Backtracking 1977 in Oz: Granville railway disaster, near Sydney, 84 people lost their lives. ABBA concert tour commenced at the Sydney Showground. Anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay disappeared near Griffith, NSW (presumed to dead and his body has never been recoverd).
Born in 1977: Schapelle Corby, interesting goods exporter; Darren Lockyer, footballer; Craig Nicholls, muso with The Vines. Also, Australia's first 7-Eleven opened in the Melbourne's Oakleigh.
While in the TV scene, 'Countdown''s Molly Meldrum interviewed Prince Charles; and in music, Flowers was formed by part-time squash court cleaner Iva Davies and his good mate, bassist Keith Welsh.
September 2025: Friday night's Aussie Music Under The Stars concert (5 September) at Brisbane's Roma Street Parklands precinct was the result of a crazy planning project that worked an absolute treat.
September's stars, moon, weather and available car parks lined up perfectly for this feel-good series of shows dubbed Night At The Parkland. It takes in a seven-night run until 14 September.
Image © Michelle Cop
Outdoor concerts can be acoustically and visually challenging. At best, it can be a fingers-crossed, dollars-down production. At worst? A wet and ruined financial unrecoverable disaster.
Yet this team nailed a sell-out concert like no other. Fantastic lighting, amazing sound clarity and projection of intensely awesome graphics on the screens created an amazing visual, aural and atmospheric end-of-week start to party time.
Iva has aged in a musically mature way since a bit under 40 years ago when Flowers formed into ICEHOUSE. This man is talented – end of story.
He was already way ahead of the game back in the day experimenting with electronic synths, programmable LinnDrums and other devices like MIDIs and Mini-Moogs, which we now take for granted and are historically long forgotten other than the brand names behind them. One of the reasons is all the technology is now incorporated into almost every keyboard on the market.
Iva was developing radically non-traditional approaches to the post-punk era we look back and call the synth, new wave genre. Call it whatever you want, it doesn't change the facts. It was a more accessible and commercially successful synthesiser-based pop music, in the closing years of '70s and early '80s.
This incarnation of ICEHOUSE is, like its predecessors, a cohesive band. A touch of new tech barely visible to the audience, like standard inner ears and guitars with FM wireless connections.
Image © Michelle Cop
Old-school tech were reliable Shure SM58's hard-wired vocal mics that were used, but no charts, no visible iPads – they knew their music. It looked like yesterday once more.
Iva's Fender Strat had picks shoved under the pickguard, he was leaving nothing to chance during the event. Having never seen them perform live before, an easy comparison to radio play meant they sounded full-strength 3D awesome.
If there was a crowd list of favourites, the ones they joined in to sing were: 'Electric Blue', 'Mr Big', 'Fatman', 'We Can Get Together', 'No Promises', and 'Crazy' – with 'Great Southern Land' and 'Hey, Little Girl' pulling big audience responses.
However, everyone is different; like the fans who dressed for the occasion, wearing wigs with hair like Iva had 'back in the day'. Pretty sure Iva would have liked to have his own back. Best Friday night outdoors for a long time. We did 'Get Together'.
More photos from the concert.
