I enjoyed this interview for a number of reasons, not least because I grew up listening to the music of Daniel Johns and Silverchair, and that at the time of me interviewing Johns, it was one of my first "big" interview subjects; I'd only been a writer for around 18 months at this stage. Secondly, it was the fact that he was the opposite to what I'd pictured him to be, and he wasn't the somnambulist drug-abuser he's become.
The following piece ran in the Sun Herald the week of the release of Young Modern, much to the discontent of EMI. I originally interviewed Johns for The Brag and supposedly I didn't have the clearance to write another piece for the Herald. Anyway, it ran, it happened, and here it is. You can read The Brag's Silverchair cover story at Fasterlouder. It was also cited in a Wikipedia article, which was pretty exciting.
Daniel Johns is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a white-speckled grey t-shirt. When you think about it, it’s a miracle that he’s still making music: from finding fame when he was 14, Johns grew into a man in the public eye. At the age of 20, his band Silverchair had sold five million records. But all the pressure upon such young shoulders started to take its toll, with Johns suffering from anxiety and depression. By the time the band had released their third album Neon Ballroom in 1999, his anxiety had manifested into anorexia. He admits that during that period, food was his enemy, and he was afraid that people were trying to poison him.
After exhuming his demons, the recording of Silverchair’s masterful opus Diorama was fraught with its own dramas: namely, Johns’ development of crippling reactive arthritis. This hindered the band’s chances to play live and take the album to the country, and many fans feared the worst for their favourite Novocastrians.
So when I meet Daniel Johns for our scheduled midday appointment at the luxurious Quay Hotel, he’s not what I expect. Smoking a cigarette – his addiction courtesy of his wife, pop star and former Neighbours bombshell Natalie Imbruglia, who gave Johns his first “tube” – Johns is effusive, witty and light-hearted; laughing opening, not reserved or withdrawn as I’d anticipated. He’s no longer gaunt and the flowing blond locks have been shed in favour for centimetre-short hair.
It’s obvious he’s pleased with his new baby, Young Modern, Silverchair’s fifth and most diverse record to date. “I kind of decided not to go in a direction with this one,” he says, opting instead to “genre-hop”. After the intricacy of Diorama, Johns’ admits his goal for the new album was to “simplify”. “Nick [Launay] that I produced the album with,” he explains, “really helped with that. We were talking about how we could make it really simple, like Beatles simple [laughs]. Like Revolver, it’s unusual, it’s quirky – like I think this record is – but it’s also so simple and so easy to pick up a guitar and learn it. So I wanted to make a really eccentric, psychedelic pop album with rock and roll elements as well.”
The musical menagerie that is Young Modern ebbs and flows, from the grandiose Beach Boys influence of ‘If You Keep Losing Sleep’ with its layered instrumentation, stirring strings, marching band snare rolls and shifting tempos, to opening number ‘Young Modern Station’ which Johns describes, with a laugh, as “Sonic Youth crossed with Talking Heads crossed with, like, The Jam or something.”
It’s also the first Silverchair record that Johns has collaborated with another songwriter since 1997’s Freak Show. After writing all the material for Neon Ballroom and Diorama, Johns co-wrote a handful of tracks on Young Modern with The Presets’ Julian Hamilton, who is also a member of Johns’ other project The Dissociatives which he formed with electronic artist Paul Mac. Johns had written 54 songs for the album, but once Hamilton became involved, “it kind of put a different slant on it, which I really liked. It brought a straighter side to the record. It was all pretty crazy.” Hamilton spun his magic on ‘Mind Reader’, the Roy Orbison-sounding number ‘Waiting All Day’, and ‘Straight Lines’, which debuted atop the ARIA Singles Charts.
“When I started writing with Jules, I tried to get into writing really good pop songs; things that were instantly palatable so they were like an invitation into the more crazier or avant-garde end of the record.” So did he ever consider writing with drummer Ben Gillies, who co-wrote the band’s first two albums with Johns? “Not for this record, because we didn’t really talk about it,” he answers. “After I’d finished my demos, me and Jules were hanging out quite a bit. It was really natural; it was never a big business plan.”
After overcoming his reactive arthritis and forming The Dissociatives in 2003, Johns announced that Silverchair were going on an “indefinite hiatus”. With Gillies joining pop outfit Tambalane and bassist Chris Joannou moving into the production seat for two albums by The Mess Hall, rumours were flying that the band had come to an end. Johns had even planned on Young Modern being a solo record, but it wasn’t until Silverchair performed at the WaveAid charity concert in 2005 that he decided to reunite with his best friends. “It’s really hard to give up being in a band that I think is a really good live band,” states Johns, a fact which the boys confirmed at Friday night’s massive Young Modern album launch at CarriageWorks, the recently transformed Eveleigh Rail Yards. “I know we’re really good friends and we make good music. I guess after [WaveAid] I decided it would be better if it was a Silverchair record, because I wanted to play with those guys again.
“I had a really strong vision of what the album should sound like, stronger than any other record we’ve ever done,” continues Johns, who also takes co-production credits on Young Modern. Johns says he wanted to create a “high fidelity White Album” but he didn’t want to make it sound like a retro pop album. “If you’re going to do a record that’s supposed to be retro, it’s so hard to top the ones that have already been done. You’re not going to make a record that sounds better than the White Album. No one’s ever going to do it. People try and try and they’re never going to be anything more than second. It doesn’t appeal to me. I want to come first!”
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