The ICEHOUSE front man has done about 40 shows this year, with the band playing to about 270,000 people in its 40^th anniversary year.

Now the band is gearing up for another crack at the Red Hot Summer Tour, where they will play to audiences in Dubbo for the first time.

But it’s not the first time Davies has been to the city. His primary school years were spent in Wagga Wagga, and he travelled the region with his forester father.

“I've certainly been to Dubbo but don't ask me how long ago it was!” he joked.

Like many rock and roll artists of the 1980s, Davies spent his early career immersed in the club scenes of Sydney and Melbourne.

He speaks fondly of the “interesting turning point in music” the band, formerly known as Flowers, found itself caught up in.

“The heavy rock had suddenly been exploded by the punk rock coming out of Britain,” Davies said.

“There was an explosion in musical technology, so synthesizers, drum machines, all sorts of effects equipment so I found myself with an incredible range of toys to play with!”

ICEHOUSE enjoyed enormous success throughout the 1980s and ‘90s before being Davies discontinued the band in 1993. They sold more than nine million albums internationally and achieved 28 platinum album sales in Australasia.

After a 16-year hiatus, ICEHOUSE reformed in 2009 for Sound Relief, and Davies said they have never looked back.

But he said the music industry had changed “in an enormous number of ways”, with the focus moving away from album sales towards more live performances.

“From early on we were directed to focus on the capital cities … it was a number of years before we started to pick up some regional areas and I remember it was a strange experience to go back to Wagga Wagga … it was actually quite a novelty to actually turn up there to play,” Davies said.

The shift meant regional audiences were finally getting the attention they deserved, he said, while it also made for better music.

“The younger acts are incredibly focused on playing … they are quite happy to drive wherever there's a demand for them and there is certainly a demand in regional Australia,” he said.

“It’s a very levelling kind of stage – for want of a better word – for music in general because there has been a whole lot of ‘hocus pocus’ in terms of technology.

“The absolute leveller is to actually have to get up and have to perform live for people because that's when you work out whether they're actually any good or not. There's a kind of truthfulness in the way things have evolved.”

He said he couldn’t wait to come to Dubbo.

“I approach places I haven't been with a kind of wide-eyed fascination these days,” Davies said.

“With something as dynamic as a rock and roll show, inevitably things go wrong and it’s only with that sense of humour that we get through a two-hour set and we enjoy ourselves.”