ICEHOUSE

Does music soothe the savage beast? Iva Davies sure wishes he knew. Icehouse’s singer, songwriter, guitarist and chairman of the board may be something of a musical yuppie, but, having been born in the rain forests of Australia, he’s a tad more familiar with man-eating reptiles than the average Izod wearer.

Too familiar, in fact. While the Sydney band was in the tropical Oz town of Darwin last September, Iva spent his free time windsurfing, until he was approached by a large, underwater spectator with a snout, two beady eyes and too many teeth. Iva did exactly what anyone in the same bloodcurdling predicament would do: he pressed the panic button and promptly fell off the board. Luckily, he actually outswam the 16-foot seawater crocodile to the shore.

It’s an unlikely episode in the rather staid life of Crocodile Davies. After all, he’s a proper student of the arts. An oboist, for God’s sake, with nearly 20 years of experience/self-masochism tucked under his spit valve. Considering his rigid background, he might have been voted “Least Likely To Become A Rockin’ Dude” by his Aussie mates in the Sydney Symphony, where, on oboe and French horn, he specialized in baroque works.

Iva completely missed the party train regarding most music this side of the 18th century, until, at 20, he discovered Pink Floyd and started hanging out with a bad element—namely, the Conservatory of Music drop-outs that made-up the original Icehouse. Then called Flowers, they started out playing glam covers until Davies was forced to write his own tunes when a recording deal took them by surprise. The first 11 songs he ever wrote comprised their first LP, an unlikely smash. Five albums later, he and his latest sidemen—guitarist Bob Kretschmer,drummer Paul Wheeler, Andy Qunta on keys, wind-player Simon Lloyd and bassist Stephen Morgan—are bigger than ever. Really, the whole thing’s something of a fluke, but Iva doesn’t see it that way. He reckons that his switch from Pachelbel and Bach to T. Rex and Iggy Pop was quite logical, as is his own eclectic blend.

“I don’t really distinguish between musics of any description too heavily,” says Iva. “One of the things that’s always driven me crazy is a bigotry—not only between classical musicians against rock music, but the reverse as well.” That belief is the backbone of the band’s catalog and eventually led to Iva’s recent grand jete into ballet with his production of Boxes—about the life of surrealist Jean Cocteau—at the Sydney Opera House. “Part of my motivation for doing that was to kind of bridge that gap between legitimate art and popular art by being a rock ’n’ roll ballet,” he supposes, “but it was more than that. I knew that in the audience we’d have 70-year-olds and 10-year-old kids of every musical taste It’s quite a tall order.”

Icehouse isn’t the first to bridge that gap—Brian Eno and David Byrne have succeeded to a greater degree—but, due to the band’s unclassifiable sound, they’re one of the first to accomplish it without making anyone else the wiser. Their somewhat pedestrian debut attracted hungry chart-junkies with the playful hit “We Can Get Together.” The follow-up, Primitive Man, was Iva’s solo excursion into dreaded synthesizer terrain. it was succeeded by Sidewalk, the live-in-the-studio knee-jerk reaction while Measure For Measure balanced the two previous extremes, leading the way for Man Of Colors to finally break bigtime in the U.S. “Crazy” and “Electric Blue” (cowritten by John Oates about Peter O’Toole’s eyes, of all things—but it also has to do with an English porn flick of the same name in which Icehouse’s Simon Lloyd shows off his stuff.. .it’s catalog number 007 in case you’d like to check it out) have sustained the album in the charts for a death-defying stretch.

“There’s always been a fine line between what is actually pop music and what is actually avant-garde music,” Davies continues. “That’s really what interests me. I still think that people like Philip Glass, who has come at it from a classical side, Seems to have legitimacy over someone like Brian Eno, who’s from a rock ’n’ roll end. I’m still mindful of the fact that visible legitimacy still does exist.”

Which side of the rock/classical fence Iva is coming from is still a bit unclear, but one thing is certain; he is about as unrock ’n’ roll as a multi-platinum rock star can be. Not counting Billy Joel.

“I suppose my music is ‘as un-rock ’n’ roll as it gets,’ but it’s academic,” Davies opines. “I mean, if you meet Brian Eno, he’s certainty not, in person, the drag queen that he portrayed. It hasn’t really affected what goes on in his brain. Know what I mean?”

Not exactly, but it all has to do with a common aesthetic shared by new wave pioneers and avant-garde artistes—like David Sylvian and Yukihiro Takahashi, who’ve worked with Iva on various projects. “I think that all these people are connected by some unspoken, common purpose in music and almost a common style. Really, the whole thing came together with new wave. Where American new wave bands may have missed the plot to a certain degree, is that they heard the product of the New Age period without recognizing where the roots of the New Age period came from. Bands like Ultravox, Simple Minds, U2, Spandau Ballet, Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvers (and Icehouse) really all drew from a common pool of masters from the glam rock period and the alternative glitter period, including Lou Reed and Iggy Pop & The Stooges. But I guess it’s no different than any period, if you look back to the Left Bank period with the French Impressionist painters. Really, there seems to be a kind of connection between the kind of art of certain periods.”

If Iva sounds a bit like a musicologist, it’s because he actually is one. Besides his albums, soundtracks, ballet composition and hobby as windsurfing critter bait, Davies has plans to further the cause of rock academia.

“I’m interested in weaning rock ’n’ roll musicians into some sort of training that teaches them to read and write music through some formal training and history; stuff that I think is really useful for all musicians.”

Imposing his own rigid background on others may be going a bit far. Does this mean that budding young thrash metallers and doom-boomers should be required to study the three Rs: (sight)reading, (song)writing and rhythm? Should Clapton, Hendrix and their ilk have perfected their guitar blazing at Juilliard?

The professor leans on his lectern and frowns. “I had this argument once with a girlfriend of mine who believed she was a painter. I come from a background where my mother is also a painter, but is very highly trained and is an associate at the Royal Society, so of course I come from a background that advocates painting. But my argument is that the unfortunate thing about painters or creators is that they can have wonderful imaginations and not have the mechanics to put on canvas, or put into sound what they feel or hear. This can be very frustrating and it can also limit their potential.”

To Iva’s trained ears the result isn’t pretty: “I think rock ’n’ roll is going through a low period, which is unfortunate,” he sighs. “There’s a lot of riff-raff around and I think we’re about to hit the next rock ’n’ roll depression. We’ll probably see a lot of people go down in flames. It’ll really sort out the men from the boys.”

Iva, of course, expects to be one of the survivors—or to at least see some of his songs live on. He’s quite proud that David Bowie wanted to cover “Hey Little Girl” until the Icehouse original became too big of a hit in Europe. The Bowie/Icehouse team would have been an interesting one since Iva’s vocal cords have long been compared to Mr. Stardust’s.

“My belief is that there are not too many people around that can sing. And so any singers as such really get put in the same bag a little bit. I can see both Bowie and myself being compared to Frank Sinatra,” he says. He’s serious. “There are not too many people who are crooners these days.”

A second cover of “Hey Little Girl” was planned for the comeback album of a ’70s metal god—Robert Plant, the anti-lva— but that also fell through. Never fear, says Davies. It’ll happen someday: “It’s the ultimate dream of every songwriter that his songs will outlast not only his own popular period, but his lifetime. The greatest compliment is when somebody covers your songs.”

But there’s a catch. Covering the work of others is just peachy as long as rock artists keep their grubby mitts off classical music. “I really hated Rick Wakeman and ELP stuff,” the art-rocker grimaces. “It’s like painting the Mona Lisa again with computer graphics; there’s no point. The original is the best, and that’s it.”

It’ll be interesting to see if orchestraadvocate Davies will stick by that statement in the light of a project currently in the making. Ironically, his first hit, “We Can Get Together,” is being recorded by a group of kindred spirits.

The Melbourne Symphony.