First published on 2 Sep 2011. Updated on 29 Nov 2011.
With the new White Heat compilation on shelves, festival berths at Homebake and Meredith , a tour with old friends Hall & Oates and a career-spanning reissue series in train, 2011 is already looking like the second coming of Icehouse. Andrew P Street talks to Iva Davies about looking back while looking forward.
The reactivation of Icehouse must have been in the works for a while?
A lot of it has come together surprisingly quickly. That catalyst is that I’m now working again with Keith Welsch, who was a co-founder of Flowers/Icehouse. He was the bass player at the time, but he’s been very heavily involved with the music industry for the last 30 years, managing bands, and record companies and publishing companies and so on. I guess to some extent I’ve been lacking in hands on management for quite a long time up until reuniting with Keith.
It's been a surprise – if you had asked me a year ago what Icehouse’s status was, I would have said, “Well that’s that.”
Well, I’ve never closed down the entity of Icehouse, like other bands did, because I always thought that that was folly. What happened was that around 1994 I started becoming involved with extra curriculum activities, the first major one of those being my second major ballet for the Sydney Dance Company [Berlin], and from there a number of projects came up. The 25 minutes piece for the Millennium based on ‘Great Southern Land’ took me nearly a year to put together, and that in turn triggered work for the Olympic Games, then I got the amazing call from Peter Weir to do [the score for] Master and Commander, and then I was invited to be involved in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Pan-Asian games… They were all incredible opportunities, but they were all removed from work with the band. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually engaged with the guitar.
Well, that’s been true for a while: early 80s albums Primitive Man and Measure for Measure were mainly, if not exclusively done on keyboards and Fairlights [music computers], were they not?
Well, it’s an interesting observation. Really, if you were to put down a list of all the hundred-odd songs, probably only four I could attribute to being written on or with the guitar. The rest of them were derived from keyboards or samples or some kind of computer keyboard technology.
Even the first album?
The Flowers period was very heavily dominated by my relationship with the guitar, even though some of the songs on that album were completely derived from keyboard technology. The song ‘Icehouse’is a perfect example of that: we bought a new string synthesizer and I took it home and fiddled with it all night with a tape recorder and created that song. So yes you're right, because I hadn’t been involved in a lot of these albums to any heavy extent, but over these last 14 years or so I really have very rarely picked up a guitar.
So the calluses are completely gone?
Well, they’re back again now. [laughs]
Keith aside, are you still in touch with the old members? There’s been what, 20 or more people through the band over the years.
There's a quite a family of Icehouse players. It is rather peculiar arrangement I suppose, but when you get right down to it they’re very long term relationships. I still have regular contact with Guy Pratt, who played bass for us back in 1982.
Oh, you read it? He rang me before he was about to write the book and asked me whether I had any stories to tell and I gave him quite a bit of material which ended up in the book that he had forgotten about; we’ve both forgotten a great many things. [laughs] There are things that happened with the band on tour that I had no idea about. These stories about the band just keep emerging, a lot of them are extremely funny.
Like that [80s-era keyboardist] Andy Qunta had been in a porno film?
Well, the interesting thing about that was that I had no idea about it. It was a series that was apparently quite famous, and the series was called Electric Blue. I had no absolutely no knowledge of it: he appeared in a gorilla suit in one of them.
Seriously? He must have snickered a lot when you wrote that song.
He must have! [laughs] Actually, I’ve never discussed it with him!
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