compilation in 1990 called “Tales from the Gypsy Road” featuring their promo videos and live medleys.Cinderella would be predominantly an opening band through the late 80's and early 90's, touring with Poison, Bon Jovi, and David Lee Roth. Unfortunately the band would decline by the mid 90's due to various setbacks and drama with personnel as well as shifting popularity in the music industry. Their last performance was in 2014.Break out the hair spray as Wayne leads us through this album. Bad Seamstress Blues/Fallin' Apart at the SeamsThe leading track to the album starts with an acoustic blues number paired with a heavier blues song, complete with slide guitar and harmonica. The lyrics are of a life that has come full circle. No regrets, but a mixture of success and sorrow. “Look in the mirror at what I found, It's just the past and it's over now.”Gypsy RoadThese lyrics discuss perseverance to achieve success, but also the loneliness and doubt that come with realizing that dream. The song is a composite of a life on the road, complete with hotel rooms and overnight rides on the tour bus. This song hit number 51 on the Billboard Hot 100.Take Me BackThe final song on the album features blues instrumentation including the slide guitar and more cow bell! The lyrics reflect on a younger life from a distance. The singer reminisces about how he was raised and wanting to be reminded of what he left behind. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Axel F (Main Theme from the motion picture “Beverly Hills Cop”)This movie from the mid-80's made its debut on network TV this month. STAFF PICKS:Electric Blue by IcehouseLynch gives us a cool start to the staff picks with Australian band Icehouse's biggest US hit. The lyrics tell the tale of a man pursuing the love of a woman who seems above his station. “Icehouse” is an Aussie slang term for an insane asylum. This song was written by lead singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Iva Davies, and Jon Oates of Hall & Oates fame.Heaven Tonight by Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising ForceBruce features neoclassical metal guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen paired with the vocals of former Rainbow and Deep Purple front man Joe Lynn Turner. This is off Malmsteen's fourth studio album, “Odyssey.” This album went to number 40 on the Billboard 200 charts, the highest charting Malmsteen album to date.Wait by White Lion Rob brings us a power ballad that peaked at number 8 on the US charts in May 1988. It was originally released in June 1987, but did not enter the charts until February 1988, based on the strength of their video on MTV. The video featured Christie Muhaw who died at the age of 24 in a car accident less than a year after the video was released.Damn Good by David Lee RothWayne's staff pick continues the blues focus with a power ballad from Roth and 12-string work by virtuoso Steve Vai. The lyrics were inspired by an encounter Roth had with an old high school friend who had some high school pictures. It is a wistful song remembering friends and good times from the past. NOVELTY TRACK:Killer Klowns by The DickiesWe close out this week's podcast with a track of punk rock's The Dickies. This is off their EP and the movie "Killer Klowns from Outer Space. "
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The Sydney Opera House, an iconic building synonymous with Australia, turns 50 today. Iva Davies is the founder and frontman for Icehouse, one of the most significant and successful bands in Australia; he also played in an orchestra at the first performances at the then-new building back in 1973. In this extra episode of The Briefing, we take a look at how the Opera House has shaped our national identity, and take a deep dive on Iva Davies' relationship with the building, going back 50 years. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this episode we play Wayne's interview with Iva Davies of Icehouse.Listen to My88, the home of the 80s, on iHeart.
The best bits from Mark and Caroline for breakfast on 92.7 MIX FM
Min. 5: DESCRIPCIÓN DE CONTENIDOS A pocas semanas de la Fiesta del Cine, las salas están ya de fiesta gracias al éxito de "Los Tres Mosqueteros", el tirón del cine de terror y la entrada de títulos comerciales como "Posesión Infernal: El Despertar" y "¡Vaya vacaciones!", que seguirán llevando al público a los cines esta semana. Pero para nosotros, la verdadera celebración tiene que ver con el estreno de la última gran película española. Tras sorprender en Berlín y triunfar en el Festival de Málaga, "20.000 especies de abejas" se cuela en la cartelera con derecho propio y podrá demostrar que merece ser comparada con títulos de la calidad de "Verano 1993", "Las niñas", "El agua", "Libertad" o "Cinco Lobitos". Alberto Luchini, Raquel Hernández valoran el debú en la dirección de Estíbaliz Urresola y el resto de novedades que se suman a la nueva cartelera. Min 40: ESPECIAL BSO MASTER AND COMMANDER Y atención a los nostálgicos porque en este capítulo celebramos un cumpleaños que sorprenderá a más de uno. Y es que "Master and Commander", el proyecto más ambicioso de Peter Weir tras el "Show de Truman" se estrenó hace 20 años y contó con el efecto arrastre del Gladiador de Oro Russell Crowe y del eficaz Paul Bettany. Pero nuestro experto musical Ángel Luque pone el foco en su sorprendente banda sonora, compuesta por tres músicos tan diversos como Christopher Gordon, Iva Davies, Richard Tognetti. Un disfrute para las oídos con el que apagaremos las velas del aniversario de una de las mejores películas bélicas y de época rodadas en el mar.
We are honored to welcome back Icehouse mastermind Iva Davies to deep dive their breakthrough album Man Of Colours from 1987. This was the album that brought Icehouse into the mainstream with hits like "Crazy" and "Electric Blue" and remains their best known globally. Iva gives us incredible stories about every song on the record, how they came to be, writing with John Oates, and much much more. We're lucky to hear from Iva again! Enjoy.
Iva Davies is a true legend of Australian music. As the founder of Icehouse, he has been responsible for countless hits including Electric Blue, Crazy and Hey Little Girl. Man of Colours remains one of the biggest selling Australian albums of all timeLater this year, Icehouse headlines the sold out "Big Red Bash in Birdsville."Chatting to Clinton Maynard, Iva explains how his iconic hit Great Southern Land came about.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Between 1980 and 1990, Icehouse racked up 13 top 20 hits across six studio albums and cracked both the US and the UK top 20 at different points, Initially known as Flowers, the band fronted by Iva Davies were at the forefront of new wave music in Australia, with their sound ranging from atmospheric synth ballads to rocky party tunes — and everything in between. In this career-spanning interview, Iva talks about the band's "dangerous" early sound that stood apart from their contemporaries on the pub rock scene and why writing hits came naturally to him. We hear the story behind chart-conquering classics like "Great Southern Land", "Hey Little Girl", "Crazy" and "Electric Blue", but also the downside of success, with Iva contending with a band break-up and a personal breakdown. He also discusses 1993's experimental seventh album Big Wheel and why Icehouse's days as a recording act came to an end, capping off a legacy that endures to this day, with Icehouse remaining one of Australia's most popular touring bands.Bonus material at chartbeats.com.au/aussieTwitter: @ChartBeatsAU, @TurnAroundOnJoyInstagram: @chartbeatsau, @joyturnbeataroundEmail: chartbeats.au@gmail.com
“Having the blessing of the man himself Iva Davies to embark on this journey of creating our own version of ‘Great Southern Land' has made the foundations solid. Reigan is an incredible artist in her own rite and to be able to work with her has been a real privilege.” – Mitch Tambo
Originally called Flowers, this pub-rock band was taken under the wing of none other than David Bowie, who insisted they join him on his Serious Moonlight Tour. That same year, they released ‘Great Southern Land', a track that's still considered Australia's other national anthem. Our Clairsy speaks exclusively with Icehouse frontman, Iva Davies. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
El 6 de Septiembre de 1522, llegaba a Sanlúcar de Barramera la nao Victoria con Juan Sebastián Elcano y 18 hombres en un estado tanto navío como tripulación muy lamentable, pero logrando una de las mayores gestas de la humanidad. La vuelta al mundo. Pero a la par, en el otro lado del mundo, en pleno océano Pacifico, la nao Trinidad que pertenecía a la misma expedición de Magallanes, comandada por Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa luchaba por salvar sus vidas en su intento de hacer el Tornaviaje. En el programa de hoy hablaremos de quien fue Gómez de Espinosa, el último capitán de la vuelta al mundo. Para ello vuelve como invitado, mi querido y admirado Tomás Mazón, autor del libro Espinosa el último capitán de la vuelta al mundo de la Editorial Encuentro, para narrarnos la singular y apasionante vida de este valiente hombre también logró dar la vuelta al mundo, pero regresando preso y viviendo muchas privaciones y penalidades, por dar servicio al rey de España. Música: Master and Commander de Christopher Gordon, Iva Davies y Richard Tognetti
Iva Davies of Icehouse joins Gleeso on Triple M Nights.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
---ARTICLES AND LINKS DISCUSSED"There's something about blasting the shit out of a razorback that brightens up my whole day""Razorback" [1984] Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-WKSnSagMg---"Not Quite Hollywood" [2008] Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v-JZb3vXE0---FOLLOW THE CONVERSATION ON reddit:https://www.reddit.com/r/sideboobcinema/---SUPPORT THE NEW FLESHPatreon:https://www.patreon.com/user?u=61455803Buy Me A Coffee:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thenewflesh---Instagram: @thenewfleshpodcast---Twitter: @TheNewFleshpod---Follow Ricky: @ricky_allpike on InstagramFollow Jon: @thejonastro on InstagramFollow AJ: @_aj_1985---SIDEBOOB CINEMA produced by Sheila EhksLogo Design by Made To Move: @made.tomoveTheme Song: Dreamdrive "Good In Red"
---ARTICLES AND LINKS DISCUSSED"They all did it for Alvin""Alvin Purple" [1973] full film:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qd3PYfLqD0&t=127s---"Not Quite Hollywood" [2008] Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v-JZb3vXE0---FOLLOW THE CONVERSATION ON reddit:https://www.reddit.com/r/sideboobcinema/---SUPPORT THE NEW FLESHPatreon:https://www.patreon.com/user?u=61455803Buy Me A Coffee:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thenewflesh---Instagram: @thenewfleshpodcast---Twitter: @TheNewFleshpod---Follow Ricky: @ricky_allpike on InstagramFollow Jon: @thejonastro on InstagramFollow AJ: @_aj_1985---SIDEBOOB CINEMA produced by Sheila EhksLogo Design by Made To Move: @made.tomoveTheme Song: Dreamdrive "Good In Red"
Ashlee Mullany, Michael Smyth, Matthew Abraham, Jessica Braithwaite, Blakey, Iva Davies, Julie Bishop, Behind Closed Doors and David's Headline. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Today on the show we tee up a morning jog for Eddie and his newfound jogging partner, SA Labour Leader Peter Malinauskas; We speak to Ice House front man Iva Davies & explore the time we sent *raunchy* messages to the WRONG people... All that and more on the Ali Clarke Breakfast show... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Today on the show we tee up a morning jog for Eddie and his newfound jogging partner, SA Labour Leader Peter Malinauskas; We speak to Ice House front man Iva Davies & explore the time we sent *raunchy* messages to the WRONG people... All that and more on the Ali Clarke Breakfast show...
We speak to Aussie legend Iva Davies of Icehouse whose pictures were on many a walls of young Aussie ladies in the 80s...
We speak to Aussie legend Iva Davies of Icehouse whose pictures were on many a walls of young Aussie ladies in the 80s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
---ARTICLES AND LINKS DISCUSSED"They all did it for Alvin""Alvin Purple" [1973] full film:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qd3PYfLqD0&t=127s---"Not Quite Hollywood" [2008] Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v-JZb3vXE0---SUPPORT THE NEW FLESHPatreon:https://www.patreon.com/user?u=61455803Buy Me A Coffee:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thenewflesh---Instagram: @thenewfleshpodcast---Twitter: @TheNewFleshpod---Follow Ricky: @ricky_allpike on InstagramFollow Jon: @thejonastro on InstagramFollow AJ: @_aj_1985---SIDEBOOB CINEMA produced by Sheila EhksLogo Design by Made To Move: @made.tomoveTheme Song: Dreamdrive "Good In Red"
---ARTICLES AND LINKS DISCUSSED"There's something about blasting the shit out of a razorback that brightens up my whole day""Razorback" [1984] Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-WKSnSagMg---"Not Quite Hollywood" [2008] Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v-JZb3vXE0---SUPPORT THE NEW FLESHPatreon:https://www.patreon.com/user?u=61455803Buy Me A Coffee:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thenewflesh---Instagram: @thenewfleshpodcast---Twitter: @TheNewFleshpod---Follow Ricky: @ricky_allpike on InstagramFollow Jon: @thejonastro on InstagramFollow AJ: @_aj_1985---SIDEBOOB CINEMA produced by Sheila EhksLogo Design by Made To Move: @made.tomoveTheme Song: Dreamdrive "Good In Red"
FULL SHOW: Laurel Hunts Down Chainmail, Iva Davies, Mel Blanc Auction + MORE!
FULL SHOW: Laurel Hunts Down Chainmail, Iva Davies, Mel Blanc Auction + MORE! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Rush Hour with Bernie, Blewey & Jars Catch-Up - Triple M Adelaide 104.7
INTRO - Roo, Ditts & Loz get a whack about the golf day yesterday, Cricket Tasmania not happy with Cricket Australia over handling of Tim Paine scandal, Justin Langer not on panel to select Tim's replacement as Captain & AFL Draft tonight. CALLUM TWOMEY – AFL Draft tonight at 6.30pm, Do you like the draft over two days? Jason Horne-Francis, how does he compare to other number 1 picks? Crows and Port, what do you think they'll end up with? BERN FILLS OUT SCHOOL APPLICATION FOR HARVEY - Bern's getting ahead organizing a school for Harvey but when it came to putting in his own profession in the application form, well Bern wasn't happy! IVA DAVIES FROM ICEHOUSE - Celebrating 40 years of Great Southern Land! FURIOUS 5 QUIZ - The last one for 2021! GOLF DAY AT GRANGE - The boys re-cap yesterday's game. BERN'S FINAL FACTS See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Ice House is coming to Hobart, so Brian sat down 1-on-1 with one of his music idols Iva Davies. It was a free range Friday with a twist today, in between your calls- Iva Davies stopped by to discuss Ice House, Chris Duffy from Just Like Justin joined us from the road as they continue their journey to Hobart and the 'Guru of Gossip' Peter Ford gave us the latest entertainment news. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Iva Davies chatted with Brian after Ice House announced they are coming to Hobart next year. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Let's celebrate an Australian classic turning 40! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Icehouse has announced a national tour to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their classic single 'Great Southern Land'. Formed by Iva Davies, the band achieved 28 Platinum albums, eight Top 10 albums and over thirty Top 40 singles.
The Bunch caught up with the Icehouse frontman where he reminisces about being on tour with David Bowie!
The Bunch caught up with Icehouse frontman Iva Davies where he reminisces about being on tour with David Bowie! There's a new type of milk on the market to put in your coffee that we're really not sure about... plus your calls on your family not approving of the person you married…
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The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers and drummer Ronnie Vannucci catch up with Triple M's Brendan Annakin to discuss their seventh studio record, Pressure Machine. Hear what made them release two new records in under a year, why Pressure Machine is one of the more honest pieces of work they've ever assembled and if you can expect all four original members on stage together for the first time in over five years post-pandemic. Plus, Brandon and Ronnie discover what Icehouse's Iva Davies thought of their famed Triple M Garage Session cover of Electric Blue. Get your copy of the brand new album from The Killers, Pressure Machine and more info: https://www.thekillersmusic.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
"Master and Commander" (2003), música de Iva Davies, Christopher Gordon y Richard Tognetti
Ivor Arthur Davies, AM, known professionally as Iva Davies is an Australian singer, songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist and record producer. He is known for his distinctive singing voice, which was influenced by contemporary glam rock singers.Davies' music career spans more than 40 years. He came to prominence in the early 1980s as co-founder and lead singer of rock band Icehouse, becoming one of Australia's top rock stars of that decade. He is the only member who has been with Icehouse throughout its entire history.In addition to his work with Icehouse, Davies has made music for television series and films, most notably as the composer for the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. He has also had a solo career which included work on the soundtrack album The Berlin Tapes with Icehouse
EXTENDED: Iva Davies from Icehouse flicks the switch on Trip The Switch
In the US Icehouse may be best known for those two huge hits from 1987, "Crazy" and "Electric Blue", but back in their native Australia they're practically royalty. Mastermind Iva Davies has directed the band for over 40 years, consistently finding new shades and angles of alternative rock to explore. These days Iva gets to bask in the love and success he's built all these years Down Under, including recently releasing a new live album, Icehouse Plays Flowers Live to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their debut album. Here we discuss what happened to their stature in America, what led to him taking 16 years off, and the stories behind many songs and albums. Iva is one of popular and Australian music's great minds, we're honored to have him. www.icehouse-ivadavies.com www.patreon.com/thehustlepod
Noel catches up with Iva Davies, the lead singer and co-founder of Icehouse. The Australian band is best known for their hit single, Electric Blue, which reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987. The band is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the debut album, Flowers, with a live album called Icehouse Plays Flowers Live.
ICE HOUSE WILL BE PERFORMING AT TRIP THE SWITCH
Music legend Iva Davies fronted one of our most loved bands, Flowers, who later became known as Icehouse.
Interview with Flowers and Icehouse frontman, Iva Davies. This is 'Good Taste Brekky' with Chloe and Elerrina on Juice 107.3 Website: https://www.juice1073.com.au YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Juice1073GoldCoast
Triple M Aussie with Becko See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Triple M Aussie with Becko See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Triple M Aussie with Becko See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We head down under this week to our home country of Australia and review a natural horror film filmed out in the outback about a giant boar. It's called Razorback, released November 2nd in 1984, and it's pretty ridiculous. Got feedback? Send us an email at oldiebutagoodiepod@gmail.com Follow the show! Facebook: https://fb.me/oldiebutagoodiepod Omny: https://omny.fm/shows/oldie-but-a-goodie YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjfdXHxK_rIUsOEoFSx-hGA Songs from 1984 Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/39v1MbWf849XD8aau0yA52 Follow the hosts! Sandro Falce - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sandrofalce/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/sandrofalce - Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/SandroFalce/ - Nerd-Out Podcast: https://omny.fm/shows/nerdout Zach Adams - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zach4dams/ Donations: https://paypal.me/oldiebutagoodiepod Please do not feel like you have to contribute anything but any donations are greatly appreciated! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Coming in at number 10 for Triple M's Aussie G.O.A.T, ICEHOUSE frontman Iva Davies joined Triple M's Becko to talk about "that" cover The Killers did at the Triple M Garage Session. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
1) Return of Myna Birds at Micks 2) Greatest trophies in World Sport 3) Mick and Whitney review SAS Australia 4) Miley Cyrus coming out with a Metallica Cover Album 5) Scott Darlow 6) Song Whisperer 7) Mick & Dave's aircheck 8) Iva Davies See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Iva Davies from Icehouse talks 80s suits and playing with celebrities
What do Elliot Yeo & the Jersey Boys musical have in common? Find out here, Movie guy Ben O’Shea takes a look at not one but two Korean Zombie apocalypse movies and Iva Davies from Icehouse takes the guys on a fashion journey through the early 80s
The Icehouse frontman shared his story about how his father's love of eucalypts helped him pen one of his most famous songs, Great Southern Land
Iva Davies called our very own, Nashy to catch up from isolation. Show your support: supportact.org.au
Before the big show today Wilko & Courts caught up with Iva Davies about why he signed on and about coming to Canberra in March for Anthems.
This morning Botica's Bunch caught up with Icehouse front man Iva Davies, they took your calls on When Has A Stray come to stay & also caught up with Tom Gleisner ahead of the finale of Have You Been Paying Attention.
Iva Davies is the man behind one of Australia's most iconic bands.Originally formed as The Flowers in 1977 before becoming what they are better know as, Icehouse in 1981.Davies is the musical creative force behind the hits such as Great Southern Land, Electric Blue, Hey Little Girl and We Can Get Together.Those hits have earned Icehouse 8 top 10 albums, over 30 top 40 singles and a place in the ARIA Hall of Fame which they were induced into in 2006.They are heading back to New Zealand in March with their Auckland show already sold out. Their 2020 shows mark the 40th anniversary of the band's debut album Icehouse and singles Can't Help Myself and We Can Get Together.The band has had 19 members, the main stay and driving force of the band remains front man Iva Davies. He told Andrew Dickens
Iva Davies, singer-songwriter for iconic Aussie band Icehouse talks to Charlotte Ryan about his long career.
Chris Lynch spoke to Icehouse frontman and creative powerhouse Iva Davies following the announcement Icehouse will be performing at Selwyn Sounds 2020.Having just celebrated touring for over 40 years, Icehouse is one of Australia’s most iconic bands, transcending age groups with their hit songs, well known and loved by audiences across generations.
In this episode I was able to interview Torah Bontrager, a non-practicing Amish that is the founder of the Amish Heritage Foundation. Torah has been on MTV True Life, the Tim Ferriss Blog, Forbes.com, and the Huffington Post. Her desire is to reclaim the narrative and help tell a more accurate Amish story while working to help those that escape the church. With that said, Torah has her own intense story of escape and she's managed to create a life that she loves on the other side of that escape. So listen to Torah's story, learn about Amish culture, and understand more about the experiences of others around you. The song that Torah chose to represent her journey is Heroes by David Bowie, specifically the cover by Iva Davies and Icehouse. You can learn more about Torah Bontrager on her personal website here. You can learn more about the Amish Heritage Foundation here. Support Torah by leaving her a comment HERE Join our Shunned Podcast Facebook group HERE Leave us a review on iTunes Find shunned podcast on Youtube, including new VIDcasts here. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Support the show by donating to the cause on our Patreon page, Patreon.com/shunned Music by Fair Voyeur entitled “No Hell Yet”.
Iva Davies is one of Australia's most accomplished musicians and composers with a career spanning over 30 years with his band Icehouse, and as a composer for film and theatre. I produced this feature music show with him in 2014.The number one song on the Australian pop music charts in 1980 was The Buggles 'Video Killed The Radio Star', accompanied through the year by such gems as Michael Jackson 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough', The Village People 'You Can't Stop The Music', Split Enz 'I Got You', The Vapours 'Turning Japanese' and Queen 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'.In May 1980, Australian radio stations started playing a song by Sydney band, Flowers. 'Can't Help Myself' made it into the Australian Top 10 and was the first song from their debut album, 'Icehouse'. I think I was first in line at my local record store to by the single and was enormously envious of my older brothers who would regularly see Flowers playing at the local pub. IVA DAVIES: We came from quite a distinct stream of music which generated by the punk movement out of Britain, but then it morphed into a strange hybrid because of technology. There was an explosion of technology, especially synthesiser technology, at that period, so we were a kind of punk band with synthesisers which was a bit odd. But clearly, these other people were not, including Michael Jackson! There were all sorts of strange things going on, strange fashions; it was a very interesting time."The first song we put out was called 'Can't Help Myself' and we'd been playing all these classic punk venues for about three years before we put out that first record. I remember being told it had become a disco hit in Melbourne and I was semi-horrified. I was very pleased it was a hit, of course, but a disco hit - we weren't a disco band!By the time we got to 1980 we'd been playing quite a few of our own songs but still had lacings of the odd cover version of things not even particularly fashionable at the time, things like T-Rex songs, but by then we'd really turned into an original band and signed with a small independent label in Sydney called Regular Records and we'd recorded our first album, and although they constitute really the first 10 songs I ever wrote, they did have a certain flavour about them that I guess was, again, a hybrid of punk with synthesizers.CAROL DUNCAN: Iva, you mustn't have been very long out of the Conservatorium by this stage?IVA DAVIES: I dropped out of the (Sydney) Conservatorium when I was about 21, so I was about 23 or 24 by this point.CAROL DUNCAN: So how did you decide to steer your songwriting and music releases in that environment at that time?IVA DAVIES: It's a terrible admission to make considering that 'Can't Help Myself' made it into the Top 10, that I was probably fairly unaware of radio except for 2JJ. That's a terrible admission for somebody who's trying to break into getting airplay on radio!CAROL DUNCAN: Something like The Vapors 'Turning Japanese' would have been all over 2SM (in Sydney) at the time. 2SM would have been the number one commercial pop music station in the late 1970s.IVA DAVIES: Indeed, and I missed a great deal of that. I think we were pretty well buried in our own world and our own world had been dominated by what I'd listened to as I grew up, quite a lot of classics, psychedelic and heavy rock bands including Pink Floyd and so on. And then when Johnny Rotten (the Sex Pistols) arrived, the world was turned upside-down quite literally.He put all of those big bands out of business overnight and London was the place to be. I remember very clearly when Keith (Welsh) and I, our bass player and co-founder of Flowers, we'd been playing almost every night of the week, sometimes nine shows a week. There were clubs all over Sydney, there were clubs all over Melbourne, there were really great bands everywhere and on any given night down the road there'd be Midnight Oil and INXS and any number of bands.When we arrived in London for our very first international tour, we looked at each other and said, 'Let's get a copy of New Musical Express (NME) and go and see a band 'cause this is where it's all coming from!' And there was nothing on!I was absolutely gobsmacked that Sydney was a hundred times more active than London on a club scene. It absolutely mystified me. All the pubs shut early, there was nowhere to go!CAROL DUNCAN: Who did you admire at the time?IVA DAVIES: I didn't buy albums of anybody, I didn't consume music. I was very curious about music but most of what I listened to was via 2JJ. 2JJ was a very progressive station; I think it's been forgotten to some degree. 2JJ were playing things that had been bought on import - they hadn't even been released in Australia yet - and so it was fascinating.We were hearing things we thought before anybody else in the world had heard them, things like Elvis Costello, XTC, mainly British bands but the odd thing coming out of America. There was a real movement of punk and new wave.CAROL DUNCAN: So you and Keith have taken off to London, you're going to see all the bands, but there's no-one home?IVA DAVIES: There's no-one home! I remember thinking at the time, 'Well where did The Cure come from and where did The Clash and The Damned and The Jam come from? Where are they all'?I had imagined that London was heaving with little clubs with all those names playing in them every night but it was really something created through the tyranny of distance, I guess. We had amplified that whole thing that had started with Carnaby Street, The Beatles, and Rolling Stones; and in my mind, and I'm sure in the minds of many other Australians, this was the mecca that we were going to visit. But it turned out it was really as much a product of BBC1 and radio and record companies than it was of an active pub music scene which was exactly what we had in Australia.CAROL DUNCAN: So, what did you do, turn around and come home?IVA DAVIES: We went off touring. We went off touring with Simple Minds who were just starting to break through in Europe. They'd a quite successful album, and we did a reciprocal deal with them where we said, 'OK, if we are your support band in Europe, that will help us, and you come to Australia and be our support band there because nobody knows you. In fact, to this day, and I'm sure Jim Kerr from Simple Minds would take credit in saying that tour we did with them really broke Simple Minds in Australia - it was off the back of that tour that they started achieving success here. Of course, many many albums and many many successes later I still catch up with Jim Kerr quite frequently.CAROL DUNCAN: I remember seeing the two bands at the Manly Vale Hotel.IVA DAVIES: Very possible! That was one of many hotels in that northern beaches area, and I ended up living on the northern beaches by accident. It was quite tribal. There was a very big pub at Narrabeen called the Royal Antler and it was our first proper gig, I guess, and almost residency. At one point we and Midnight Oil were alternating weekends. We never met them, but there was this kind of unspoken rivalry for the same audience of mad, drunken surfies.CAROL DUNCAN: It was one of Sydney's great beer barns.IVA DAVIES: It was and they were mad, of course, mad drunken surfies and probably a few other substances, as well. But they were great nights. It was a big place; I think it held something like 1500 people. And you're right, we probably did attract slightly different audiences, and certainly we also had the other side of us which was playing the inner city hotels which, of course, were very driven by the punk movement, so we'd look out on a place like the Civic Hotel and there'd been a sea of black and safety pins.CAROL DUNCAN: Why did the name change come about? Was it as simple as swapping the band name and album title?IVA DAVIES: It was, but we actually had no choice. What we hadn't realised was that while we were happily going along as Flowers in Australia and New Zealand, as soon as we signed to an international record company and they said, 'We're going to release this around the rest of the world, we need to do a little check on the name. It hadn't even occurred to me that a band name is like a company trading name and, unfortunately, there were at least three other acts around the world trading on the name 'Flowers'. One of them being the very, very famous session bass player, Herbie Flowers, who you probably know best for being the creator of that wonderful bass line that introduces Lou Reed's 'Walk On The Wild Side'.So there were objections and we simply had no choice, we had to come up with another name. This has happened to a number of Australian bands. It happened to Sherbet who became Highway, and The Angels who became Angel City. Our logic was fairly simple - people here in Australia and New Zealand only know us by two things, that is the name of the band 'Flowers' or the name of the album 'Icehouse'. So, we became Icehouse.A band name becomes its identity in a far bigger way that just a set of letters. I've had this discussion with my 17-year old son who has got a collection of friends in a band and they haven't been able to think of anything. I keep asking what the band is called and they're called something different every day. I said 'you better get it right because it will end up owning you'.CAROL DUNCAN: Your son has actually played with you?IVA DAVIES: Yes, oh you know about this! I had a fairly mad idea last year, although the idea had been around since 1983. I remember we were touring in Europe and we had a number one song in Europe so there was a lot of pressure on me. I was doing millions of interviews and we were playing very big festivals of 30,000 people.We were playing on one and I was standing on the side of the stage next to my band and Peter Tosh's band was playing - Peter Tosh was the co-founder of Bob Marley's Wailers - and it was a big band, 9 or 10 people on stage, backing singers and whatnot, and I said to my bass player, "See the guy at the back going chukka, chukka, chukka on the guitar, the laziest job in the world? I want his job. I had a conversation last year with somebody about this moment and they said, 'Why don't you do it?'Our manager thought I was mad, a number of promoters thought I was mad, too, but what we did was completely re-invent Icehouse as an eight-piece reggae band. We added some extra guys from Melbourne to give us a brass section and we re-arranged every one of the hits that we'd been playing in the classic repertoire as reggae songs.We put two shows on - one in Melbourne, one in Sydney - as a kind of Christmas party because my feeling was that the reason we were doing it is because reggae makes you want to dance and smile and laugh, and we had the best possible time, it was just fantastic. We've just released the recording of the Sydney show and re-named the band DubHOUSE - the album is DubHOUSE Live.I wanted to get my children to come. My daughter is OK because she's 20 but my son was under age, under the drinking age, and the only way I could get him in was to put him in the band. So I said to him, 'Look Evan ...' he's17 and a very good guitarist, 'I'm sorry, you're not going to get a rehearsal, you're not going to get a sound check. Here's a recording of a rehearsal of Street Cafe done in this style, you've got the guitar solo, go home and learn it and I'll see you on stage."And so the poor guy was thrown on stage with absolutely no preparation whatsoever, but fortunately, he had done his homework and had a great night.CAROL DUNCAN: How do the kids see your career, Iva?IVA DAVIES: Well the strange truth is that they didn't. I finished the last tour that we did back in the day, as it were, when my daughter was six weeks old. Effectively, we didn't play again and my children grew up.In 2009, our long-time tour manager, Larry, who works for a very big audio production company - he'd been working for with us since 1984 - came up with the idea for Sound Relief (concerts held in Sydney & Melbourne for 2009 bushfire relief) and actually volunteered us, so we were the first band on the bill for Sound Relief.By that time in 2009, my daughter would have been 14 or 13, and my son 12 or 13, and that was the first concert they ever saw me play. So they'd grown up all those years not knowing anything about it, or relatively little.CAROL DUNCAN: Did they think Icehouse was cool or were you 'just Dad' and therefore couldn't possibly be cool?IVA DAVIES: Strangely enough, I seem to have breached the cool barrier into the cool area. A very strange thing happened, before that Sound Relief show and before my daughter really got to appreciate my association with it. She came home from school one afternoon, waltzed in the door and announced, 'I LOVE THE EIGHTIES! I love EVERYTHING about the eighties!'Strangely enough, the eighties are going through a whole new generation of cool at the moment. Except for the hair, and a lot of the clothes.CAROL DUNCAN: When you look at that part of your career, the pop/rock part of your career, what do you see, Iva?IVA DAVIES: I'm proud that we worked very hard, I believe, to maintain a kind of class and a quality. That went through everything, even the recordings themselves. I went through the graduation from vinyl to CD, which was a massive turnaround, and it happened incredibly quickly.I remember having a talk to a record company about it and they said, 'Last year we manufactured 80% out of vinyl and 20% out of CD, this year we're manufacturing 80% out of CD and 20% out of vinyl, and the following year we're not making any vinyl at all. That's how fast it turned around. But 'Measure for Measure', our fourth album is one of the first three fully digital recordings ever made in the world, which was a real milestone, so it's the first completely noiseless recording that was made for the new format of CD. It's moments like that that I reflect on and think, well, that's because we really put a lot of care and attention into these things.CAROL DUNCAN: Iva, you're also seen as one of the pioneers in Australia of bringing in synthesizers, computers, the Fairlight and so on. You mentioned an interesting word there, 'noiseless', and that's perhaps where the feud happens between the vinyl purists and people who are very happy to purchase their music in a digital form whether on CD or via digital download. How do you see the vinyl vs CD war when it comes to audio quality?IVA DAVIES: I noted with some amusement touched with horror a program that Linda Mottram did on 702 in Sydney where there was this discussion about vinyl, and she spoke with a so-called expert who was out of a university, and with due respect to that professor I desperately wanted to call in and say, "Can I just tell you about what actually happens when you're making pieces of vinyl and why they sound the way they do, and how it is absolutely possible to make CDs sound exactly like vinyl IF that were the endgame that you wanted to have in mind.I won't go into it now but the fact of the matter is it's all about a process called mastering. The way that tapes, mixes, were mastered for vinyl had to be very particular because of the intolerance of vinyl - vinyl can't carry very much big bass. I found that out with the Flowers album when I insisted to the co-producer that we put lots of bottom end into it and then realised a bit later on when the mastering engineer said to me, "I can't cut this to vinyl, it's got too much bass in it." They're the sorts of mistakes that you make when you're young.I'm a firm believer in anything that doesn't have moving parts and that is digital. I'm afraid I've moved on from anything old-school quite happily.CAROL DUNCAN: Did you call in?IVA DAVIES: No, I didn't, I just thought it's probably too difficult a conversation to have in detail over the radio but it does infuriate me because I'm sure if you got any mastering engineer on to the radio they'd say to you it's mainly because people don't understand how these things are made.CAROL DUNCAN: What gave you the confidence to leap into these new technologies?IVA DAVIES: Perhaps it was more out of ignorance than anything, I certainly didn't see any risk involved, but the main driver for me was that these were new toys. Every time something new was invented, my eyes would light up and I'd think, 'Imagine the possibilities!'I remember expressly that conversation I had with our management where, out of sheer co-incidence they'd moved offices from where they were in Bondi Junction to the top storey of a two-storey building in Rushcutters Bay and the ground storey was where they made Fairlights, believe it or not. Management were oblivious to this, they had no idea what was going on down there. But I did and I came to the managers one day and said, 'I desperately want to get one of these machines, they are amazing.'Of course, I was proven correct because they revolutionised music forever. I think apart from the technology of recording, the sampler - which is what a Fairlight was - was the single most influential piece of technology ever created. I said this to my management, that I was desperate, that I'd really like one, but the catch was they were $32,000. That was in 1981 or 1982 so you can imagine how much money that was then - it was half a small house.But I got one, and interestingly enough my management were quite philosophical about it. They said, 'Well, it's a lot of money, but according to our calculations you'll pay for this with the first two projects you use it on.' And they were right. The first project I used it on was my very first film score for Russell Mulcahy's 'Razorback', which is about 95% Fairlight.The great irony of that was that I kept producing bits of music, because Russell Mulcahy was out in the desert filming scenes and he kept dragging up Peter Gabriel's fourth album, the one with Shock The Monkey on it, and they were out in the desert with this blasting away on a ghetto blaster and I got it into my head that this was what Russell likes. So I kept producing Gabriel-esque soundscapes and so on, and the producers of the movie kept coming back to me and saying, 'No, no no - that's not what we want, we don't want this.' In the end I was getting various clues from them but didn't really know, but I had another go along the lines of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' - a fairly mad piece of classical music. I constructed all this with the Fairlight, it was a quasi-orchestral thing. I took it back to them and they said, 'Yes! That's exactly it!' and I said, 'Well, if you wanted that sort of thing why didn't you go and get a classical composer.'In its day, 'Rite of Spring' was a controversial piece of music, and Iva Davies shares a birthday with Stravinsky.Considering that it was 1913 when that piece first hit the stage for Diaghilev's ballet company. It wasn't just the music; it was actually the subject matter of the ballet that I think was fairly upsetting to a lot of people. It's all about primal sexualism, basically, so you can imagine that to an audience of 1913 that sort of idea was fairly horrifying.CAROL DUNCAN: In 1984, you've got Razorback, also 'Sidewalk' - the third album from Icehouse, at this point did you consider that you didn't actually have to be a pop star?IVA DAVIES: No, I had a very strange life prior to that because I had a completely Jekyll and Hyde existence. I took up the guitar when I was 13, and taught myself, and it was probably also the year that I started taking oboe lessons. I had these two parallel lives and completely separate lives. I had a set of classical people - when I was in high school I played in a wind quintet and we used to rehearse every Saturday morning. We all had our first cars at that point. They were my friends and we went off and won the City of Sydney Eisteddfod and so on. They never, ever met the guys that I was in the acoustic band with. Ever! Because I just had these two lives. So my course was fairly accidental all the way through, it was probably always going to be accidental.To this day, I keep remembering things that I did. I remembered that I was in the orchestra that was primarily made up of members of the Sydney Symphony and the senior Conservatorium orchestra, of which I was a member, for the staging of the two first Australian ballets in the Opera House. I would have been about 19 and, of course, that's a fairly big moment for the Opera House to have a night featuring Australian opera in that building, and I'd completely forgotten about it. There are things from both lives that I've forgotten about.CAROL DUNCAN: 1985, your double life really starts to change as you start working with the Sydney Dance Company.IVA DAVIES: I have to give credit to our managers to some degree who recognised - Ray Hearn was managing us from the beginning. I think he considered himself to be a very erudite individual, he was very widely read, he'd seen every movie possible, and he had a huge record collection. He wasn't a musician but I think he spotted in me the potential that if I kept on that very two-dimension wheel of 'write an album, record an album, tour an album, write an album, record an album, tour an album ...', that I would burn out, that I needed something else to do. So it was he who went and pursued the soundtrack idea with Russell Mulcahy, and it was he who introduced me to the Sydney Dance Company who were a very dangerous company at that point. People forget that they did ballets entirely naked and this was quite revolutionary stuff in its day. They had a very young, hip audience. So it was a very smart move. But it was also a move that was good for the dance company. I had also forgotten until reminded about a month ago that in the Opera House's entire history this has never been repeated, but they did a very dangerous thing. They put two shows on a Friday and a Saturday night, one at a conventional hour and then a whole other audience would turn up at 10.30 at night and we'd do it all again. The staff at the Opera House thought this was going to be an absolute disaster, 'Nobody's going to go to the Opera House at 10.30pm to see a show', but they did and they were all my audience and they were coming to see what all the fuss was about. It was the most successful season the dance company has ever had.CAROL DUNCAN: Were you worried about your pop/rock audience coming over to see what you were doing and being disappointed?IVA DAVIES: I've always utterly failed to understand what the problem is between the various tribes of music. I started of as a bagpipe player when I was six, and although I went through that very, very particular stream of classical musicians, and they are, and they are a very exclusive lot - a lot of them, and they are a very intolerant lot - a lot of them, I think things have improved. But at that time they very much looked down their nose at 'popular music' and rock and roll, but by the same token it was equally prejudiced the other way around. I've never understood why. I don't get that you have to be one or the other but not all of them. In my head, there was absolutely no problem with my audience turning up to the ballet.CAROL DUNCAN: What gave you the confidence to follow both streams?IVA DAVIES: Only because I can kind of speak both languages. I had a discussion with somebody the other night about music and it is another language. It's certainly a language when you read and write it and I learned how to do that. But my dialogue with rock and roll musicians has to be completely different because most of the people I played with all these years don't read and write music. But rock and roll musicians communicate in a different kind of way. So because I'm comfortable in both of those languages, I can happily flick between the two of them, at whim almost.CAROL DUNCAN: Which is why I don't' let my kids drop out of their violin lessons - I want them to have that other language.IVA DAVIES: From my point of view, by miles, the single biggest advantage I've had in my work and succeeding in the broad framework of popular music is the fact that I was highly trained. That is the most sure, certain way to cut every corner you can - to actually know what you're doing.CAROL DUNCAN: December 31, 1999, and Icehouse is performing at the Millennium New Years Eve concert outside the Sydney Opera House and there is a moment on your face where it's just occurred to you how very special that moment is.IVA DAVIES: The penny really didn't drop, I mean, there was such a lot of pressure involved in that. The transmission, the TV director, Greg Beness, had synchronised a whole lot of footage to be running in parallel with shooting the performance. We had backups of backups because, of course, everybody thought that every computer in the world was going to blow up at midnight being the Y2K bug and so on. It was going out to about four billion people. It's not as if you can get to the end of it and go, 'Oh, we mucked that up, can we have another go?', 'Oh, they've already counted down; we're in a new millennium'. So I was incredibly aware of all of that and actually I've watched back some of the footage and it takes me a fair old while to settle down, it's (The Ghost Of Time) a 25-minute piece and it took me a number of minutes before I was, 'OK, we're up and running, everything seems to be working, everybody knows where they are, I can hear everything ....'I got to the end of it and stepped off the stage, Frank Sartor the Lord Mayor of Sydney gave me a glass of champagne, Richard Wilkins counted down from 10 and the fireworks went off directly over my head and I went, 'Wow!'CAROL DUNCAN: From this point, your other career really takes off and you head off to work on Master and Commander.IVA DAVIES: Yes, I've said to other young bands over the years, 'Just be aware - you never know who will be listening,' and so it was with thus that one person who was listening to The Ghost of Time on the millennium eve as it was going out, one of those four billion people, was one Peter Weir - an iconic Australian film director.This is how bizarre the next few years ended up being for me in terms of things just popping out of seemingly nowhere. I was sitting in my studio one day up on the northern beaches and the phone rang. A voice said, "Iva, this is Peter Weir. I'm filming Master and Commander on location in Baja, Mexico. I've fallen in love with The Ghost of Time. I want you to reassemble your team and give me a score like that."The whole experience was incredible, to go to Hollywood. I remember I had a colleague of mine, my music editor, had worked quite a bit in Hollywood on 'Moulin Rouge' and other things. He took me to the Fox lot and was very well recognised, but the thing that became immediately apparent was how incredibly well-respected Peter Weir is in Hollywood. Even though you don't necessarily associate him with massive blockbuster success time and time again, he's respected by directors and quality people in Hollywood and that's the difference.CAROL DUNCAN: Is it difficult to do this sort of work, to create something to someone else's demands?IVA DAVIES: I was very fortunate because Peter Weir has immense respect for music. He said to me not once, but twice, 'Music is the fountainhead of the arts,' that's how important it is to him. But having said that, he uses it very sparingly and in a very subtle way. So I had the great luxury to have three months to work on what equated to, in the end, not much more than 35 minutes worth of music. If you go and see a movie like 'Lord of the Rings', the composers had to write music from end to end of the film, so we're talking two and a half hours of music. Three months to produce that amount of music meant that it could be done with care but at a fairly unstressed pace, as it were. And that was fantastic. I have no doubt that Peter Weir quite deliberately planned the whole thing that way, so that it would be NOT a stressful operation. He's a consummate film-maker and he knows exactly what he's doing, so he schedules and plans things very well.Having said that, I always knew that the brief of a score writer is to write what the director wants to hear, not what the score writer wants to hear, so that was very apparent and so be it. Very often these films are the vision of a director and music is just one component of that. It should feed into their vision.CAROL DUNCAN: What are the professional moments that you hold dearest to your heart?IVA DAVIES: In terms of recording, I had a quite surreal moment. I was very influenced by one Brian Eno who was an absolute pioneer of synthesizers and electronic music, and in fact probably invented the term 'ambient music'. Of course, he was a founding member of Roxy Music but went on later to become incredibly successful in his own right and especially as a producer, he produced almost all of the U2 albums - massive albums. But I'd been following him since he was an early member of Roxy Music and especially been guided by his approach to synthesizers, which was very esoteric and completely at odds with a lot of the nasty noises that were being produced in the 1980s, for example. And I thank him for that because it probably stopped me from making a lot of bad sonic mistakes.The producer I was using at the time was a friend of his and I found myself having a conversation with the producer about the song we were working on at the time - a song called Cross the Border - I had in mind Brian Eno's backing vocal style. I knew that the producer, Rhett Davies, had worked with Brian Eno. I turned up to Air Studios, another very famous studio in London, to do the vocal session and in came Brian Eno. So there was a moment where I was standing in the studio, standing next to Brian Eno who was singing my lyrics and my backing vocal line. That was a real moment for me because he was a real hero of mine.CAROL DUNCAN: At what point did you realise that you had been successful enough to truly pursue anything that you wanted to do?IVA DAVIES: I spent most of my career not quite believing that things would work. In fact, I remember very clearly - we'd been working for years and years, working around these pubs, the first album came out, and I remember the first royalty cheque turned up. The accountant for the management company asked me into the office and said, 'Well, here's the cheque for the Flowers album for you,' and I looked at it and I'd been broke for years. My parents had to keep paying the odd rent payment for me and so on. We weren't earning any money at all, the album had only just come out, and I saw this cheque and it was for $15,000.I looked at Gino, who I had lunch with today - same accountant, and I said, 'Gino. This is amazing. This is incredible. I know I'm just going to fritter this away. I know I'll never get any more money out of this business. What's the deposit on the cheapest, cheapest, cheapest house in Sydney? Well, I bought the cheapest house in Sydney with that deposit, but of course, it wasn't the last cent that I made out of the music business.But for many years, for a long time, I really didn't consider that it was going to last, that I was going to make any money out of it. It's that classic thing where, luckily my parents didn't call me on the phone and say, 'When are you going to get a proper job?' they were very supportive. I think I was the one secretly calling myself and saying, 'When are you going to get a proper job?'CAROL DUNCAN: What are you still learning?IVA DAVIES: I'm still learning technology because unfortunately, it won't sit still! The industry standard for recording is a system called Pro-Tools, you very possibly use it in the studio there and it's certainly in every recording studio in the world. I've been working with Pro-Tools for a very long time but, of course, like any other software, there's a new release of it every five minutes. So I'm actually getting to the stage when I really am going to have to run to catch up! So unfortunately at my age, I'm still having to learn technology because it's the basic tool of my trade and that's never going to stop.CAROL DUNCAN: Are you still as excited by it as you were in the mid-1970s when you and Keith Welsh started 'Flowers' and when you went and harassed your management to allow you to buy that first Fairlight for $32,000?IVA DAVIES: I think I take it a bit more for granted these days because things have exploded in the way that they have. You can imagine the climate in which a piece of technology like the Fairlight came out; it was just mind-numbing. It was unlike anything anybody could ever imagine, whereas I suppose every time there's a new release of Pro-Tools, it's got a couple of lovely new features but it is a development of something which has been around for much more than a decade now.However, having said that, there seems to be a whole new generation of software writers who are incredibly interested in music and incredibly interested in playing with sound, and these are the people who are coming up with all the new noise generating bits - soft synthesisers and all that sort of stuff. That's kind of where the interesting new area is.CAROL DUNCAN: And Keith Welsh has been on this whole journey with you?IVA DAVIES: Indeed. In the music industry the whole time. He and I have been working closely over the past three years and we've started playing again and we re-released the entire catalogue. We put out a compilation called 'White Heat' which is about to go platinum.CAROL DUNCAN: What would you want the young Iva Davies to know?IVA DAVIES: That's a good question! I think I probably did seize most opportunities that came my way so I wouldn't necessarily say, 'just go as fast as you can with every opportunity that you can', I probably would have said, 'Put more attention to the money and where the money is going and who's getting it!' As a forensic accountant, I'm a kind of 'overview guy' as opposed to a 'detail guy'.
Iva Davies is one of Australia's most accomplished musicians and composers with a career spanning over 30 years with his band Icehouse, and as a composer for film and theatre. I produced this feature music show with him in 2014.The number one song on the Australian pop music charts in 1980 was The Buggles 'Video Killed The Radio Star', accompanied through the year by such gems as Michael Jackson 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough', The Village People 'You Can't Stop The Music', Split Enz 'I Got You', The Vapours 'Turning Japanese' and Queen 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'.In May 1980, Australian radio stations started playing a song by Sydney band, Flowers. 'Can't Help Myself' made it into the Australian Top 10 and was the first song from their debut album, 'Icehouse'. I think I was first in line at my local record store to by the single and was enormously envious of my older brothers who would regularly see Flowers playing at the local pub. IVA DAVIES: We came from quite a distinct stream of music which generated by the punk movement out of Britain, but then it morphed into a strange hybrid because of technology. There was an explosion of technology, especially synthesiser technology, at that period, so we were a kind of punk band with synthesisers which was a bit odd. But clearly, these other people were not, including Michael Jackson! There were all sorts of strange things going on, strange fashions; it was a very interesting time."The first song we put out was called 'Can't Help Myself' and we'd been playing all these classic punk venues for about three years before we put out that first record. I remember being told it had become a disco hit in Melbourne and I was semi-horrified. I was very pleased it was a hit, of course, but a disco hit - we weren't a disco band!By the time we got to 1980 we'd been playing quite a few of our own songs but still had lacings of the odd cover version of things not even particularly fashionable at the time, things like T-Rex songs, but by then we'd really turned into an original band and signed with a small independent label in Sydney called Regular Records and we'd recorded our first album, and although they constitute really the first 10 songs I ever wrote, they did have a certain flavour about them that I guess was, again, a hybrid of punk with synthesizers.CAROL DUNCAN: Iva, you mustn't have been very long out of the Conservatorium by this stage?IVA DAVIES: I dropped out of the (Sydney) Conservatorium when I was about 21, so I was about 23 or 24 by this point.CAROL DUNCAN: So how did you decide to steer your songwriting and music releases in that environment at that time?IVA DAVIES: It's a terrible admission to make considering that 'Can't Help Myself' made it into the Top 10, that I was probably fairly unaware of radio except for 2JJ. That's a terrible admission for somebody who's trying to break into getting airplay on radio!CAROL DUNCAN: Something like The Vapors 'Turning Japanese' would have been all over 2SM (in Sydney) at the time. 2SM would have been the number one commercial pop music station in the late 1970s.IVA DAVIES: Indeed, and I missed a great deal of that. I think we were pretty well buried in our own world and our own world had been dominated by what I'd listened to as I grew up, quite a lot of classics, psychedelic and heavy rock bands including Pink Floyd and so on. And then when Johnny Rotten (the Sex Pistols) arrived, the world was turned upside-down quite literally.He put all of those big bands out of business overnight and London was the place to be. I remember very clearly when Keith (Welsh) and I, our bass player and co-founder of Flowers, we'd been playing almost every night of the week, sometimes nine shows a week. There were clubs all over Sydney, there were clubs all over Melbourne, there were really great bands everywhere and on any given night down the road there'd be Midnight Oil and INXS and any number of bands.When we arrived in London for our very first international tour, we looked at each other and said, 'Let's get a copy of New Musical Express (NME) and go and see a band 'cause this is where it's all coming from!' And there was nothing on!I was absolutely gobsmacked that Sydney was a hundred times more active than London on a club scene. It absolutely mystified me. All the pubs shut early, there was nowhere to go!CAROL DUNCAN: Who did you admire at the time?IVA DAVIES: I didn't buy albums of anybody, I didn't consume music. I was very curious about music but most of what I listened to was via 2JJ. 2JJ was a very progressive station; I think it's been forgotten to some degree. 2JJ were playing things that had been bought on import - they hadn't even been released in Australia yet - and so it was fascinating.We were hearing things we thought before anybody else in the world had heard them, things like Elvis Costello, XTC, mainly British bands but the odd thing coming out of America. There was a real movement of punk and new wave.CAROL DUNCAN: So you and Keith have taken off to London, you're going to see all the bands, but there's no-one home?IVA DAVIES: There's no-one home! I remember thinking at the time, 'Well where did The Cure come from and where did The Clash and The Damned and The Jam come from? Where are they all'?I had imagined that London was heaving with little clubs with all those names playing in them every night but it was really something created through the tyranny of distance, I guess. We had amplified that whole thing that had started with Carnaby Street, The Beatles, and Rolling Stones; and in my mind, and I'm sure in the minds of many other Australians, this was the mecca that we were going to visit. But it turned out it was really as much a product of BBC1 and radio and record companies than it was of an active pub music scene which was exactly what we had in Australia.CAROL DUNCAN: So, what did you do, turn around and come home?IVA DAVIES: We went off touring. We went off touring with Simple Minds who were just starting to break through in Europe. They'd a quite successful album, and we did a reciprocal deal with them where we said, 'OK, if we are your support band in Europe, that will help us, and you come to Australia and be our support band there because nobody knows you. In fact, to this day, and I'm sure Jim Kerr from Simple Minds would take credit in saying that tour we did with them really broke Simple Minds in Australia - it was off the back of that tour that they started achieving success here. Of course, many many albums and many many successes later I still catch up with Jim Kerr quite frequently.CAROL DUNCAN: I remember seeing the two bands at the Manly Vale Hotel.IVA DAVIES: Very possible! That was one of many hotels in that northern beaches area, and I ended up living on the northern beaches by accident. It was quite tribal. There was a very big pub at Narrabeen called the Royal Antler and it was our first proper gig, I guess, and almost residency. At one point we and Midnight Oil were alternating weekends. We never met them, but there was this kind of unspoken rivalry for the same audience of mad, drunken surfies.CAROL DUNCAN: It was one of Sydney's great beer barns.IVA DAVIES: It was and they were mad, of course, mad drunken surfies and probably a few other substances, as well. But they were great nights. It was a big place; I think it held something like 1500 people. And you're right, we probably did attract slightly different audiences, and certainly we also had the other side of us which was playing the inner city hotels which, of course, were very driven by the punk movement, so we'd look out on a place like the Civic Hotel and there'd been a sea of black and safety pins.CAROL DUNCAN: Why did the name change come about? Was it as simple as swapping the band name and album title?IVA DAVIES: It was, but we actually had no choice. What we hadn't realised was that while we were happily going along as Flowers in Australia and New Zealand, as soon as we signed to an international record company and they said, 'We're going to release this around the rest of the world, we need to do a little check on the name. It hadn't even occurred to me that a band name is like a company trading name and, unfortunately, there were at least three other acts around the world trading on the name 'Flowers'. One of them being the very, very famous session bass player, Herbie Flowers, who you probably know best for being the creator of that wonderful bass line that introduces Lou Reed's 'Walk On The Wild Side'.So there were objections and we simply had no choice, we had to come up with another name. This has happened to a number of Australian bands. It happened to Sherbet who became Highway, and The Angels who became Angel City. Our logic was fairly simple - people here in Australia and New Zealand only know us by two things, that is the name of the band 'Flowers' or the name of the album 'Icehouse'. So, we became Icehouse.A band name becomes its identity in a far bigger way that just a set of letters. I've had this discussion with my 17-year old son who has got a collection of friends in a band and they haven't been able to think of anything. I keep asking what the band is called and they're called something different every day. I said 'you better get it right because it will end up owning you'.CAROL DUNCAN: Your son has actually played with you?IVA DAVIES: Yes, oh you know about this! I had a fairly mad idea last year, although the idea had been around since 1983. I remember we were touring in Europe and we had a number one song in Europe so there was a lot of pressure on me. I was doing millions of interviews and we were playing very big festivals of 30,000 people.We were playing on one and I was standing on the side of the stage next to my band and Peter Tosh's band was playing - Peter Tosh was the co-founder of Bob Marley's Wailers - and it was a big band, 9 or 10 people on stage, backing singers and whatnot, and I said to my bass player, "See the guy at the back going chukka, chukka, chukka on the guitar, the laziest job in the world? I want his job. I had a conversation last year with somebody about this moment and they said, 'Why don't you do it?'Our manager thought I was mad, a number of promoters thought I was mad, too, but what we did was completely re-invent Icehouse as an eight-piece reggae band. We added some extra guys from Melbourne to give us a brass section and we re-arranged every one of the hits that we'd been playing in the classic repertoire as reggae songs.We put two shows on - one in Melbourne, one in Sydney - as a kind of Christmas party because my feeling was that the reason we were doing it is because reggae makes you want to dance and smile and laugh, and we had the best possible time, it was just fantastic. We've just released the recording of the Sydney show and re-named the band DubHOUSE - the album is DubHOUSE Live.I wanted to get my children to come. My daughter is OK because she's 20 but my son was under age, under the drinking age, and the only way I could get him in was to put him in the band. So I said to him, 'Look Evan ...' he's17 and a very good guitarist, 'I'm sorry, you're not going to get a rehearsal, you're not going to get a sound check. Here's a recording of a rehearsal of Street Cafe done in this style, you've got the guitar solo, go home and learn it and I'll see you on stage."And so the poor guy was thrown on stage with absolutely no preparation whatsoever, but fortunately, he had done his homework and had a great night.CAROL DUNCAN: How do the kids see your career, Iva?IVA DAVIES: Well the strange truth is that they didn't. I finished the last tour that we did back in the day, as it were, when my daughter was six weeks old. Effectively, we didn't play again and my children grew up.In 2009, our long-time tour manager, Larry, who works for a very big audio production company - he'd been working for with us since 1984 - came up with the idea for Sound Relief (concerts held in Sydney & Melbourne for 2009 bushfire relief) and actually volunteered us, so we were the first band on the bill for Sound Relief.By that time in 2009, my daughter would have been 14 or 13, and my son 12 or 13, and that was the first concert they ever saw me play. So they'd grown up all those years not knowing anything about it, or relatively little.CAROL DUNCAN: Did they think Icehouse was cool or were you 'just Dad' and therefore couldn't possibly be cool?IVA DAVIES: Strangely enough, I seem to have breached the cool barrier into the cool area. A very strange thing happened, before that Sound Relief show and before my daughter really got to appreciate my association with it. She came home from school one afternoon, waltzed in the door and announced, 'I LOVE THE EIGHTIES! I love EVERYTHING about the eighties!'Strangely enough, the eighties are going through a whole new generation of cool at the moment. Except for the hair, and a lot of the clothes.CAROL DUNCAN: When you look at that part of your career, the pop/rock part of your career, what do you see, Iva?IVA DAVIES: I'm proud that we worked very hard, I believe, to maintain a kind of class and a quality. That went through everything, even the recordings themselves. I went through the graduation from vinyl to CD, which was a massive turnaround, and it happened incredibly quickly.I remember having a talk to a record company about it and they said, 'Last year we manufactured 80% out of vinyl and 20% out of CD, this year we're manufacturing 80% out of CD and 20% out of vinyl, and the following year we're not making any vinyl at all. That's how fast it turned around. But 'Measure for Measure', our fourth album is one of the first three fully digital recordings ever made in the world, which was a real milestone, so it's the first completely noiseless recording that was made for the new format of CD. It's moments like that that I reflect on and think, well, that's because we really put a lot of care and attention into these things.CAROL DUNCAN: Iva, you're also seen as one of the pioneers in Australia of bringing in synthesizers, computers, the Fairlight and so on. You mentioned an interesting word there, 'noiseless', and that's perhaps where the feud happens between the vinyl purists and people who are very happy to purchase their music in a digital form whether on CD or via digital download. How do you see the vinyl vs CD war when it comes to audio quality?IVA DAVIES: I noted with some amusement touched with horror a program that Linda Mottram did on 702 in Sydney where there was this discussion about vinyl, and she spoke with a so-called expert who was out of a university, and with due respect to that professor I desperately wanted to call in and say, "Can I just tell you about what actually happens when you're making pieces of vinyl and why they sound the way they do, and how it is absolutely possible to make CDs sound exactly like vinyl IF that were the endgame that you wanted to have in mind.I won't go into it now but the fact of the matter is it's all about a process called mastering. The way that tapes, mixes, were mastered for vinyl had to be very particular because of the intolerance of vinyl - vinyl can't carry very much big bass. I found that out with the Flowers album when I insisted to the co-producer that we put lots of bottom end into it and then realised a bit later on when the mastering engineer said to me, "I can't cut this to vinyl, it's got too much bass in it." They're the sorts of mistakes that you make when you're young.I'm a firm believer in anything that doesn't have moving parts and that is digital. I'm afraid I've moved on from anything old-school quite happily.CAROL DUNCAN: Did you call in?IVA DAVIES: No, I didn't, I just thought it's probably too difficult a conversation to have in detail over the radio but it does infuriate me because I'm sure if you got any mastering engineer on to the radio they'd say to you it's mainly because people don't understand how these things are made.CAROL DUNCAN: What gave you the confidence to leap into these new technologies?IVA DAVIES: Perhaps it was more out of ignorance than anything, I certainly didn't see any risk involved, but the main driver for me was that these were new toys. Every time something new was invented, my eyes would light up and I'd think, 'Imagine the possibilities!'I remember expressly that conversation I had with our management where, out of sheer co-incidence they'd moved offices from where they were in Bondi Junction to the top storey of a two-storey building in Rushcutters Bay and the ground storey was where they made Fairlights, believe it or not. Management were oblivious to this, they had no idea what was going on down there. But I did and I came to the managers one day and said, 'I desperately want to get one of these machines, they are amazing.'Of course, I was proven correct because they revolutionised music forever. I think apart from the technology of recording, the sampler - which is what a Fairlight was - was the single most influential piece of technology ever created. I said this to my management, that I was desperate, that I'd really like one, but the catch was they were $32,000. That was in 1981 or 1982 so you can imagine how much money that was then - it was half a small house.But I got one, and interestingly enough my management were quite philosophical about it. They said, 'Well, it's a lot of money, but according to our calculations you'll pay for this with the first two projects you use it on.' And they were right. The first project I used it on was my very first film score for Russell Mulcahy's 'Razorback', which is about 95% Fairlight.The great irony of that was that I kept producing bits of music, because Russell Mulcahy was out in the desert filming scenes and he kept dragging up Peter Gabriel's fourth album, the one with Shock The Monkey on it, and they were out in the desert with this blasting away on a ghetto blaster and I got it into my head that this was what Russell likes. So I kept producing Gabriel-esque soundscapes and so on, and the producers of the movie kept coming back to me and saying, 'No, no no - that's not what we want, we don't want this.' In the end I was getting various clues from them but didn't really know, but I had another go along the lines of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' - a fairly mad piece of classical music. I constructed all this with the Fairlight, it was a quasi-orchestral thing. I took it back to them and they said, 'Yes! That's exactly it!' and I said, 'Well, if you wanted that sort of thing why didn't you go and get a classical composer.'In its day, 'Rite of Spring' was a controversial piece of music, and Iva Davies shares a birthday with Stravinsky.Considering that it was 1913 when that piece first hit the stage for Diaghilev's ballet company. It wasn't just the music; it was actually the subject matter of the ballet that I think was fairly upsetting to a lot of people. It's all about primal sexualism, basically, so you can imagine that to an audience of 1913 that sort of idea was fairly horrifying.CAROL DUNCAN: In 1984, you've got Razorback, also 'Sidewalk' - the third album from Icehouse, at this point did you consider that you didn't actually have to be a pop star?IVA DAVIES: No, I had a very strange life prior to that because I had a completely Jekyll and Hyde existence. I took up the guitar when I was 13, and taught myself, and it was probably also the year that I started taking oboe lessons. I had these two parallel lives and completely separate lives. I had a set of classical people - when I was in high school I played in a wind quintet and we used to rehearse every Saturday morning. We all had our first cars at that point. They were my friends and we went off and won the City of Sydney Eisteddfod and so on. They never, ever met the guys that I was in the acoustic band with. Ever! Because I just had these two lives. So my course was fairly accidental all the way through, it was probably always going to be accidental.To this day, I keep remembering things that I did. I remembered that I was in the orchestra that was primarily made up of members of the Sydney Symphony and the senior Conservatorium orchestra, of which I was a member, for the staging of the two first Australian ballets in the Opera House. I would have been about 19 and, of course, that's a fairly big moment for the Opera House to have a night featuring Australian opera in that building, and I'd completely forgotten about it. There are things from both lives that I've forgotten about.CAROL DUNCAN: 1985, your double life really starts to change as you start working with the Sydney Dance Company.IVA DAVIES: I have to give credit to our managers to some degree who recognised - Ray Hearn was managing us from the beginning. I think he considered himself to be a very erudite individual, he was very widely read, he'd seen every movie possible, and he had a huge record collection. He wasn't a musician but I think he spotted in me the potential that if I kept on that very two-dimension wheel of 'write an album, record an album, tour an album, write an album, record an album, tour an album ...', that I would burn out, that I needed something else to do. So it was he who went and pursued the soundtrack idea with Russell Mulcahy, and it was he who introduced me to the Sydney Dance Company who were a very dangerous company at that point. People forget that they did ballets entirely naked and this was quite revolutionary stuff in its day. They had a very young, hip audience. So it was a very smart move. But it was also a move that was good for the dance company. I had also forgotten until reminded about a month ago that in the Opera House's entire history this has never been repeated, but they did a very dangerous thing. They put two shows on a Friday and a Saturday night, one at a conventional hour and then a whole other audience would turn up at 10.30 at night and we'd do it all again. The staff at the Opera House thought this was going to be an absolute disaster, 'Nobody's going to go to the Opera House at 10.30pm to see a show', but they did and they were all my audience and they were coming to see what all the fuss was about. It was the most successful season the dance company has ever had.CAROL DUNCAN: Were you worried about your pop/rock audience coming over to see what you were doing and being disappointed?IVA DAVIES: I've always utterly failed to understand what the problem is between the various tribes of music. I started of as a bagpipe player when I was six, and although I went through that very, very particular stream of classical musicians, and they are, and they are a very exclusive lot - a lot of them, and they are a very intolerant lot - a lot of them, I think things have improved. But at that time they very much looked down their nose at 'popular music' and rock and roll, but by the same token it was equally prejudiced the other way around. I've never understood why. I don't get that you have to be one or the other but not all of them. In my head, there was absolutely no problem with my audience turning up to the ballet.CAROL DUNCAN: What gave you the confidence to follow both streams?IVA DAVIES: Only because I can kind of speak both languages. I had a discussion with somebody the other night about music and it is another language. It's certainly a language when you read and write it and I learned how to do that. But my dialogue with rock and roll musicians has to be completely different because most of the people I played with all these years don't read and write music. But rock and roll musicians communicate in a different kind of way. So because I'm comfortable in both of those languages, I can happily flick between the two of them, at whim almost.CAROL DUNCAN: Which is why I don't' let my kids drop out of their violin lessons - I want them to have that other language.IVA DAVIES: From my point of view, by miles, the single biggest advantage I've had in my work and succeeding in the broad framework of popular music is the fact that I was highly trained. That is the most sure, certain way to cut every corner you can - to actually know what you're doing.CAROL DUNCAN: December 31, 1999, and Icehouse is performing at the Millennium New Years Eve concert outside the Sydney Opera House and there is a moment on your face where it's just occurred to you how very special that moment is.IVA DAVIES: The penny really didn't drop, I mean, there was such a lot of pressure involved in that. The transmission, the TV director, Greg Beness, had synchronised a whole lot of footage to be running in parallel with shooting the performance. We had backups of backups because, of course, everybody thought that every computer in the world was going to blow up at midnight being the Y2K bug and so on. It was going out to about four billion people. It's not as if you can get to the end of it and go, 'Oh, we mucked that up, can we have another go?', 'Oh, they've already counted down; we're in a new millennium'. So I was incredibly aware of all of that and actually I've watched back some of the footage and it takes me a fair old while to settle down, it's (The Ghost Of Time) a 25-minute piece and it took me a number of minutes before I was, 'OK, we're up and running, everything seems to be working, everybody knows where they are, I can hear everything ....'I got to the end of it and stepped off the stage, Frank Sartor the Lord Mayor of Sydney gave me a glass of champagne, Richard Wilkins counted down from 10 and the fireworks went off directly over my head and I went, 'Wow!'CAROL DUNCAN: From this point, your other career really takes off and you head off to work on Master and Commander.IVA DAVIES: Yes, I've said to other young bands over the years, 'Just be aware - you never know who will be listening,' and so it was with thus that one person who was listening to The Ghost of Time on the millennium eve as it was going out, one of those four billion people, was one Peter Weir - an iconic Australian film director.This is how bizarre the next few years ended up being for me in terms of things just popping out of seemingly nowhere. I was sitting in my studio one day up on the northern beaches and the phone rang. A voice said, "Iva, this is Peter Weir. I'm filming Master and Commander on location in Baja, Mexico. I've fallen in love with The Ghost of Time. I want you to reassemble your team and give me a score like that."The whole experience was incredible, to go to Hollywood. I remember I had a colleague of mine, my music editor, had worked quite a bit in Hollywood on 'Moulin Rouge' and other things. He took me to the Fox lot and was very well recognised, but the thing that became immediately apparent was how incredibly well-respected Peter Weir is in Hollywood. Even though you don't necessarily associate him with massive blockbuster success time and time again, he's respected by directors and quality people in Hollywood and that's the difference.CAROL DUNCAN: Is it difficult to do this sort of work, to create something to someone else's demands?IVA DAVIES: I was very fortunate because Peter Weir has immense respect for music. He said to me not once, but twice, 'Music is the fountainhead of the arts,' that's how important it is to him. But having said that, he uses it very sparingly and in a very subtle way. So I had the great luxury to have three months to work on what equated to, in the end, not much more than 35 minutes worth of music. If you go and see a movie like 'Lord of the Rings', the composers had to write music from end to end of the film, so we're talking two and a half hours of music. Three months to produce that amount of music meant that it could be done with care but at a fairly unstressed pace, as it were. And that was fantastic. I have no doubt that Peter Weir quite deliberately planned the whole thing that way, so that it would be NOT a stressful operation. He's a consummate film-maker and he knows exactly what he's doing, so he schedules and plans things very well.Having said that, I always knew that the brief of a score writer is to write what the director wants to hear, not what the score writer wants to hear, so that was very apparent and so be it. Very often these films are the vision of a director and music is just one component of that. It should feed into their vision.CAROL DUNCAN: What are the professional moments that you hold dearest to your heart?IVA DAVIES: In terms of recording, I had a quite surreal moment. I was very influenced by one Brian Eno who was an absolute pioneer of synthesizers and electronic music, and in fact probably invented the term 'ambient music'. Of course, he was a founding member of Roxy Music but went on later to become incredibly successful in his own right and especially as a producer, he produced almost all of the U2 albums - massive albums. But I'd been following him since he was an early member of Roxy Music and especially been guided by his approach to synthesizers, which was very esoteric and completely at odds with a lot of the nasty noises that were being produced in the 1980s, for example. And I thank him for that because it probably stopped me from making a lot of bad sonic mistakes.The producer I was using at the time was a friend of his and I found myself having a conversation with the producer about the song we were working on at the time - a song called Cross the Border - I had in mind Brian Eno's backing vocal style. I knew that the producer, Rhett Davies, had worked with Brian Eno. I turned up to Air Studios, another very famous studio in London, to do the vocal session and in came Brian Eno. So there was a moment where I was standing in the studio, standing next to Brian Eno who was singing my lyrics and my backing vocal line. That was a real moment for me because he was a real hero of mine.CAROL DUNCAN: At what point did you realise that you had been successful enough to truly pursue anything that you wanted to do?IVA DAVIES: I spent most of my career not quite believing that things would work. In fact, I remember very clearly - we'd been working for years and years, working around these pubs, the first album came out, and I remember the first royalty cheque turned up. The accountant for the management company asked me into the office and said, 'Well, here's the cheque for the Flowers album for you,' and I looked at it and I'd been broke for years. My parents had to keep paying the odd rent payment for me and so on. We weren't earning any money at all, the album had only just come out, and I saw this cheque and it was for $15,000.I looked at Gino, who I had lunch with today - same accountant, and I said, 'Gino. This is amazing. This is incredible. I know I'm just going to fritter this away. I know I'll never get any more money out of this business. What's the deposit on the cheapest, cheapest, cheapest house in Sydney? Well, I bought the cheapest house in Sydney with that deposit, but of course, it wasn't the last cent that I made out of the music business.But for many years, for a long time, I really didn't consider that it was going to last, that I was going to make any money out of it. It's that classic thing where, luckily my parents didn't call me on the phone and say, 'When are you going to get a proper job?' they were very supportive. I think I was the one secretly calling myself and saying, 'When are you going to get a proper job?'CAROL DUNCAN: What are you still learning?IVA DAVIES: I'm still learning technology because unfortunately, it won't sit still! The industry standard for recording is a system called Pro-Tools, you very possibly use it in the studio there and it's certainly in every recording studio in the world. I've been working with Pro-Tools for a very long time but, of course, like any other software, there's a new release of it every five minutes. So I'm actually getting to the stage when I really am going to have to run to catch up! So unfortunately at my age, I'm still having to learn technology because it's the basic tool of my trade and that's never going to stop.CAROL DUNCAN: Are you still as excited by it as you were in the mid-1970s when you and Keith Welsh started 'Flowers' and when you went and harassed your management to allow you to buy that first Fairlight for $32,000?IVA DAVIES: I think I take it a bit more for granted these days because things have exploded in the way that they have. You can imagine the climate in which a piece of technology like the Fairlight came out; it was just mind-numbing. It was unlike anything anybody could ever imagine, whereas I suppose every time there's a new release of Pro-Tools, it's got a couple of lovely new features but it is a development of something which has been around for much more than a decade now.However, having said that, there seems to be a whole new generation of software writers who are incredibly interested in music and incredibly interested in playing with sound, and these are the people who are coming up with all the new noise generating bits - soft synthesisers and all that sort of stuff. That's kind of where the interesting new area is.CAROL DUNCAN: And Keith Welsh has been on this whole journey with you?IVA DAVIES: Indeed. In the music industry the whole time. He and I have been working closely over the past three years and we've started playing again and we re-released the entire catalogue. We put out a compilation called 'White Heat' which is about to go platinum.CAROL DUNCAN: What would you want the young Iva Davies to know?IVA DAVIES: That's a good question! I think I probably did seize most opportunities that came my way so I wouldn't necessarily say, 'just go as fast as you can with every opportunity that you can', I probably would have said, 'Put more attention to the money and where the money is going and who's getting it!' As a forensic accountant, I'm a kind of 'overview guy' as opposed to a 'detail guy'.
The Icehouse Frontman talks to Strawny... The Red Hot Summer Tour hits Westport Park Sat April 7 presnted by Triple MSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Segments Include:- What's the buzz- Mounce Review: Jonesy road tests new toothpaste- Man takes a cheese platter into an AFL game - Amanda's girls weekend away- Icehouse star Iva Davies talks about playing at our Backyard JAM -- Reaction Line: Charles or William as the next Head of the Throne?- We speak tp former Westpac boss Gail Kelly - City 2 Surf over the weekend- We chat to Survivor evictee Sam- GooliesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The true blue Chris Dicker and ol' cobber Paul McWhirter break down the Australian giant boar movie Razorback (1984). We don't really ask the questions; would you spoon-a-roo? How much influence did Iva Davies really have? And why was Dicko Dicko? Follow us on socials @itmompod or email us at itmompod@gmail.com if ya wanna suggest a film/movie/turd!
To close Rocktober 2016, we interview one of Australia's greatest ever songwriters, front man for iconic Aussie band Icehouse - Iva Davies. Iva led Icehouse to an amazing 28 platinum records, 8 top 10 albums and 30 top 40 singles. We dig into Iva's creative writing process, his experimentation in musical instruments and sound, and how that led to the band writing some of the most iconic anthems in Australian rock music. This show uncovers useable, practical tips and tools for writing regardless of whether its copy for a presentation, website, a speech or a poem. If you have a desire to enhance your writing skills, you will find this show GOLD. Iva's musical skills for writing extend from rock to soundtracks for Hollywood films, ballet, television and special events like the Olympics. The Mojo Radio Show copyright Gary Bertwistle & Darren Robertson Products or companies we discuss are not paid endorsements. They are not sponsored by, nor do we have any professional or affiliate relationship of any kind with any of the companies or products highlighted in the show.... sadly! It's just stuff we like, think is cool and maybe of interest to you our listeners. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Título original Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World Año 2003 Duración 137 min. País Estados Unidos Estados Unidos Director Peter Weir Guión Peter Weir, John Collee (Novelas: Patrick O'Brian) Música Christopher Gordon, Iva Davies, Richard Tognetti Fotografía Russell Boyd Reparto Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany, James D'Arcy, Max Pirkis, Lee Ingleby, Robert Pugh, David Threlfall, Edward Woodall, Ian Mercer, Billy Boyd, Joseph Morgan, Richard McCabe, Chris Larkin, George Innes, Mark Lewis Jones, Bryan Dick, Alex Palmer, John DeSantis, Patrick Gallagher, Ousmane Thiam, Thierry Segall Productora 20th Century Fox / Miramax / Universal Pictures Género Aventuras. Acción | Siglo XIX. Aventuras marinas. Guerras Napoleónicas. Capa y espada. Cine épico Web oficial http://www.masterandcommanderthefarsideoftheworld.com Sinopsis Guerras napoleónicas, año 1805. Bonaparte domina Europa. Inglaterra consigue resistir porque es la primera potencia naval del mundo. Precisamente por eso los mares se convierten en un crucial y estratégico campo de batalla. En el Atlántico, el Surprise, un navío inglés capitaneado por Jack Aubrey (Crowe), es atacado por sorpresa por un buque de guerra francés. A pesar de los graves daños sufridos por la nave, Aubrey decide navegar a través de dos mares para interceptar y capturar al enemigo. Se trata de una misión que puede determinar el destino de toda una nación.
Illusionist Productions - The Home of Doctor Who Fan Audio Productions!
Download MP3 (61MB)"MIND THE GAP!"The Tom Denham EraSeason 1, Episode 5Two trains, six passengers and a dimensional doorway that shouldn't exist. Just another day for the Doctor but too much for others to take. In this adventure, saving everyone might be a bit tougher than usual.Written by W.D. Stevens & Tom DenhamDirected by W.D. StevensIncidental Music by W.D. Stevens and Iva DaviesTheme Arr. Ned WarrenTom Denham (The Doctor), Nari Riis (Luna),Elice Rebecca (Penelope/Underground Driver), Jessica Hayden (Jade/Tannoy),William R. Stone (Eric), W.D. Stevens (Gary/Attendant/Ghan Driver),Michael Slee (Husband), Therese Slee (Wife)