Welcome to A Breath of French Air with Sandy Kaye. Hello, and thanks so much for deciding to spend some time with me. I’ve been poring over the requests you’ve sent me recently, trying to nail down some of the guests you’ve asked to hear from.
While I get lots of emails and messages from listeners everywhere, and please do keep them coming, many of you here in Australia have reached out asking me to interview my next guest. He’s singer, songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist and record producer, Iva Davies, who most of you know from the band Icehouse, well known for this massive hit. Iva Davies is renowned for his distinctive singing voice and for a diverse career spanning some 45 years.
He came to prominence in the early 80s as co-founder and lead singer of the glam rock band Flowers, a band that later changed its name to Icehouse, and Ivor became one of Australia’s top rock stars of that decade. He was courted by both David Bowie and Peter Gabriel. He’s made music for several television series and films, and he’s also had an incredibly successful solo career.
During my chat with him, Iva tells us all about his early classical upbringing, how he’s always felt a bit of an imposter trying to write songs. And then we jump into life today, as Icehouse, a band that hasn’t released an album since 1993, is about to headline one of Australia’s biggest music festivals, the Red Hot Summer Tour. Feel like meeting him? Let’s do it.
Hello. Iva, how are you? I’m okay. Let’s bring you up to speed.
Ivor Davies first started playing the bagpipes during his boyhood, growing up in country New South Wales. He hailed from a musical family and moved to Sydney to complete high school. It was there he learned to play the oboe and became the principal oboist in the local orchestra.
Do you think you’ve made the right decision to be on the guitar and be playing the music that you are? Well, the fact of the matter is I actually had absolutely no choice about it. It was the proverbial hand of fate. What happened was I’d spent years and years and years and years training on the oboe during the course of which I became apparently very good at it, and my father cashed in a nest egg that he had and invested in a beautifully handmade French oboe, which was worth a lot more than I appreciated at the time.
And finally got to a position where by the time I was 20, I was the principal oboist of a working orchestra, which is extraordinary when I think about it. And in the quest to ever become better at playing the oboe, I, during a holiday break, took it to Sydney’s leading woodwind repairer. And I got it back and it was absolutely unplayable.
And what I now know with hindsight, which is always wonderful, is that it should only have ever gone back to Paris to its original maker. They’re such specialized things. And there I was in the orchestra, principal oboe, and didn’t have an instrument that worked.
And in the end, my hand was forced, I had to resign. And that was the end of it for me. Many years later, I did get that oboe back to Paris physically.
I went there myself. I was on tour in Europe and got four albums into a career in something completely different at that point. But yeah, that kind of made me unemployed and unemployable, basically.
And the only other thing that I had in my life was my ability to also play the guitar. Did you feel that your music career was over then? I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do. I think I wouldn’t be alone in saying that, you know, when you’re the age of 21, 22, a lot of young people are kind of drifting and kind of rudderless in a way.
And that situation that sort of basically took the wind out of the classical career sails, you know, set me adrift, as it were. And I really didn’t have a clue. And there was a point at which the band had started and we were playing in little pubs and getting the odd gig here and there and whatever.
And it was all great fun. But I think I got to the age of about 24 and freaked out completely and just realized that I didn’t have a proper job. I actually applied to the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney.
That year had opened a brand new course and they were only taking six people a year. It was a 14 month course. It was six days a week, nine hours a day.
And it was for training piano tuners. And I actually went to that and I said to the guys in the band, if I get into this course, that’s it, that’s the end of the band. Luckily, probably to do with the fact that I’ve never been a very good pianist, I didn’t get into that course.
And so there I was still adrift with the band. Well, you didn’t stay adrift very long because you started off as Flowers, you changed the name to Icehouse. And in 1980, your debut album included the song Can’t Help Myself.
That reached the top five. And I believe that made it to the highest selling debut album in Australia at the time. So you must have been riding pretty high by then.
It was all down to hard work, really. Our management company had the two most powerful bands in Australia at the time, Colt Chisel and the Angels. And we were the apprentices, really.
And I’d learned a lot of hard lessons with those bands. And the strategy they had was to make us play and play and play and play and play relentlessly, which we did for the best part of nearly three years. We were doing sort of nine shows a week.
And that’s at least two shows a night, a number of nights a week. And then quite often with a drive from Sydney to Brisbane or Brisbane to Melbourne or Melbourne to Adelaide or whatever, thrown in the middle of it. And so by the time that first album came out, was actually released, we already had a huge live following.
And that was the manager’s strategy. They said, by the time you release this album, you’ll have so many people wanting to buy that album because you’ve played to so many people. That will virtually ensure its success.
And of course, I didn’t believe in any strategies at the time. I was just working and working and working and working. And so I don’t think any of us in the band really expected to come out of the blocks flying like that.
How did it feel then? It was a bit overwhelming, I guess. You know, we went from doing tiny little pubs and setting up in a corner, you know, places that weren’t even designed to have bands, to doing places like Festival Hall in Melbourne for 4000 people. And, you know, it was quite a leap, really.
I mean, it must have felt incredibly surreal. And indeed, I think, you know, we also had to be incredibly lucky in so much as this period happened to be. And we now look back on it and can identify it as such, you know, a kind of golden period for Australian bands and the pub scene, which really generated all those bands.
And one of the most eye opening experiences I had was to go to London, which had always been for us some sort of distant Mecca. I remember getting magazines like New Musical Express and Melody Maker, which were the UK generated music magazines that were so important to us to tell us, you know, that the Sex Pistols had arrived or whatever. And, you know, on the first night we were in London, Keith and I, the bass player, decided to go out and see a band.
And, you know, we were absolutely confounded because all the pubs shut. They didn’t have bands in pubs anyway. The pubs are all too small.
And we sort of looked at each other and kind of went, well, where are all those magical bands that we’ve been thinking of playing all over London? If we’re in Sydney tonight, we could go to 50 pubs and there’d be fantastic bands in each of those pubs. Same in Melbourne, same in Adelaide, same in Brisbane. And it was absolutely amazing.
We were completely baffled by it. But did you end up getting to see anyone that night? Well, no, we ended up playing with a number of people as we toured Britain, but including Simple Minds, which were and they were great mates and they still are. But no, we came back absolutely convinced that, you know, of all the places in the world that were generating the best quality and the greatest volume of popular music at that time, Australia was light years ahead.
Well, well, it certainly was the heyday for music here, wasn’t it? I know the walls of this, but they never really look. They just stand aside. They’re all standing, staring at the wall.
Who put the writing on the wall? Will no one ever know? Oh, well, I don’t mind the wall. Tell me. Why won’t you tell me? I’ve got nothing to say.
Tell me, why don’t I know these places? Tell me, why I get no answers? Am I talking, talking to the wall? Someone’s trying, jumping, standing still. I don’t think I’ve had enough of it all. Get your hands up, up against the wall.
Who put the writing on the wall? Will no one ever know? Oh, well, I don’t mind the wall. Ivor, I know that you had to change the name of the band from Flowers, but how did you get the name Icehouse? The place in which I’d first moved out of home was as a result of that orchestra. There was a lady who was a philanthropic supporter of the arts, especially of young classical musicians.
And this entire big old house that she’d owned, which is a two-story, had been a beautiful mansion, but it had been subdivided into three flats. And one of the orchestra members got a job somewhere else and had to move out. And I moved in with a French horn player.
And upstairs, there was a violinist, another French horn player, and a clarinetist. And out the back, there was a trumpet, trombone, and cellist. And so it was an absolute cacophony the whole time.
And as beautiful as it was, it was absolutely freezing cold in winter. And, of course, I had no money. I think I eventually did buy a radiator at vast expense.
But up until that point, I think I probably found the only hardware store in Sydney that actually still sold bags of coal because it had an operating coal fireplace, which saved my life. And there, I spent many a long night freezing during winter, coming home from gigs and stoking up this fire and trying to get warm. At the same time, I also noticed across the road, even at 3 or 4 in the morning, there was another old mansion, this one very disheveled.
But the lights were always on, and it absolutely mystified me. And I used to watch people come and go during the daytime, and you’d recognize them for about three months. And then you’d never see them again, and there’d be somebody new.
And it just had an air of mystery about it. And somehow or other, I kind of coalesced those two stories into a song called Icehouse. And it wasn’t, in fact, until the song was well and truly written and we were performing it that one night I’d come back from a show on the northern beaches, I think, still fairly early days.
And I was up at 3 in the morning, as was my habit. And there was a knock on the door, and I opened the door, and there were two young women dressed as punks at the front door. And one of them said, Would you like a cup of tea? And I thought, Oh, man, I’ve got a couple of mad ones here.
And she must have seen the look on my face. And she said, Oh, no, no, no, it’s okay. We’re from across the road.
We’re psychiatric nurses. We’ve just been to see you play. And so it turned out that this house that I’d written a song about was actually a halfway house for psychiatric patients.
Oh, right. So I did get to go across and get into the Icehouse across the road, have a cup of tea, and then come back. There’s a growing love inside the Icehouse.
Love’s inside the Icehouse. Icehouse was the first album released by the Australian rock synth-pop band Flowers, who’d been forced to change their name due to legal restrictions and to prevent confusion with the Scottish group called The Flowers.
This is a Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Iva Davies had met bass player Keith Welsh when Ivor had taken a job working as a part-time cleaner at a squash court in inner Sydney in 1977.
The two quickly got together and formed the band, rehearsing in a house next door. Ivor wrote all the tracks on the debut album, and Icehouse became the cornerstone of Australian music, pivoting away from the beery, hard blues rock of artists like Billy Thorpe and Cold Chisel into a more sophisticated European style. Bearing in mind that those songs on that album probably are the first ten songs that I ever wrote, I wasn’t looking for anything really.
I had no idea how to actually go about writing a song, and I assumed that, for example, I’d still have the notebook. I got a notebook and I thought, oh, well, you must get ideas and jot them down and so on, and indeed, that notebook is full of the beginnings and the refinements of all of the lyrics from that first album, along with a few sketches and phone numbers and a classic list of shows that we did in Melbourne at pubs and the fees involved, which were extraordinary, you know, door charge, $2 a head sort of thing. Fee for three 45-minute sets, $150.
And so, yes, I did, but I also lived a very, very isolated sort of life. And the other thing was that, you know, I’d studied great songwriters like Joni Mitchell, and, of course, Joni Mitchell’s quite famous for writing very, very personal songs, and that was the last thing in the world that I actually wanted to do. So I scrupulously avoided, I thought, writing songs that involved me in any way whatsoever.
And now, of course, I look back on that album and I look at those lyrics and see how isolated a lot of those songs are and they’re about alienation and walls and all that sort of thing, and I thought, yep, that’s exactly me. All about you, yeah, right. Just a little back step, one more time Oh, there she goes Another girl, another notion Girl, I’m gonna follow you I’m gonna let you go I’m gonna leave you I won’t ever let you go Round again, taking that back step One more time, oh no There she goes, looking at me Does it feel like dancing? Round again, all I want from you Don’t change your mind, oh no There she goes, tell me that girl Is alienation The band started in Sydney in 1977.
You were known for playing that new wave and synth-pop music. Why do you reckon all those old songs have lasted so long, they still hold up so well today? Look, that’s the kind of question I can’t possibly answer because about the last thing that would have been in my brain then was, you know, what are people going to think of these songs in 40 years’ time because I was a very young fellow who was really, these songs on the Flowers album are among the very first songs I ever wrote and I can almost hear myself learning how to write songs when I listen to that collection. It’s quite a strange sensation so, you know, I was running so fast to kind of keep up with the sort of demand that we had of, you know, we need some more songs, we need some more songs, we need some more songs that none of my brain was dedicated to how long are these going to last so it’s kind of surreal looking back that far and going oh, well, they’re still here a nice feeling to have created something that didn’t exist before the same feeling you have whenever I wrote any songs it was wonderful to kind of sit back and go well, there’s something that didn’t exist I’ve just made something and I guess probably all creators of works feel the same way if they’ve written a book or they’ve painted a painting or whatever but it’s nice to sort of look back and go I’ve made something positive, there it is Do you think maybe the key to good songwriting is not worrying about it and being pressured and hurried and rushed with life how does that translate to today if you sat down and wrote a song you’d take a lot more time and care over it, wouldn’t you? I don’t think I would have had the ability to be able to kind of be that discerning I think the most magical song of all of my songs was the song Man of Colours which came much later but it was almost kind of landed in my lap fully formed I remember the whole process of writing it was so incredibly fast that I sat back in the chair by that time I had a full 24 track tape recording system in my lounge room basically creating this tape and then sitting back two hours later and going that’s amazing so, you know, every songwriting experience along the way was a different one partly deliberately I tried never to repeat my process for fear of repeating myself in songs but, you know, I guess the underlying motto was always there which is this person doesn’t know what they’re doing and therefore I’m making it up as I go Sometimes that’s not a bad thing though, is it? I’ve tried to describe the process to people unsuccessfully I must say over the years and it’s just little things that sort of caught my attention little details of some other song that I thought well there’s a half-baked idea there maybe I can do something with that little thing I was talking last night with my son about writing songs and there was a particular song which you may be familiar with it’s not from the Flowers album it’s a song called Man of Colours and I remember hearing a triangle part in a recording this is the little percussion instrument that you kind of disregard and thinking oh that is so cool and that became a kind of formative part of writing a song which is quite a strange idea when you think about it the least kind of important, most incidental detail of a recording caught my attention at some point enough for me to use it as a starting point for a song And the scent of the oil and brushes Drifts down like a pale perfume And he says I’m a simple man Do you think you just went with your gut in those days? Do I think I just worked with my gut? I think I just worked with my gut most of the time, yeah I think really there’s a sort of slight hint of desperation really in my songwriting process which is any idea that I can find I’m going to use during my career I went back and reviewed a lot of the kind of working cassettes that I had along the way between albums and realised how much recycling I did which kind of smacks of somebody who is desperate for ideas it’s just like anything will do this has got to be something, I can make this into something Well it sounds like at the time you were really under pressure to keep coming up with ideas Well certainly the good thing, the nice thing about this Flowers album the very first album was that these songs were written over a fairly lengthy period of time and they were all road tested so by the time we got to releasing that first album, the Flowers album we’d been playing for three years and we’d been playing, in the latter part of that three years we’d been playing a load of shows sometimes nine shows a week a couple of shows a night we were working incredibly hard but we were also adding these songs very slowly and playing them every night so we kind of road tested all of these songs before we got to record them after that it became quite a different deal because as you correctly point out I was kind of on the treadmill of having to come up with an album every year or so and tour it and do all the stuff that goes with it all the press tours and all that sort of stuff but these songs were forged in a kind of different way and that’s why this first album, the Flowers album I guess sort of can’t be compared with the albums that followed it because it was the kind of album that was road tested before it was ever recorded Which are your favourite tracks on that album? You know it varies and over the years I guess I’ve been asked lots of times what my favourite song is and it kind of keeps moving around and it’s a very strange choice if I had to make a choice from this album and it’s a song that was probably regarded as a kind of incidental song on the album when we recorded it and it was certainly a very brand new song when we recorded the Flowers album and it’s a song called Not My Kind and it closes the album and I guess I’d not really thought about it very much at all until we started rehearsing and decided that we should include it because it was on this album and I thought wow there’s much more to this song than I really realised when I was writing it and I hadn’t really thought about it much since because we didn’t play it regularly and so yeah it keeps moving so my choice as of today when we’re talking is the song called Not My Kind Singing on the sidewalk With the brave boys in the back street Doesn’t you find that never ends? That was a very late edition song to the Flowers album I wrote that virtually in the studio well I finished it virtually in the studio as we were recording the Flowers album and it turned out to be a very powerful song I had kind of completely forgotten about it’s obviously about serious alienation but I think the most telling line is the last line the title of the song you don’t hear until the very last line of the song and it goes he’s just another boy she’s just another girl and they’re not my kind I was in a very particular period during that time when I wrote all of those songs and I didn’t realise it at the time but I was incredibly isolated and had a very peculiar sort of life I spent most of my time staying up all night I had a couple of cleaning jobs and very often we’d play a show at a pub somewhere and I would come back and then I’d go to work cleaning big movie theatre that I had a job cleaning and I’d be there for three hours and then I’d come home and I’d sleep for two hours and then I’d get up again and do my next cleaning job which was the squash courts next door it was a very strange life so it was kind of all about alienation I guess and I didn’t even realise it at the time Must be really interesting to look back on all of those songs that represent different parts of your life and influences of your life then Very, very interesting and only really possible because it’s sort of years ago I don’t think really I had any insight at all into what my process was or what my life might have been like until I’ve sort of got this amount of distance from it With a career spanning more than 45 years Icehouse was one of Australia’s most iconic bands transcending age groups with their hit songs loved by audiences across generations playing to sell-out audiences in Australia, New Zealand and worldwide Tell me a little bit about Great Southern Land Great Southern Land with hindsight it’s pretty easy to kind of pin down where that came from We went off having freshly changed our name because of the international legal issues to Icehouse We went off on our first international tour and we worked and we worked and we worked and we were away for six months It was really hard work and I think it sort of broke us all really but certainly I got incredibly homesick and it also coincided with my first flight across Australia and there was one light bulb moment in that where we’d gone across all the mountain ranges the Great Dividing Range and so on past all the western slopes and things started to get very sparse and we got to where we were out over the desert and I fell asleep and I woke up two hours later and we were still over the desert and I think the recognition in that one kind of explosive moment was wow, this is absolutely enormous and that was just something that I’d never even thought about even though I grew up in regional Australia I just hadn’t really comprehended the whole scale and I think that in combination with getting incredibly homesick the result of that was that the very first thing I did for the second album when I got back home from that international tour was to write Great Southern Land You walk along Like a primitive man In a naked world With sticks and bombs See the hungry man It’s a hungry man During the 90s I kept thinking to myself because it was the only number one song that we’d ever had in Australia that Electric Blue would be my legacy by far the most successful in terms of chart positions but then I was invited to write the 25 minutes of music leading up to the Millennium Countdown to be performed on the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and it was going to be televised by four billion people and it was to be based on Great Southern Land and that inspiration for that idea came from the late wonderful Ignatius Jones and because it had such a huge broadcast I think and it was such a moment all of a sudden Great Southern Land as a song not totally forgotten at that point but certainly in the cupboard sort of leapt to the floor and it’s stayed there ever since quite extraordinary The band’s unofficial Australian anthem Great Southern Land had been a part of almost every Australian summer soundtrack for the past 40 plus years In 2017 the iconic hit was also selected from over 60,000 suggestions to become the new name for a Qantas fleet of Dreamliner aircraft
This is a Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. How’s your writing today? Have you been doing much stuff? No, I haven’t.
I always found it incredibly difficult and I don’t think that it would ever get any easier. Quite a lot of the time I gave myself kind of intellectual songwriting challenges and that may seem like a strange thing to say. It hardly seems to be organic, that kind of thinking.
But there were things that I’d hear a device that was used in somebody else’s song that I thought, hmm, that’s a kind of interesting thing to do. Somebody played me quite recently the song Can’t Help Myself, which was the very first song that we released. And I remember very clearly that where that came from was very unlikely indeed.
It was inspired by the last ten seconds of a Michael Jackson song where Quincy Jones had pulled down all the faders of all the elements of that recording and just left a couple of guitars who were doing this kind of arpeggio pattern. And I was fascinated by this last seven seconds of don’t stop till you get enough, was the name of the song. And it was a very unlikely place for a punk song to start, really.
Keep on, won’t stop till you get enough Keep on, with the, with the first drop Don’t stop till you get enough You’re still as popular as you always were, if not perhaps more, despite the fact that there hasn’t been a live album from you since about 1993. People just can’t get enough of all the songs. You’re about to head out on the Red Hot Summer Tour, you’re headlining that.
Are you happy with where you are today in terms of rolling out the music for fans everywhere and touring bits and pieces? How else do you spend your time? At the moment, yes, the thing about performing live in this sort of context is that it’s always different and always unpredictable. And so that’s both a challenge and also quite exciting. You ask what I’m doing, I’m staring here at one of my guitars that goes back to 1981 and I have it in pieces at this point of time because it wasn’t functioning the way I wanted it to and I’ve just been unscrewing things and cleaning parts of it and so on and so forth.
It’s a very pedestrian sort of way to spend a day but that’s what I’ll be doing. It seems like you must have a really nice balance now. I mean, in the beginning you were frenetic with doing so much work.
Now you can pick and choose the gigs you want to do, you can rest on your laurels for all the great music that Icehouse has actually put out and it seems like you’re loving life. Well, it’s a great privilege really to be able to do that and I’m always mindful of it. But then we come along and play something like the Red Hot Summer Tour and there’s me side of stage watching people like Noiseworks and Wolfmother and Eskimo Joe and Baby Animals and Killing Heidi and Bachelor Girl and just going, wow.
There is such a wealth of Australian music and talent that it’s just great to be around really. Repetitions I don’t want The things that they say are wrong Oliver Davies tends to sell himself a little short. He’s one of the top Australian performers of all time.
So much so, in fact, that at the height of his career, Icehouse became the focus of artists like David Bowie and Peter Gabriel. Somebody alerted me to the fact that Brian Eno has just been commenting on Twitter about a song called Angel Street and Angel Street was on Measure for Measure. It was never a single and there’s Brian Eno being a fan of it and I was just blown away and I thought, oh my goodness.
And it reminded me too of that kind of key line that Bowie said to me when we just sort of met up for the first time before about to do that tour with him and he said, you never know who will be listening because he heard us on the radio in Europe. We had a hit with Hey Little Girl and David Bowie was listening and so was Peter Gabriel. I actually had to choose between going on tour with Peter Gabriel or going on tour with David Bowie at his absolute height.
It was a terrible decision to have to make but anyway, we know which one I chose. My son sort of verbally kicks me every now and again and says, Dad, you should have gone with Gabriel. Anyway, I’ve introduced both my children to those wonderful Peter Gabriel albums and he set targets as did other songwriters that I’ll never hit in however many songs it is.
I’ve written hundreds of songs but I still come back to something like the song Beko and go there’s a song that kind of had incredible gravitas and importance. It’s so simple and it’s a powerful song about a political message and I tried on occasion to kind of get into that sort of thing and really fell flat on my face I think. So yes, I’m still jealous of Peter Gabriel and his songwriting.
And everything goes wrong Sometimes it makes no sense Once was a time I should have known better Although you may try Again The song Hey Little Girl, which had caught the attention of both Peter Gabriel and David Bowie, went to number two in Switzerland, seven in Australia and nine in Austria and New Zealand. According to Ivor, Icehouse’s European tour with David Bowie the following year in 1983 was an incredible experience. The band had long been compared to the iconic British performer and they’d spent years idolising the man and his music.
Much of Flowers and Icehouse’s earliest works were actually covers from the likes of David Bowie and others. We did a lot of Bowie covers, I mean we were playing tracks from Low which is a kind of strange experimental album. I think the weirdest stuff that we did, and I know that a lot of people wouldn’t have known this material and perhaps some of them, the audience that Flowers had thought that our original songs were a lot of covers that we did from the first three at least early Brian Eno albums.
They would be classed as relatively obscure. Brian Eno actually did some work with us on the fourth album and I’ve stood in a studio next to him singing backing vocals into a microphone, which is quite extraordinary. Oh, Winter Palace From the Arabian Nights It waves on an ocean Gems from the golden age A new world, turning round and round Making some sense Where there’s no sense at all He’s currently managed by Flowers’ original manager and so there’s a weird kind of transcontinental relationship with Brian Eno, but I’ve recently gone back and actually been playing some of those early albums and really discovering why it was that I picked those for Flowers to play.
They’re such interesting creations. We did stuff from all over the place. We played a whole bunch of Easy Beat songs, we played a bunch of Loved Ones songs.
In fact, I’m quite convinced that In Excess heard the version that we were doing of the Loved One and that’s what inspired them to record it. We were doing things that were contemporary, you know, Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello. We were doing stuff that went right back, the Kinks, the Trogs.
We had a massive sort of repertoire in those days. All of those things, that’s where all my roots are. They’re all embedded in Pink Floyd and Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and that whole thing, you know, as well as Led Zeppelin and other obvious things.
It was an extraordinary musical environment for me to kind of get my first electric guitar in, really, and I was kind of drinking it in this massive stuff that became the influences on those first songs. It was 1988 when Ivor Davies and co-collaborator John Oates won an APRA Music Award for the Icehouse song Electric Blue, which was to become their biggest seller to date. Two more albums followed, the last of which was Big Wheel in 1993, and there’s unlikely to be another one in our lifetime.
Why? There is an entire unreleased album. I’ve actually just been reworking my will with a whole bunch of lawyers and I’ve specified that that’s not going to be released until my demise. And whatever time is in between then, I can’t imagine at this point me going back and writing, because I put a lot of blood into that album and I believe it’s probably the best set of songs I ever wrote.
So it’s kind of made a really strange bar too high for myself in a kind of weird way. And then on the other hand, you know, I was here late one night, not that long ago, and I went, oh, and I was hearing something and I went downstairs with the grand piano that I’ve got and I took my phone with me and then I recorded this little sketch and every now and again I’ll play it and go, you know what, should finish that. So I don’t know, it’s quite haphazard with me.
I think you probably recognise by now that I’m not somebody like Paul Kelly or Neil Finn who are intensely jealous of these guys who just write constantly. I can’t do that. I’ve never been able to do that.
I have to make a block of time. I generally have to have a deadline that’s kind of thrust on me by somebody else. And so back in the day I had this contract with these clauses that said you will deliver this by this date, that’s it.
And so they were my brick wall deadlines and that’s probably the only reason I really wrote those songs, because I don’t need to do it as a personal therapy. So I can’t really answer that question by promising you there’s going to be a bunch of songs any time in the near future. Well, there may be no new music but at least we can still enjoy the old stuff.
I used to be the one who made you feel so safe and strong I could always make it right when everything was going wrong And I don’t know why it’s seeming so different now I’m on my own And I don’t know what it is that scares me when I’m all alone I can’t believe that everyone I know would lie to me When reason’s so cold it hurts me every time It’s so cold until it freezes me I try to hide it but there’s only one obsession is you The little things you used to do and say Break every moment of my night and day My obsession is you We’re very happy that you’re around, Ivor Davies. I thank you so much for your time. I’ve had several listeners write in to me because I always ask them who they want to hear from and quite a few of them have said, Can’t you talk to Ivor, I want to see what he’s doing today and how he is.
So we’ve talked to you and very glad to find you so well and heading out on the road again. Thanks, Andy. Thank you very much.
One thing’s for sure, you won’t be doing any more cleaning gigs going forward, will you? No. Well, we’ll see how it goes. You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kay.
You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye.