This year marked the 30th anniversary of the first album from Icehouse who were actually called Flowers when it was released.
‘Icehouse’ was the title of the Flowers album but the band was soon forced to swap the album name and band name. Iva Davies tells why:
“It’s actually quite a simple story”, Iva tells undercover.fm. “We operated here under the name Flowers for many years. We put out the first album. The first album was called ‘Icehouse’ and then that attracted some international interest and so we were going to release the album overseas. It turns out a band name is just a business name and somebody else was using it. We couldn’t use the name Flowers. We had a very simple choice. We had to change the name of the band and the other name that was known in Australia and New Zealand was the name of the album ‘Icehouse’ so we adopted the name of the album and it has been Icehouse ever since”.
The band that was called Flowers never went on to anything. “We never heard from then again,” he says. “There was a band from Scotland called Flowers and there was Herbie Flowers, a very famous bass player who was responsible for that iconic bass line in Lou Reed’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, so there were a number of people. It’s not the first time it has happened to an Australian band. It happened to The Angels and it happened to Sherbet (believe it or not. I don’t know who else in the world was operating under the name of Sherbet but there you go). It is one of those interesting episodes where a bit of bad luck at the time turned into good luck because it is probably a better name.”
VIDEO: Icehouse, watch the Undercover interview with Iva Davies:
