ICEHOUSE announce Man of Colours Tour Announced
Ahead of the Live at the Fleet Steps show overlooking spectacular Sydney Harbour on 30 September and Night at the Parkland in Brisbane on 18 September, ICEHOUSE has announced the band’s first headline indoor concert tour in over 20 years to celebrate Man of Colours’ 40th Anniversary across Australia in June and July 2027.
Kicking off at the Newcastle Entertainment Centre on Saturday, 5 June, the tour will head to Brisbane Entertainment Centre (Saturday, 12 June), TikTok Entertainment Centre in Sydney (Saturday, 19 June), Margaret Court Arena in Melbourne (Saturday, 26 June), Adelaide Entertainment Centre (Saturday, 3 July), closing out the tour at RAC Arena in Perth (Saturday, 10 July).
Tickets to the Man of Colours tour will go on sale at 11.00am local times on Friday, 18 September 2026. A PayPal First Access Presale starts 11.00am local times on Wednesday, 16 September via tegpartners.com.au/paypal. PayPal account required to purchase.
Some special $99.90 tickets will also be spread throughout the best seats in every Arena, giving fans the chance to score an incredible view at an unbeatable price.
With a career spanning over 45 years, ICEHOUSE is one of Australia’s most iconic bands, transcending age groups with their hit songs, well known and loved by audiences across generations. ICEHOUSE has played to sell-out capacity audiences in Australia, New Zealand and throughout the world and have sold over 9 million albums worldwide.
ICEHOUSE was formed by Iva Davies, the band’s frontman and musical creative force, who led the band to amazing sales levels including 28 Platinum albums, eight Top 10 albums and over thirty Top 40 singles.
Man of Colours was released on 21 September 1987 and was the band’s 5th studio album. The release went to #1 in Australia and New Zealand, spending the next 11 weeks at the top of the Australian chart, selling over 1 million copies to date and going on to win ICEHOUSE ARIA Awards for Album of the Year and Highest Selling Album. (See below for stories from Iva around the album)
The album included five of the band’s most requested tracks over the past 40 years – Crazy, Electric Blue, Man of Colours, My Obsession and Nothing Too Serious – with both Electric Blue and Crazy respectively hitting #7 and #14 in the US. See below for Iva’s recollections around Man of Colours’ songs, videos and tour.
While many of the songs from the album have become live performance favourites, there are several songs which the band has never performed live and fans will have the first (and likely only) opportunity of hearing the band perform ALL OF THE SONGS FROM THE ALBUM IN CONCERT.
In addition to Man of Colours, fans can expect to hear a slew of ICEHOUSE’s greatest songs including Great Southern Land, Hey Little Girl, No Promises, Don’t Believe Anymore, Love In Motion, We Can Get Together and more.
Iva Davies said, “The band and I are excited to be celebrating the Man of Colours anniversary with you all. We’ve never played some of the songs from the album so this tour is going to include some firsts for us as well as our fans.
“These seated, indoor shows are going to be different for the band and the audiences too”, Davies added. “Compared to the big outdoor shows we’ve mainly been playing over the past 15 years, indoors means we get to play more songs and create an even bigger show for us all.
“These are going to be very, very special shows in celebration of our best-known album, its songs and the fans who’ve made it a part of their lives over the past 40 years. See you there!”
“ICEHOUSE is one of the true greats of Australian music, and 40 years on, Man of Colours remains one of the most loved albums this country has ever produced,” said Cameron Hoy, CEO, Ticketek Entertainment Group. “We’re thrilled to help deliver this once in a lifetime tour for fans across Australia.”
Special guests on all shows will be announced in the coming months.
Photos, artwork and bio information can be downloaded from here and a video sizzle reel is available here.
Tickets to this once-in-a-lifetime musical journey through one of ICEHOUSE’s biggest albums will sell FAST and we recommend fans get in quick before they’re sold out.
On sale details:
ICEHOUSE Fan Club Presale:
Wednesday 16 September at 11am to Friday, 18 September at 10.59am
PayPal Presale:
Wednesday 16 September at 11am to Friday, 18 September at 10.59am
General On Sale:
Friday, 18 September at 11.00am local times via teglive.com.au
$99 tickets available in all sections in each venue
GP tickets on sale: Friday, 18 September @ 11.00am local times via teglive.com.au
TOUR DATES
Saturday, 5 June 2027
Newcastle Entertainment Centre, Newcastle NSW
Saturday, 12 June 2027
Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane QLD
Saturday, 19 June 2027
TikTok Entertainment Centre, Sydney NSW
Saturday, 26 June 2027
Margaret Court Arena, Melbourne VIC
Saturday, 3 July 2027
Adelaide Entertainment Centre, Adelaide SA
Saturday, 10 July 2027
RAC Arena, Perth WA
ICEHOUSE’s 40th Anniversary Man of Colours tour is proudly presented by TEG Live, PayPal and Triple M
BEHIND THE MAN OF COLOURS ALBUM
Stories behind the Songs:
Electric Blue:
John Oates had called me out of the blue one day during the Measure for Measure North American tour — our first conversation since a brief encounter at Adelaide Airport almost five years earlier. I was staying at iconic old New York hotel the Mayflower (since demolished, sadly) and I was down having a drink in the bar when the barman said there was a call for me. To my complete amazement it was John, calling out to say, “We have to write songs together.”
Apparently it was already a done deal. John Oates was coming all the way to Australia to write songs with me and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I’d tried to put him off, believe me.
Back in Sydney John, an incredibly generous man who thrives on collaborative songwriting, turned up with flight cases full of gear he had brought along to help the process. Among other things he had electric guitars, a LinnDrum 9000 (the latest model big brother to the LinnDrum I’d had back in the day, which I sold to Joe Camilleri) and an extraordinary armadillo-skin backed mandolin.
The first thing we had to do was get the LinnDrum to work with the Fairlight, because they used completely different systems. I called up the Fairlight team and they did a great job of customising my instrument, creating what is in effect a souped-up version (it’s now being held by Southern Cross University). With that sorted out, we got to work.
Before long, we had arrived at the moment of truth and there was no avoiding it. What’s this song about and more importantly, what’s it called? After much to-ing and fro-ing, in desperation I said, “Look. I’ve got this one phrase, it comes from a Marc Bolan song right back in his Tyrannosaurus Rex days. The song is called ‘Jewel’, we used to play it when we were a covers band. The full line is, ‘Her thoughts are gold, her eyes electric blue, she sleeps upon the dreams of me and you’. We might be able to do something with ‘electric blue’ except that syllabically it doesn’t fit with the vocal line we’ve mapped out for the chorus.” John said, “Don’t worry. Just bang it on the end: ‘All I can do, electric blue.’ ” And so we did.
Nothing Too Serious:
In September 1986 (just as we were writing the songs for Man of Colours) Iggy Pop had released his 7th studio album “Blah Blah Blah”. Once again it was a collaboration with David Bowie just as he had done in the late 70’s. The two albums from the 70’s “The Idiot” and “Lust for life” had been very influential on me and the young “Flowers” band had included at least 4 or 5 of the songs from those albums in its repertoire.
The opening lyric lines from one song called “Tonight” had immediately shocked me:
“I saw my baby, she was turning blue. I knew that soon her young life was through”
Iggy’s attitude to this catastrophic overdose story seemed so utterly matter of fact.
Of course back in his earlier days as the front man of his band “The Stooges” Iggy’s drug and alcohol excesses were legendary. The front cover of their live album “Metallic KO” is a photo of him bare chested, passed out on his back on stage and bleeding from the many self-inflicted broken glass cuts all over him.
The release of “Blah Blah Blah” at that time reminded me of all of this Iggy history and I found myself wondering about what sort of state he might have found himself in after one of those very big nights back in his partying prime.
In my version of that aftermath, “Nothing Too Serious” is a rather more playful take on the damage and everyone apparently survives.
“Baby is blue, she had a heavy night. Baby is blue she’s gonna be alright”
I’d reduced the damage down to just “I had a little accident, nothing too serious”.
Man of Colours:
The title track, Man of Colours, wove together some diverse ideas. On a return flight from overseas I had picked up a copy of Time Magazine to read. The cover story was fascinating. At the time Andrew Wyeth was America’s greatest living artist. He lived on a farm with his wife and had his studio there. His agent’s regularly came down from New York to check on the work he was doing for upcoming exhibitions. But in 1986 Wyeth shocked the world by revealing that from 1971 to 1986 he had secretly been painting 240 portraits of the same woman, Helga Testorf. Not even Wyeth’s wife or Testorf’s husband knew that had been going on, and it was such a mystery that news of it warranted the cover of Time.
The character of the old painter in my song drew from the fact that my artist mother was starting to lose her eyesight at the time.
“And the old man rubs his failing eyes,
and takes a moment to watch the view from a window nobody knows is there,
he can watch the empty street below”
The ‘window’ was, of course, my little upstairs bedroom balcony, from which I could watch the world below unnoticed.
Bringing those disparate thoughts together I had the momentary flash of a thought about the structure of the lyrics. I gave myself the structural challenge of starting each line of the chorus with the last word of the previous line, allowing the addition of “a” where it was needed to make sense:
‘And he says, I… / I am a man / A simple man / A man of colours / And I can see / See through the years / Years of a man / A man of colours’
The Kingdom and My Obsession:
My girlfriend at the time directly inspired The Kingdom, a song about an incredibly independent, self-contained young woman who doesn’t want to be one half of something, which my girlfriend said in the letter declining my proposal of marriage. There are no prizes for guessing My Obsession sprang from the same place.
Girl in the Moon:
Girl in the Moon was another song that started as an exercise: in this case to try to write something as gloriously nonsensical as the lyrics Marc Bolan came up with for pretty much every one of his songs and The Beatles sang in John Lennon’s I Am the Walrus. But even though it sounds easy, writing great-sounding nonsense is actually incredibly difficult; the brain keeps defaulting to strings of words that make sense. I got there in the end — ‘Put on my Cadillac boots and my magazine jeans, though the colours don’t rhyme’ — but it was tricky.
Anybody’s War:
From my little balcony upstairs at the time, I had observed many couples interacting as they walked along my street. They had no idea they were being watched, of course, and so the exchanges in conversation were candid and unguarded. More than once I found myself overhearing a ferocious domestic argument, and as the houses around me were packed in on each other tightly, at night I sometimes heard the continuation of those arguments. I don’t think I ever heard a full on domestic fight but the conversations along the streets were enough to get me thinking.
Anybody’s War is a song about domestic violence. The treatment that I gave it in the lyrics veiled this subject enough that I never had to reveal it in interviews but now that you know this you will spot it straight away.
“She catches every last regret, she holds it gently like a dying star
He stands like a small boy in the street, throwing rocks and stones into the crowd”
Oddly this wouldn’t be the last time I covered this subject in a song, but the next one would be far more transparent, and the imagery markedly more brutal.
Sunrise:
Sunrise had an unlikely starting point. It was being reported on the news that Japan’s economic recovery since the war was now so strong that it had one of the strongest economies in the world. This in turn started me thinking about the way Japan had rebuilt itself out of the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Sunrise was the result.
Stories behind the Videos:
Crazy:
Making what turned out to be the first of two videos for Crazy took place on a very different scale than we’d been used to thus far. The director, Mark Joffe (who went on to direct the film Cosi) had an incredibly ambitious idea: a single tracking shot of me moving through a strange place with strange, chaotic things happening all around me all of which I never acknowledge. The madness included such surreal touches as someone in a beetle suit trying in vain to climb a wall and people in the background fighting with samurai swords and bouncing on bungee cords. But the big ticket items were pyrotechnic explosions, a car that was to crash into a girder just in front of me and motocross bikes that would fly by me before executing jumps in the background.
There was a stalker sub-theme and Mark had cast a young up and coming actress called Nicole Kidman in the part. She didn’t end up being able to do it, so he replaced her with twins, young women with a slightly spooky look who trailed me through the chaos. We shot it at a disused power station in the Sydney suburb of Pyrmont with an experienced stunt crew. It was choreographed with split-second timing and we spent most of the day walking though it repeatedly, but we couldn’t have a full dress rehearsal because we only had one car to wreck. Mark drilled the message that we would only get one go at this, so no matter what happened once he called action everyone was to keep going all the way to the end.
The Story behind the Cover:
I took a direct hand in the album artwork, though that was initially a secret. Festival Records, with whom we were signed directly, produced various possible images. Many of them were clunkily literal (a man’s head with a prism of light bursting out of it, etc) and none of them worked. It was clear to Bob (Kretschmer) and me that they weren’t going to crack it. We talked about what was needed and I suggested that it should be something that looked as simple as if a child had done it, because the character, the man of colours himself, was so innocent, just painting away in in his own world.
I went up to the local newsagent, bought some crayons and a marker and with a few well-chosen strokes created the partial outline of a man in black holding three flowers in the primary colours of red, yellow and blue. “There,” I said, “It ought to be something like that.” Bob shook his head, he was dumbstruck. “No, not something like that; that should be the cover. It’s perfect.” We felt a bit sheepish about presenting it to Festival in case they said, ‘We’ve got a whole art department here, you just stick to the music.” So, Bob we dummied up an invoice from a non-existent graphics company and we handed that over with the drawing saying, “Thanks for all your efforts, but we commissioned this lot to have a go and we really like what they’ve come up with. What do you think?”
Festival agreed it would work really well but asked if they could have the details of the company that had made it so they could talk to them about a tiny adjustment to straighten the lines representing the legs — at which point Bob and I confessed.
I’ve been asked many times over the years by astute fans and yes, the bunch of flowers the man of colours is holding is a very deliberate reference back to the early band name Flowers.
Stories from the Road:
On 4 March 1988 we played a show for the opening night of the Adelaide festival of the Arts at Elder Park.
45,000 tickets had been sold but on the night a massive crowd turned up, crashed the barriers and the bedlam that ensued made the front page of The Adelaide Advertiser the next day (click here to view). In the article, the estimate of the crowd numbers by police is more in the order of 130,000 people. That would arguably make it the largest crowd ever pulled by an Australian band in this country.
Having played right around Australia, we took the Man of Colours tour to the US and Canada from March to July, squeezing in UK, Belgian and Dutch dates in the middle of two North American legs. Four and a half months might not sound too bad on paper, but we had already been touring non-stop for the better part of a year at this point.
There were 22 of us in the touring party, including roadies and tech crew. Among the latter were Michael Horn and Simon Leadley, ludicrously overqualified for their roles, since they both held degrees in electrical engineering. Instead of sitting in an office they were loading gear into trucks at 2am purely for the fun and adventure of touring the world with a rock band as keyboard techs.
We followed the standard touring regimen of two days on, one off, then three days on, one off. But even on supposed days off my time was booked up with promotion and publicity. On performance days we would arrive in a new town or city and the rest of the band would have hours to relax, catch up with laundry, phone home, etc. Meanwhile the local Chrysalis rep would take me on the rounds of radio stations and newspaper and TV interviews. Each of the local Chrysalis reps was on a sales incentive scheme that meant that the more sales they achieved the bigger the bonus they’d receive. So, as you can imagine, they pulled out all stops to make the maximum use of the time they had me in town. They would have been working for months on this visit, setting up radio contests, in store appearances at record stores, and so on. I’m generally hopeless at remembering names, but I trained myself to hold between 10 and 15 in my short-term memory. We would walk into a radio station and on the way through to the studio I would be introduced by name and title to a dozen or more staff. I would do the interview and still be able to recall all of the names as I shook their hands on the way out. The second we drove away, my memory would wipe itself and re-set.
Following the media commitments, the rep would get me to the venue by 4.30pm or 5pm for a soundcheck. Then it would be back to the hotel for an hour or so to have a shower and get ready. (I never have been able to nap, and I never eat before a show.) We’d do the show, followed by a meet and greet with competition winners and local music retailers and media. (Martin Takarangi was my savior in these situations, watching for the small tug on an earlobe which meant I needed to be extracted from a conversation with someone a little too keen.) We’d get back to the hotel at maybe 1am and I’d have room service food and try to wind down enough to get to sleep by 3am. At seven the next morning we’d be up and on our way to the airport to do it all over again.
We arrived back in Australia in July 1988, bringing 12 months of incredibly intense touring to a close by playing for 25,000 people at World Expo 88 in Brisbane. The continued success of Man of Colours was the reward for all our hard work and it had become the first Australian album to send five singles into the Top 30. In addition to Crazy and Electric Blue, My Obsession hit #5, the title track reached #28 and Nothing Too Serious got to #29. As well, Electric Blue would go on to collect the APRA Award for Most Performed Australasian Popular Work for 1988.
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