Songoftheday 10/13/15 - I've got a pocket full of holes, head in the clouds the king of fools..

"Crazy" - Icehouse
from the album Man Of Colours (1987)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #14 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11

Today's Song of the Day is by the Australian modern rock band Icehouse, who started out as Flowers in the late 70s in Sydney. Led by singer/multi-instrumentalist Iva Davies, they changed their name to coincide with their self-titled debut international album. The first single, "Can't Help Myself", was a top-10 single in their homeland, and made the American dance chart at #50 in 1981. Its followup, "We Can Get Together", managed to hit the U.S. pop chart for the first time, reaching #62 (and #51 on the rock chart). The title track "Icehouse" made the Mainstream Rock chart in Billboard that same year at #28. All three of those were originally released in Australia under the Flowers name.

In 1982, they released their second album as Icehouse, Primitive Man, and while the lead single, the topical "Great Southern Land", reached the top-5 in Australia, it was the second, "Hey Little Girl", which again crossed over the Pacific, reaching the American rock and dance charts, and becoming their first to reach the British top-40 at #17. Three years later, their song "No Promises", taken from the soundtrack to the ballet Boxes and on their album Measure for Measure, was their biggest at that time in the States, hitting the top-10 on the rock and dance charts.

Icehouse released their fifth studio set Man Of Colours in the fall of 1987. The first single from the record, "Crazy", was written by Davies with band members Andy Qunta and Bob Kretschmer, and the spacious production afforded by David Lord made them sonically like INXS by way of Simple Minds circa 1985, with Iva's mullet exceeding the high standards of the time...

"Crazy" became Icehouse's first American top-40 hit in January of 1988, while reaching #10 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. Internationally, the single went to #3 in Australia, #10 in New Zealand, and even made the British top-40 at #38.

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Here's the original Australian version of the video for the song, which only had the rest of the band in the stunt-filled clip for a short second...

...and the group performing live in 1988...

...and lastly, at another Aussie gig in 2012...

Up tomorrow: the Purple One isn't a good substitute.