iProng classic interview: Silverchair

interview by Bill Palmer

“Imagine if tonight, I hung myself. Now how amazing would that be for your story?”

Daniel Johns asked me that question a few minutes into our interview, and for a split second I thought I might have a problem. Did the lead singer of Silverchair, who when he made his rockstar debut at age fifteen looked and sounded hauntingly like a young Kurt Cobain, really just suggest that he was going to kill himself?

“I was just joking. I’m not going to do it tonight.”

And then I realized he was just having a little fun with me. In fact all three band members were. “That was brilliant,” drummer Ben Gillies complimented Daniel on his wit, as our interview dissolved into laughter. It wouldn’t be the only time. When the hotel waiter came by, Daniel put my portable voice recorder up against his mouth and asked for a double espresso as if he were placing an order into a McDonald’s drive thru speaker. He then gave the recorder to Ben, who promptly ordered a quarter pounder meal deal from the confused waiter.

Who were these comedians and what did they do with Silverchair, the trio of angsty Australian teenagers whose smash debut “Tomorrow” saw the most airplay of any song in the United States in 1995? And where was the anxiety in Daniel Johns, who eight years ago was so anorexic he weighed barely a hundred pounds, and who five years ago was suffering from such a severe case of arthritis that he was confined to a wheelchair? During the time I spent with the three founding members of Silverchair on the Sunset Strip earlier this month, must as I might try, I couldn’t find any trace of angst.

Nor will you find any real angst on Young Modern, the new Silverchair album which if you’ve been asleep for the past decade will stun you with its moments of downright cheeriness. The now-standard lyrical references to Daniel’s health issues are still there. But while 1999’s Neon Ballroom was one long painful admission that Daniel was fighting anorexia and that he wasn’t winning, the reference to the arthritis in the first thirty seconds of Young Modern comes almost in a “been there, done that, let’s move on” throwaway kind of manner before he boasts that “the band is back together.”

Silverchair never did officially break up, but the five years between Young Modern and its predecessor Diorama saw all three band members dive into various side projects. Most notable was The Dissociatives, a 2004 pairing of Daniel with fellow Australian musician Paul Mac, who just happened to be sunbathing down at the other end of the pool during our interview. It turns out Paul is now Silverchair’s keyboardist. So is Paul’s addition creating any friction within the band? Hardly.

“I don’t think we’d be able to replace him,” bassist Chris Joannou said of Paul’s contributions to Young Modern and the current tour, with Daniel comparing Paul’s role in Silverchair to Billy Preston’s role in the Beatles. When I pointed out that Paul’s unofficial status meant that he got to sunbathe in solitude while the three of them had to put up with me, Daniel suggested that they might start having three Swedish male models handle interviews in their place. But then we were getting silly again. Come on guys, where’s the angst?

Not that Young Modern doesn’t have its share of earnest moments. The first single “Straight Lines” appears to find Daniel determined to walk the straight and narrow. The line “lately I’m a desperate believer” implies that he’s found a specific reason for it, but he insists that the line is meant to be vague: “It’s not ‘I’m a believer in God’ or ‘I’m a believer in Xanax’ or anything like that.”

“You could just tell instantly that it was a single,” Ben says of the song that not only debuted at number one in their native Australia but also landed the band back on the U.S. singles charts for the first time this decade, reaching number twelve on Billboard’s Modern Rock charts. In fact “Straight Lines” has received enough attention that Silverchair commissioned their friends from a band called The Presets to create a remix of the song which will be released exclusively through iTunes on December 1st and is currently featured on Silverchair’s official website.

But the earnestness of “Straight Lines” belies the downright jocularity the three band members displayed during our time together, now in their late twenties but often acting as if they were fifteen. When I asked them to describe what Young Modern Station (the title of the album’s first track) would look like if it were a real place, their answers were predictably zany. “Cocaine, prostitutes, Beck’s [beer], fires, Motorhead would be playing, and it would look like hell…I don’t think it would be a place that you’d want to stay for very long,” said Daniel, with Chris adding that “there’d be lots of heat.”

Before the interview I was given brief run-downs about their various personalities from an outside source, and I asked the band how accurate they felt those descriptions were: Ben the silly one, Chris the shy one. Chris expressed frustration at always being tagged as shy, leading the other two guys to mockingly comfort him they way you might console a child. Chris pretended to perk up appropriately. “With confidence-boosting moments like that, how can I be shy?”

Daniel decided to take his description, “the most serious one but he knows how to have a good time,” and put his own spin on it: “I think that means I’m manic depressive.” He then went on to invent his own descriptions for each of the three band members, coming up with “wildly reclusive, eccentric, manic depressive” for Chris, Ben, and himself, respectively.

Did he mean it when he labeled himself manic depressive? With Daniel it seems you never can quite tell whether he’s being serious or not. Perhaps he’s not even sure himself. I asked him about his habit of asking concert audiences to scream two times, then eight times, then six times, and so on, and he gave me a rather detailed description of how the various numbers added up to secret codes he couldn’t reveal, spelling out moods of joy and sadness.

“You’re making that up, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, a little.”

I’m still not sure whether he was or not.

“I’ve had forty birthdays this year,” Chris said in reference to the fact that Daniel keeps asking the crowd at each concert to sing “Happy Birthday” to Chris whether it happens to be his birthday or not. When exactly was his birthday? “It was a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve had numerous ones before that.” And Daniel himself warned me not to bother quoting anything he says while onstage, as it’s all just “buying time so I can catch my breath.”

Was that just Daniel’s way of not having to explain the “we felt like U2 for awhile and we didn’t like it” line that he dropped on the audience during the band’s performance in Anaheim the week before, or does he just honestly not remember what he’s saying when he’s up there? He certainly didn’t dodge the tougher questions, including the obligatory inquiry into how he views his health problems now that that they’re in the rear view mirror: was there a point where you didn’t think you’d make it?

“There was a moment when I didn’t think we’d be doing anything else because I couldn’t play guitar, or I couldn’t even walk,” Daniel said of the arthritis which kept him from touring after 2002’s Diorama. I mean I expected to get better but I didn’t know I’d get a lot better over time. Yeah I’m surprised I’m sitting here but I’m glad. It’s better than being on a lounge and eating soup the for ninetieth day in a row.”

Then came perhaps the tougher question, directed toward his bandmates who’d referred to him as a “brother” earlier in the conversation, the question they’d have to answer while sitting next to him: was there a time when either of them didn’t think Daniel was going to make it?

“I always thought he’d get better,” Chris offered. “The hardest thing was watching him go through the pain, like coming in some days he could play maybe two chords and that was about it, and that was too much.”



Ben’s take was similar. “You’ve just kind of got to sit back and just hope that they do whatever they need to do to come out of it. And you’re kind of thinking about the band as well, thinking aw geez, will we ever do that again?”

Although they both had side projects of their own during Silverchair’s five year hiatus, it seemed that Ben and Chris didn’t really want to consider the possibility of never being able to make music with Daniel again. These three guys have, after all, been doing this together since they were twelve years old. I was almost sorry I’d asked. All three of them were plenty forthcoming when it came to discussing it, but it’s just not where their heads are at these days. I was dredging up something it seems they’d already made peace with.

But it seems we couldn’t go too long without getting silly again. This being the publication for iPod and iPhone users, there comes a time in every iProng interview where I make up an excuse to pull my iPhone out of my pocket in order to get a reaction. With Silverchair being from Australia, where the iPhone has yet to become officially available, I thought I might be able to wow them or at least elicit some degree of fascination.

No luck. Seeing as how they recorded Young Modern in Los Angeles and were currently on their second U.S. tour in the second half of 2007 alone, the iPhone was already old hat. “I just had to talk him out of getting one the other day,” Daniel said of Ben, who summed up his iPhone fascination with “brilliant. YouTube!”

Daniel’s take on Apple’s new product lines sounded like something you might hear from a Wall Street analyst. “They have a really obvious pattern. Whatever they release, it takes at least three generations before it’s good. I think they just released it now to sucker everyone into getting one…I’m sure it’s fine in America, but in Australia?” You’ll hear more than one Apple aficionado speak in the exact same terms, particularly when faced with the prospect of using an iPhone in a country where you’d have to hack it in order to get it to work. But because it’s coming from Daniel, you wonder if he was offering serious commentary on Apple or just finding a subtle way to tease me by calling me a sucker for buying the first generation model.

Chris was more interested in the iPod touch, which I didn’t have with me, but he knew all about its wireless internet access and sixteen gigabyte capacity. I did manage to impress the band with Cover Flow on the iPhone, as there’s something about an artist seeing their own album covers fly past one after another on-screen that invariably elicits a reaction, but it makes me think that perhaps Apple might want to hurry up and launch the iPhone in places like Australia before it becomes yesterday’s news.

When I fired up the 1998 hit song “Torn” from Natalie Imbruglia and handed my iPhone to Daniel, he took one look at his wife’s face on the album artwork and declared that “she’s hot” in the same way that any other guy might. I did get him to reveal he’d written a song for Natalie’s second album, saying that “to sit down and write a pop song can be really enjoyable.”

And perhaps that explains why “Straight Lines” sounds more like a pop song than a grunge song, and why the most terse moment on the entire Young Modern album involves some thieving birds. So what of those early Silverchair fans who fell in love with “Tomorrow” and are now finding their way back to the band and expecting the Nirvana influences to still be there? A few songs from the first two albums are still in the concert repertoire, but “Tomorrow” hasn’t been played live in years.

“There’s a very small element of people that come to a Silverchair show to experience the sentimentality or to re-live the first time they had sex or something, or they want to hear what we were doing at that moment of their lives, but I don’t think it would have been a very wise decision to continue down the road we were going down ten years ago,” Daniel explains, with Ben referring to the “limited shelf life” of the grunge sound.


Sure enough, here in 2007, grunge is long gone and yet Silverchair is still very much still with us. Could these guys really have had the foresight all the way back when they were teenagers to know that their sound would have to evolve in order to stay relevant? As Daniel summed it up, “It’s not really that conscious or anything…we’re having more fun now than we did in the early days. So that seems to have been a correct decision.”



The day after our interview I saw Silverchair in concert once again. Ben, the “eccentric” one, was wearing swimming goggles on his forehead while playing the drums. Daniel led the crowd scream in an even more elaborate pattern of screams than the week before (was that because I’d asked about it?) and this time I couldn’t help but jot down it down. The numerical sequence was 1-1-2-1-2-3-7-3-1-2-1-1-2-3-3-4 for anyone who wants to take a crack at deciphering it.



When Silverchair left the stage for an encore break, the crowd predictably erupted into a chant to bring them back. Was it along the lines of “Play ‘Tomorrow’” or “Bring back the old stuff?” Nope, the crowd was singing the opening notes of “If You Keep Losing Sleep.” the latest single from the new album.

You know what? Maybe these guys are onto something.

Learn more about Silverchair at ChairPage.com. Looking for iProng Magazine issue #1 from December 2007? Right here.