Silverchair was one of biggest bands to come out of Australia.
The rock trio would make a mark a few years after grunge had taken over..
In fact, they had their big break not even a year after Nirvana's Kurt Cobain died.
This put Silverchair in the unique category of post-Nirvana alt-rock acts that included
the likes of Foo Fighters, Puddle of Mudd, Bush, and Local H. By the way guys I’ve
done a whole video on whatever happened to Local H, link is down below.
Silverchair would also end Australia’s musical drought by being the first band to have a
debut album chart in the top 10 in America since 1982’s Men At Work.'
Silverchair would be also the first Australian band in 5 years to have an album chart in
the top 10.
The last band before them was INXS.
Vocalist and guitarist Daniel Johns grew up in a musical home with his parents frequently
blasting Black Sabbath and Deep Purple records.
Johns and his schoolmate, a drummer named Ben Gillies started jamming together as teenagers
in 1992 in Newcastle, Australia ,a blue collar working town north of Sydney, The pair wanted
to get serious about music and enlisted bassist Chris Joannou and called themselves Innocent
Criminals.
They soon started jamming on Pearl Jam songs before writing their own.
By the spring of 1994, a neighbour of Johns told the young musician about a demo tape
contest called Pick Me that was being broadcast on the TV show NOMAD and being sponsored by
the local radio station Triple J FM.
John’s was a little skeptical telling Rolling Stone in 1996 “We’d been in competitions
before and didn’t do shit.
But we sent in our tape" he'd remember
Silverchair would be one of more than 800 entries into the contest and thought their
tape would be lost in the shuffle.
Their tape they submitted was credited to their old moniker Innocent Criminals.
One of the show’s judges heard the almost 7 minute long demo of the song Tomorrow and
was blown away It was no surprise the band’s demo stood out considering how awful some
of the submissions were.
One band did a song about tuna fish while another artist submitted a song that heavily
sampled movies include the fugitive and star trek.
That judge who discovered Silverchair would be a video director named Robert Hambling
who told rolling Stone magazine “It stood out even stronger because I’d
just listened to about 80 or 100 demos back-to-back,” From my point of view, in a competition to
find new talent, you couldn’t find a more perfect example than three young lads in their
bedrooms in Newcastle with a song that, I believed, could be a No. 1 mega worldwide
smash hit.”
The other judges concurred and awarded Silverchair the show’s grand prize, which included a
full day recording session to spruce up Tomorrow, a video shoot for the single at an old prison
and by June of 1994 the video for Tomorrow was already being aired on the TV Show Nomad
and Triple JJJ FM added the song their rotation .
Within a week of the band getting radio airplay, record labels were chomping at the ability
to sign the band.
John’s mother who managed the group at the time was being contacted by Australian labels
including Murmur who was owned by Sony.
Now what's funny is that the reps went to a local Newcastle.
pub called the Jewels Taverns but because the boys were underage they weren’t allowed
to play there, so they had to play in the restaurant next door to the bar.
The band would end up signing with Murmur records who released Tomorrow under their
new band name Silverchair.
The name originated from combining the Nirvana song Sliver, which one of the members thought
was spelled silver and the track Berlin Chair by You Am I.
A month after it’s release, Tomorrow topped the charts in Australia selling 175,000 copies.
It was estimated that approximately 1 percent of australia’s population purchased the
single.
The band would tell billboard magazine how tomorrow's origins dated back to early 1994
while they were still called Innocent Criminals.
” That was on a TV show.
There was this poor guy taking a rich guy through a hotel to experience the losses of
the less fortunate than him.
The rich guy is just complaining because he just wants to get out and the poor guy is
saying you have to wait till tomorrow to get out.
That's one of our least serious songs but it still has meaning to it.
To give you a sense of how quickly silverchair blew up, the first well known rock band they
saw was the Australian group Screaming Jets in the summer of 1994.
They played at a venue that seated 3,500 people, and funny enough, Silverchair was the opening
act.
Johns would tell Rolling Stone
“It was sold out, and we were pretty nervous,” recalls Johns, who was 15 at the time “It
was just after we got a record contract.
We played and then we got to go upstairs into the VIP area and watch the Jets.
“But it was pretty weird,” “The Jets sounded so good.
We thought we must have sounded like shit.”
By early 1995 the band was playing the country’s big day out festival.
They played an afternoon slot on one of the side stages and attracted more than 15,000
people, three times their performance area’s capacity.
Keep in mind that during the bands rise in popularity they were 15 and 16 years of age
& still in school.
In fact their debut album Frogstomp was recorded and mixed in just 10 days during the boys
christmas break from school.
Since the band members toured extensively to support Frogstomp, they were missing a
lot of school, their school principal was pretty accommodating restructuring their classes
for the last two remaining years until graduation and they would be get special credits for
music.
Silverchair would be managed by their parents and when the band hit the road ,their mom
and dad’s would take turns chaperoning them on tour.
Silverchair would tour America 4 times in just eight months on the back of frogstomp
and even landed a spot opening for the Red hot chili peppers and the Ramones
By the end of the day Frogstomp would be certified double-platinum in America, triple-platinum
in Canada by the CRIA, and multi-platinum in Australia thanks to the single Tomorrow.
The album would peak at number 9 on the billboard charts.
Rolling Stone Magazine would estimate that in 1996 by the time Frogstomp ended it’s
run on the charts, the trio would earn about $1 million a piece with their parents setting
up trust funds to hold the money.
Success aside Gillies would reveal how fame wasn’t quite what they expected telling
Rolling Stone “You always think that if you ever put a record out that it’s all
fancy hotel rooms and chicks, And we’ve seen the other side of it.
You gotta do all the shit – traveling, interviews, stupid photo shoots.
All that other stuff is just a big pull.”
Despite the band’s early success, their egos seemed in check, Johns would tell the
LA Times in 1995 “We still think we kind of suck.
We’re still learning, you know, and we are improving.
The more you play the better you get.
But it’s just weird to us because there’s a lot of other really good bands here in Australia--bands
who play much better than us--that still aren’t signed.”
When it came to the critics many of them felt the band's debut album relied too heavily
on their Seattle Grunge influences.
And despite constant comparisons to Nirvana, Johns,, denied the trio were major Nirvana
fans, but admitted to being bigger fans of Pearl Jam.
In fact the the director who shot Tomorrow was Mark Pellington who also did Pearl Jam’s
videoJeremy.
Johns lashed out against the band’s critics telling MTV "The people who say stuff like
that are just dumb, old fucks who can't remember what it's like to be young,"Just because you're
a teenager doesn't mean you don't have those emotions.
Those people are just jaded" he would say.
The band were also soon the subject of a murder trail in America when two teenagers who killed
a family in Washington State blamed the band’s song 'Israel Son' for inspiring the crime.The
band would be acquitted of these charges.
I’ve done a detailed video on this subject.
Link is down below.
In May of 1996, the Australian trio re-entered the studio to work on their sophomore album,
which took them six months to complete..
The members were now 17 and still in school.
They did however make one big decision for their second record, barring their parents
from the recording studio.
Drummer BEN GILLIES, would tell MTV I think the second album's always the worst one.
It's the one that says if you're a one-hit wonder or if you're a band that's gonna be
here for a long time.
Their sophomore album would be titled 'Freak Show' and Johns would tell the same interview
"it's kinda like old freak shows of the 40s.
Just traveling around and doing your show and going to the next town and doing it again.
We saw there's a similarity there, and thought it'd be a good theme" he'd say.
It was during the tour to support the album the members finally graduated from high school
allowing them to focus solely on music.
And lrically, many of the songs on Freak Show focused on the backlash and anger of the expectations
put on the band during their Frogstomp period..
Released in February of 1997 the album would peak at number 12 on the billboard charts
in america and sold roughly a quarter of the copies of its predecessor.
Globally it's estimated that the album sold 1.5 million copies and it produce two hits
in Abuse Me and Freak
After graduating from high school in 1997, when the average teenager is getting ready
to go to college, the Australian band started working on their third album, Neon Ballroom.
In a 1999 interview with Hip Online, Ben Gilles talks about the inspiration behind Neon Ballroom
saying
“The name comes from two meanings.
‘Neon’ means, is a representation of, all the modern sounds on the album, like our
hidden little techno sounds and the overall modern sound of the album.
And the ‘Ballroom’ has got to do with the kind of older sounds on the album like
the strings and the piano and keyboards.
It’s actually just a mix of old and the new.
That’s what it represents.”
While Silverchair’s first two albums could be called post-grunge, Neon Ballroom represented
something much different incorporating more keyboards and synthesizers Johns would reveal
to Junkee.com “I wrote Neon Ballroom in that time where I hated music.
“Really everything about it, I hated… but I couldn’t stop doing it.
I felt like a slave to it.”
Johns in a separate interview would tell MTV that leaving school influenced his writing
on the album as he was solely focused on writing rather than fitting in school work around
trying to be a musician.
Johns would tell MTV
With the previous two albums, the lyrics were very focused on the anger I was feeling towards
certain groups and sub-cultures and people.
And with this album, musically and lyrically, I just wanted to do something that people
wouldn't expect, so I really just focused on things that I was feeling about myself,
and psychological issues, and lyrically, it's a lot deeper and means a bit more to me" he
would say.
Fans understood just how deep the lyrics were as around the time of Neon Ballroom’s release
as Johns would go public with his struggle with anxiety, depression and an eating disorder.
John would reveal his problems started in 1997 following the band’s tour for Freak
Show.
After returning home, he took the advice of his therapist and moved out of his parents
home and into his own place.
It was during his time living alone he isolated himself from the outside world, wrote poetry
for six months in 1998.
He would reveal to MTV "I had a lot of troubles with anxiety and had to take medication, because
every time I left the house, I would think people had conspiracies and people were after
me, and every time I left the house [I thought] I was going to be beaten up.
He eating disorder would be captured in the track Ana’s Song.,
But thankfully for the frontman he was able to turn his life around after Doctors made
him aware that he wouldn’t survive for long if he kept up his lifestyle.
The writing process also proved to be different as the album’s songs didn’t start out
with music first, but rather the poetry John’s wrote in isoluation, Unlike previous Silverchair
releases, he music was shaped around the lyrics.
The only exception to this album was the song Anthem for the year 2000, which apparently
dated back to the mid 90’s.
After Neon Ballroom, the group parted ways with Sony and signed with two different labels.
Atlantic in North and South America, and Eleven: A Music Company for Australia and Asia.
Eleven was actually a label that the trio co-founded & In a statement posted on the
band's official Web site, the Silverchair’s manager stated why they parted ways with Sony
revealing , "The company was unable to give the band the kind of future controls over
their music which other labels are offering, so it was simply time to move on.
Things didn’t seem to end on good terms with sony as the label would release a best
of compilation that the band disavowed.
As the band began work on their fourth full length studio record , Diorama, the band’s
songwriting style changed once again as songs started with John first writing new material
on piano.
He had learned to work with an orchestra telling billboard magazine in 2002 “I wanted an
album of colour so we tore up the rule book.”The band would work with composer Van Dyke Parks.
Who famously worked with Beach Boys Brian Wilson.
Sadly for the band their touring plans would be cut short and dates would be cancelled
in Europe and North America after the Johns who was 23 at the time would come down with
reactive arthritis which prevented the musician from being able to stand and play guitar on
some days.
The lack of touring & changing musical tastes and the band’s new sound likely led to it’s
weakened commercial performance peaking at number 92 on the billboard charts in America.
The band would go on an indefinite hiatus, which would last for several years.
The band would reconvene in 2005 during a charity gig for the Tsunami victims.
Three years into their hiatus, the band quietly regrouped to begin working on their last studio
album, 2007’s Young Modern.
By this time.
Daniel Johns had already written 50 songs that he has briefly considered for a solo
project.
The band had planned to release a follow-up to Young Modern starting work on the album
in 2009, but it was never completed.
. The group stopped recording part way through to pursue other side projects & the members
are still on good terms, and haven’t ruled out a reunion.
The band issued a statement in 2011 announcing their indefinite hiatus which read
We formed Silverchair nearly 20 years ago when we were just 12 years old.
Today we stand by the same rules now as we did back then... if the band stops being fun
and if it's no longer fulfilling creatively, then we need to stop...
Despite our best efforts over the last year or so, it's become increasingly clear that
the spark simply isn't there between the three of us at the moment."
In 2018 Johns expressed he had no desire to reform the band, but as recently as May of
2020, a picture of Johns playing electric guitar appeared online, leading to The Newcastle
Herald speculating that a reunion maybe possible.
That does it for today's video guys.
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