THE BIG READ
Forty years after Man of Colours became one of the defining Australian albums of its generation, Iva Davies is preparing to do something ICEHOUSE has never done before — play it from beginning to end.
ICEHOUSE will celebrate the album’s 40th anniversary with a six-city national arena tour in June and July next year, marking the band’s first headline indoor concert tour in more than 20 years.
And this won’t simply be a run through the hits. While Crazy, Electric Blue, My Obsession, Man of Colours and Nothing Too Serious have long been part of the ICEHOUSE story, several tracks from the album have never been performed live. For the first time, audiences will hear the record in full, followed by songs spanning the band’s career.
Released on September 21, 1987, Man of Colours spent 11 weeks at No.1 in Australia, sold more than a million copies and produced five Top 30 singles. Its reach extended well beyond Australia, with Electric Blue climbing to No.7 in the US and Crazy reaching No.14.
Nobody is more surprised that people are still listening than the man who made it.
Speaking to Starts at 60, Davies laughs at the suggestion that he might somehow have known these songs would still be filling venues decades later.
“That is the great mystery, and I don’t know. People have said to me, ‘When you were writing these songs, did you construct them to still be here in 40 years’ time?’ Nothing could be further from the truth,” Davies said.
“My view of the whole industry then was pretty cynical, based on factual observation.
“How long did The Beatles last — was it five years? How long did Led Zeppelin last — maybe five years? Pink Floyd — maybe seven years?”
Davies was so convinced it could all disappear that his first substantial royalty cheque sent him looking for security rather than rock-star indulgence.
“I remember getting the very first royalty cheque from the Flowers album and being absolutely gobsmacked. It was more money than I’d ever seen written in a figure in my life… $15,000,” he explained.
“That doesn’t sound much by today’s standards, but we’d been paying ourselves $50 a week for at least two years, and my rent was $24 a week, which was considered incredibly cheap.
“I was so desperate, thinking, ‘This is all going to be over in five minutes,’ that I went racing into the management accountant and said, ‘Gino, I know it’ll be cheap — is this enough for a deposit on the cheapest house in Sydney?’
“And I bought the cheapest house in Sydney for $60,000 with a $15,000 deposit. That gives you a summary of how long I thought it was going to last. I didn’t think it would last very long at all.”
More than four decades later, ICEHOUSE is still here.
The Man of Colours anniversary tour begins at Newcastle Entertainment Centre on June 5, 2027, before travelling to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.
For Davies, the move back indoors will be a change from the large outdoor concerts ICEHOUSE has predominantly played over the past 15 years. It will also give the band room to perform more songs and create a bigger production around the album.
The anniversary has inevitably prompted Davies to look back at the extraordinary Australian music scene from which ICEHOUSE emerged.
Recently, while sorting through his substantial archives, he found something he had almost forgotten existed: an old management booking book containing handwritten records of gigs stretching back to the late 1970s.
“Those names include Cold Chisel, The Angels, Divinyls, Mondo Rock, us, INXS — because at that point our managers were also booking agents, and they were booking the shows for early INXS, for Mondo Rock and for us,” Davies said.
“It’s fascinating. I’ve handed it over to Keith — I’m still working with Keith as manager — and said, ‘You ought to get somebody to transcribe this.’
“It’s an absolute record, handwritten by one of the young women in the office, of every single booking over three years of all those iconic bands. To look at it is just breathtaking in terms of the amount of work we all did. There was a huge amount of work — we were doing stupid stuff like playing nine shows a week, so at least a couple of shows every night.
“In one of those nine-show weeks, we also had an overnight drive from Melbourne to Sydney in the middle of it. We did that day in, day out, for years, leading up to the release of the first album.”
When Davies catches up with musicians from that era today, he says there isn’t a great deal of misty-eyed reminiscing.
“I think generally speaking they’re pretty unsentimental. I think we all look back with a bit of head-scratching now and sort of collectively say, ‘What the hell happened?’
“It was like the eye of a storm.”
Davies’ route into that world was hardly conventional. Long before Flowers and ICEHOUSE, his future appeared to lie in classical music. He began playing oboe as a teenager, won a scholarship to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and eventually became a professional orchestral musician.
Then his career took a turn nobody could have planned.
“By the time I was a professional, I’d been in the orchestra for seven months,” he said. “I’d just been promoted to principal oboe. The orchestra was going into a bit of a break, and I was constantly striving to be better, as most musicians are.
“I sought out Sydney’s leading woodwind repairer and took my beautiful handmade French oboe to be serviced and, hopefully, improved. When I got it back, I couldn’t get a note out of it. They’d absolutely ruined it.
“What I know now is that it should only ever have gone back to its maker in Paris. Even if I’d been able to afford that and known it at the time, I probably would have had to wait nine months for it to come back. Effectively, that put me out of a job and ruined about 11 years of training. I only had one other skill at that time: while having all those oboe lessons from the age of 13, I’d also taught myself how to play the guitar.”
Davies found work cleaning and, on his 21st birthday, bought a solid-body electric guitar advertised in the Trading Post and a 100-watt Marshall amplifier.
Then came the introduction that changed everything.
“One of the manageresses at the squash court next door saw me come into work one day as the cleaner and said, ‘We’ve been hearing you play your guitar next door. You should meet my son — he’s a bass player. His name is Keith Welsh.’
Keith, of course, was the co-founder of the band.
“So it wasn’t a case of designing anything,” Davies explained. “It was complete sliding doors, and a good deal of what some would call bad luck, but also good luck at the same time.”
The classical musician was about to enter a very different world. There was only one problem.
He had never even been inside a pub.
“I remember reasonably clearly when Keith — who’d been in cover bands and having fun with that for a while — dragged me into a pub. There was a band playing, and it was like going into outer space,” he said, laughing.
“I’d never been in that environment: all these young women and men dancing, a lot of noise, a band playing. I left the pub with Keith and said, ‘Well, I think I’ve worked out what’s going on there. The young men are there for the young women, and the young women just want to dance. So if you get the place to dance, you’ve got the room.’
“Simplistic as that might sound, it turned out to be a pretty accurate analysis. The early version of the band was almost entirely geared around making people dance.”
Those pub rooms became bigger, and eventually some of the biggest names in music were paying attention.
Davies reflects: “The words David Bowie said to me were incredibly prophetic. He pointed at me and said, ‘You never know who’ll be listening.’ And of course, he was listening — as was Peter Gabriel.
“We unfortunately had to turn down a Peter Gabriel tour because it clashed with the David Bowie tour. I had to choose between the two, which was an incredible blow because I was a massive fan of Peter Gabriel as well.”
Even now, Davies is discovering evidence of just how far his music travelled. Within the past six months, he and his partner were clearing old books from his house and took several boxes to a local charity shop.
About a week later, a golfing friend called.
“He said, ‘I know the manageress of the charity shop. She says she’s found a book you might want back.’
“He sent me a photo. It was a book by Lou Reed of his lyrics. In the front it was written: ‘Of course you can do my songs. I’ve admired your work for a long time. Lou Reed.’ Dated 1995.
“I had no idea I had that book.”
Davies knew how the connection had come about. He had sought Reed’s permission to use a Velvet Underground song in a ballet, but had completely forgotten about the book and its inscription.
“So it kind of gets better and better,” he said. “That was literally within the last six months. I now have that book back in my possession — just as well.”
Before next year’s Man of Colours tour, ICEHOUSE will play its only Sydney concert of 2026 at Fleet Steps on September 30.
For Davies, playing beside Sydney Harbour carries a significance that reaches much further back than ICEHOUSE.
“Sydney Harbour takes me back to when I wrote it,” he says of Great Southern Land.
“Circular Quay was fairly pivotal when I was growing up because when I was about 14, I won a scholarship to the Conservatorium of Music. That scholarship meant my oboe lessons at the Conservatorium would be paid for.
“Every Thursday afternoon I’d catch the train from Epping, where I lived, into Circular Quay — about a 45-minute train journey then. I’d get off the train at Circular Quay, and in the years I was going in there, from about 14 to 16, I actually watched the Opera House being built.”
Davies recalls returning to the site as an 18-year-old full-time Conservatorium student and playing in the orchestra for two Australian one-act operas inside the then-new Opera House. His connection with the site continued across the decades, through performances inside the building, work for Sydney Dance Company and, eventually, one of the biggest moments of his career.
For Sydney’s Millennium celebrations, Davies created The Ghost of Time, a 25-minute orchestral work based around Great Southern Land, performed on the Opera House forecourt.
The song itself had fallen somewhat into the shadow of another ICEHOUSE hit.
“There was a period where everybody had forgotten about Great Southern Land, which might sound extraordinary, but it was well and truly eclipsed by Electric Blue.
“Electric Blue was current and became the first and only number one we ever had. For a long time I thought, historically, that would be the song people would define me by.”
Electric Blue remains ICEHOUSE’s only Australian No.1 single.
Then came the Millennium.
“From that moment on, suddenly everybody remembered Great Southern Land and it came to the fore again,” he said.
“It was quite extraordinary — a weird but logical turnaround.”
Fleet Steps will now put Davies back in the gardens he walked through as a teenage music student.
“The Conservatorium being up the hill means walking through those very gardens that we’ll be playing in at the Fleet Steps,” he said.
“It’s always had an extra special layer of importance for me.”
At 71, Davies still gets nervous before walking onto a stage.
“In some ways, yes, but I still get incredibly nervous — nothing has changed there,” he admits.
“What has changed is that I have absolute confidence in the band and the crew, and that’s a nice weight off your shoulders. To know you’re walking into an environment surrounded by people who are incredibly good at what they do and unbelievably reliable, and that there are backups of backups in terms of equipment — all those things make a live show less potentially volatile.”
Asked what ICEHOUSE song he would choose to play if the band ever reached its final show, Davies barely hesitates.
“It’d be pretty hard to go past Great Southern Land in this country.”
For now, though, there are plenty more shows to play. Next year ICEHOUSE will take Man of Colours back into Australian arenas, performing the album in its entirety four decades after its release.
Davies once thought his career might be over in “five minutes”. Forty years after Man of Colours, audiences are still listening.
ICEHOUSE — Man of Colours 40th Anniversary Tour, purchase tickets from TEG LIVE
Saturday, June 5, 2027 — Newcastle Entertainment Centre, Newcastle
Saturday, June 12 — Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane
Saturday, June 19 — TikTok Entertainment Centre, Sydney
Saturday, June 26 — Margaret Court Arena, Melbourne
Saturday, July 3 — Adelaide Entertainment Centre, Adelaide
Saturday, July 10 — RAC Arena, Perth
Tickets are on sale now via TEG Live.
Before the anniversary tour, ICEHOUSE will perform Live at Fleet Steps on Sydney Harbour on Wednesday, September 30, 2026.
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