I thought very little of them after that until the video for I Can't Help Myself appeared on Sounds one afternoon. The band setup in a big concrete multi-level carpark and synched through the song. I loved how the chorus was delayed with a brief guitar instrumental and seemed to be about the dangerous side of mental illness. The charts at that stage offered far fewer love songs than most of the years of the '70s: Enola Gay was about the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Underpass was about a kind of Ballardian isolation, Counting the Beat was about masturbation, and so on. This joined the stream but did so with a singable chorus and a staccato keyboard hook in the verse. So, no more Bowie vocal party tricks, then.
Cut to Schoolie's Week 1980. I was staying at a friend's family unit high above Broadbeach. Through the floor to ceiling windows you could see all the other cells, expensively dimly lit, each one a screenshot from the kind of neo noir film we'd be seeing in cinemas around the corner of the opening of the decade. We went to late night bars for drinks and pre-dawn cafes for toasted sandwiches after the drinks. We went to parties where no one was unwelcome. The endless beergardens in the afternoon and whatever you could get away with after sundown. We slept when we had to, regardless of the position of the sun. It was overcast for the second half of the week and it didn't bother us at all. Two songs will always bring that back for me. Holiday in Cambodia and We Can Get Together. After I made a tactical move to another flat on Mermaid Beach I heard the album that the second one came from. And in the middle of a loud night of drunken girls and boys I listened and liked what I heard.
You think the volume's too low at first. A single bass note on the synth coils out of the dark for a little too long until the vocal comes in with a strings like figure on the keyboards. "It's always cold inside the icehouse. Though the rivers never freeze ..." There's also a girl waiting outside waiting for a boy who'll never come. The Devil lives inside the icehouse, at least that's what the old folks say. As the parts of the verse develop the keyboard figure adapts to the chord changes and the bass keeps barrelling on. A pause for each chorus, a single line: there's no love in side the icehouse. This big lightless nightmare of a song moves slower than a funeral cortege until the palm muted chugging guitars push it into the territory of a tank battle. The images flash and soar into life.
Next came the song I mentioned before. A chunky electronic chug gives way to a shiny hot lead riff and a power chord announces the singer. "There must be something we can talk about..." And ends the verse with the first half of the chorus. The repeated plea, "No matter what your friends say, don't go too far..." Could have been written for us except that we really did need our friends to stop us (and they did, just quietly). The song was all teen fear, the fear that becomes indistinguishable from excitement and turns a night sky into a tide of wishes and the lights below it a ragged map. There's a great lust in the middle of it as there's a great lust at every party every night where everyone's well under twenty and changing like a chameleon as often as they have to get whatever it is they need. But it's also 1980 and three years of punk and punk-influenced pop have taken adolescent courtship from oafish rock unchanged since the '50s to this blend of angsty hesitation and bursting will. And at the end, finally with a high climatic sustained wordless vocal note beneath the chorus is the explosive refrain: WE CAN GET TOGETHER! And then, because it's still 1980, it finishes with chit chat and a rounded chord.
And that's what most of the album turns into, two streams of electronics and anthemic rock. The single after that was Walls which had a cinematic video to it. They attracted a lot of attention at the Countdown Awards and mimed Icehouse from within a wireframed neon cube. Whether it was a single or not the song Sister was on Countdown more than once. And the rest is success with a sharp ear for a hooky chorus enough to fill a good sized compilation album.
These aren't the only good songs on this first one and very few feel like filler. A disco version of Can't Help Myself didn't impress me but at least it was a different one. Nothing to Do was Iva back to his old cover version days in a Lou Reed mode. Pretty standard if enjoyable fare that helped my first Christmas holidays back in Townsville that bit more fun. What lifted it above standard was that sense of cinema it offered so boldly. No surprise in learning later that the producer was Cameron Allen, a film composer whose score for the political thriller Heatwave could do with a contemporary release.
But the thing about Flowers was that, regardless of how the band started it very soon became a group with a line up that changed around Iva Davies. A look through the songs credits on the record sleeve have him in every one and mostly solo compositions. As much as Tubeway Army really had just been Gary Numan and players so this band was Iva and friends. Oh, and it feels like they went in one way and came out another during my holidays but what had been a band called Flowers became the same band called Icehouse. Considering the font on the cover art no change was necessary, just now the album was called Flowers by a band called Icehouse. And when the Oz Rock wave flowed into the commercial FM stations in the decade to come there was no real way of using that much image to tell them apart from Australian Crawl or Mondo Rock. The songs were still better than those others' but that's where they moved and lived ever after.
So, while Flowers were never cool they appealed with the same crossover ease as the mainstreaming Split Enz were at the time, even going to rival that band's egg Crowded House with honours. I am the last to whinge about bands selling out but quick to point out that some were not doing so but reaching stated ambitions. See also The Police or The Pretenders. No shame in that. But I recall as though it were art directed by my own nostalgia, the pleasure of qualifying my affection for a hooky single, a Street Cafe or Great Southern Land, without ever needing to commit to fandom. It was a smirking nod across the picket line and felt as good as all smirks do. But now, with facial muscles that need to do more to show less I can listen to the songs and briefly run back out into the night of the Gold Coast canals and jump into the shadows before anyone sees me.
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