Icehouse frontman Iva Davies says his band has a long history with Cold Chisel. Photo: supplied
Icehouse frontman Iva Davies' wild transition from a highly trained classical oboe musician to the world of rock and punk has seen him grace the stage with artists they admire, including David Bowie and Cold Chisel.
Icehouse are among the artists coming to New Zealand, alongside Bic Runga and everclear, as part of the Summer Concert tour in Queenstown, Whitianga and Taupo, from 18-26 January.
Davies told Summer Times host Anna Thomas they will also be reunited with Cold Chisel, with whom they've also got a long history. Both were picked up by managers who broke away from the monopoly of the music industry in their early days.
"The whole way through that period, we were a bit like younger brother apprentices, really. So in order to showcase us, we did a heap of support shows, both with The Angels and with Cold Chisel.
"I'm an incredible admirer of their legacy of song catalogue … in fact, if you go and have a look at that very first Flowers album, you'll find Ian Moss as a special guest guitarist on a song called 'Skin'.
"We were well aware when we were supporting them as very young men that, you know, Jimmy Barnes was a hell raiser, and every show for him was take no prisoners, and that's the kind of guy he is. On the other hand, we had moments of quite dark, dark music that's of a completely different genre to the flat-out rock and roll that Chisel plays. So I'm looking forward to it immensely."
Davies found his musical talent in his first year of high school, when he received a handmade French oboe and went on to get a scholarship at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, one of the oldest and most prestigious Australian music schools.
"By the time I was 20, I was the principal oboist of a working professional orchestra, which was extraordinary."
But he was forced to quit after taking his oboe to a repair shop in Sydney, which ruined the instrument, something he now recognises was a huge mistake because it needed to be sent back to Paris for any adjustments.
"They weren't the sort of things you could pick up in music shops. They were the sort of things that you would order and then wait literally a year or two years for. So I actually had no chance of progressing any further at all, physically, as a classical musician, and the only other thing I had left that was a possibility was the fact that I could also play the guitar."
On his 21st birthday, he bought a second-hand electric guitar and sealed his fate as the frontman of Flowers (now Icehouse).
"It was, in one sense, an absolutely devastating turn of events to have that oboe wrecked. In another sense, it was an amazing sliding door.
"Something in me sort of whispered that that classical training that I had gave me some kind of ability to create something that's going to at least not go out of immediate fashion, that's not of the moment. And we were very conscious, even down to the sort of clothes that we wore that we didn't want to associate ourselves with any particular short-lived fad of fashion that happened at the time.
"I sort of always referred myself mentally as the ultimate maverick, because, of course, as soon as I started a punk band, all my classical associates disowned me. And then, of course, I was never welcomed to the punk world because I was a highly trained classical musician."
In a bid to find the Gibson Les Paul custom guitar, referred to as "Black Beauty", Davies has put out a call on social media with a four-minute short film.
"It's bizarre, the sort of effect that it had on me, because I realised, when I was putting together this story to do this movie [about the guitar], that a good 13 years went past from when that guitar was stolen and eight studio albums. And on the eighth studio album, I wrote a song called stolen guitar. I was still scarred by it.
"We were still a relatively small band, and it got stolen as we were packing up from a tiny pub on Broadway George Street in Sydney … I went through about another six Les Pauls in very quick succession trying to replace it, but I never really did that successfully."
He says it's recognisable because he made a few changes to the guitar, which he believes he bought from band Air Supply's lead guitarist.
