EMOTION SICKNESS
Massive Magazine, April 1999
Story by Craig Tansley
"Camera reload please. Okay. Rolling. Clear the set. And action." The backing track kicks to life. Daniel Johns come alive, airstrumming his guitar. He stomps his feet and dirt from the ground rises. He’s wearing a sparkly purple cardigan with crazy-looking red shoes that look like oversized moccasins. "We are the youth who’ll take your fascism away…" He mimes the words as he stares vacantly into the main camera. The band behind him take the cue. Chris Joannou’s shaved head gleams with sweat as he throws himself about, Ben Gillies thrashes his drum kit to within an inch of its life. I take a look at the black and white monitor: slick, very slick silverchair. The track finishes, Daniel holds his pose until the director, a young guy with a permanent worried frown etched on his face, calls cut again: "Okay. Lens change. Drinks for the boys." The pierced extras on the set relax, some light up cigarettes and look like they’d rather be anywhere else. Make-up girls come from everywhere like flies. Daniel, Chris and Ben are touched up and perfected. Daniel looks bored, he’s chewing his nails and practising his vacant stare. The crew scramble to reload film and change camera angles. Snacks are passed around- salami, carrots, cheese and an assortment of dips- but silverchair get nothing but glasses of bottled water. "Camera reload please. Okay. Rolling. Clear the set. And action." The backing track kicks to life again. Daniel Johns comes alive, air strumming his guitar. He stomps his feet and dirt from the ground rises…welcome to silverchair’s world. Should I add, it’ snearly 8 o’clock on a Friday night and we’re still hours from finishing. Tonight will be a reasonably early night, there’s a shoot at Sydney’s Martin Place early tomorrow. After that, the three teenagers will board a flight to play their first major gig in over a year at Cobram’s Peaches’n’Cream festival. They’ll finish at 1.30am and fly back to Newcastle. Weeks later they’ll fl y to England to play three major live shows. But before they go, there’s the obligatory interviews for the major music magazines, street press, daily newspapers, radio and television; after all they’ve got a new album out. And they’ll need to do some more videos for the next singles off the album, ‘Emotion Sickness’ is next. In March they’ll tour the east coast of Australia, then they fly to America, via Glasgow, Nottingham, Manchester and London to promote the album. After America, they’ll fly back to Australia for an extensive national tour. Sound exhausting? You bet. But whose fault is that they’re Australia’s biggest band?
"Do you want the story of our lives? It’s hurry, hurry….wait…hurry, hurry…hang on…wait."- Chris Joannau.
Last time silverchair kept me waiting I told them off and said they wouldn’t be allowed to ride their b ikes anymore. Of course, I didn’t realise who they were at the time and I was quite embarrassed later when I found out. This time I’m prepared to wait and observe. We’re at Sydney’s Technology Park on the rim of the city. I’m sitting on a stool in a huge building that looks like some sort of factory out of the 19th century. There’s steam in the air, which adds to the surrealism of the occasion. I feel the like I’m a bit player in the movie Playing Beattie Bow. People are milling around. There’s men with cameras everywhere. They look a little irritated, but I also sense an air of expectation, especially amongst the extras on set who are huddled together in a semicircle drinking cordial. I pour myself another coffee and ask again how long it will be before I get my interview. "Not long, they’re just getting ready." I sit down, again, and wait. Someone walks by who looks like a mixture of Daniel Johns and Kurt Cobain; I stare until he stares back. Suddenly silverchair’s management grab me by the arm. "They’re ready." I’m led up past the back of the building feeling like I’m about to have a special audience with the king. We approach what look s like the campervan out of Scooby Doo. It has "Wham" written on the side in bright letters and I wonder for a second if this is really some cruel trick and I’m about to come face to face with George Michael and Andrew Ridgley. "You’ll probably only have half an hour, sorry, but they’re running late for their video"- it’s the young guy with the permanent worried frown. It’s been a long day and like it or not, I’m a journalist, and journalists are only a means to an end in the music industry. We’re not always a welcome intrusion. I open the door and enter the air-conditioned comfort of silverchair’s world. The jester has arrived.
Daniel Johns once tried to kill me. He used a lethal weapon in a threatening manner and if it wasn’t for my quick evasive action he may very well have succeeded. The lasting impression I have of Daniel Johns is of his huge, terrified eyes staring at me as we went within a metre of really hurting each other. Johns was learning to drive at the time and was travelling much faster than he should’ve (in his defence, the speed limit was 5km/h). I’m not sure who got the biggest shock when he took on a corner much too wide and nearly collided with my van. He was 16 and a guest at a resort I worked at in far north New South Wales, silverchair were headlining the inaugural Homebake festival and were staying with their parents. They were model guests, there were no loud parties with drugs and cheap women, they didn’t even drink. They took time out to sign autographs for kids staying at the resort, and I couldn’t help thinking at the time how balanced they all were given the upheaval their lives had just gone through. I wondered how long it would be before they changed and got caught up in the rock’n’roll game. I thought one day I’d hear the stories: heroin, cocaine, out-of-control egos, suicide attempts; and remember them as fresh-faced teenagers who kept me waiting because they "forgot" to bring their bikes back by 6 o’clock.
The collective silverchair- Daniel Johns, Chris Joannou and Ben Gillies- are sitting together around a table inside the Scooby Doo van. They look up as I come in. Chris and Ben give me a genuine smile, Daniel is a little more hesitant. I shake hands and notice just how fragile looking Johns is. He’s much skinnier than I’d imagined and his glam-rock outfit and pale make-up combine to make him look inanimate, almost like a mannequin. The driver of the van leaves the room and I’m alone with the trio. They go back to the magazines they were reading before I came in. Chris is engrossed in a surfing magazine. I spot an "in". "I used to work on that, " I tell him. "Yeah? No way! Really? This mag’s unreal, the survey on sex and surfers is so funny," he laughs. "That must have been the coolest job." I spare him the details: that it wasn’t all surfing, travel and beautiful women. He’s in silverchair, he knows all too well reality and people’s perception of reality can be two very different things. The ice has been broken, with Chris at least. Daniel Johns is a different story. He’s outwardly friendly, but there’s something very different about him. Chris and Ben seem, on first impression at least, like your typical 19-year-olds. Daniel doesn’t. I direct my first question to him: "has the kind of fame you’ve had messed with your minds?" Johns says nothing. I expect him to laugh or at least smile. I asked the question with my tongue firmly in cheek, but he seems to want to give me a serious answer. His eyes are intense, he looks directly at me, or through me, each time he speaks. The black eyeliner he’s wearing is cracking under the strain of his concentration. When he speaks I can barely hear him above the steady drone of the air-conditioner. I have to lean forward in my seat. Every word he speaks is quotable, but I know his soft, almost delicate voice, will be very hard to hear when I play my tape recorder back. But I don’t want to put the thing any closer to his face: far too obtrusive. For a person who’s been picked at and probed like Daniel Johns, little things like that could turn him off telling me anything significant. "it’s really a wonder we’re not all schizophrenic," he finally speaks, shocking me with ‘the perfect quote.’ Chris and Ben laugh, almost uncomfortably, Daniel smiles. "We’d go off playing these shows and hearing how big we were and listen to our songs on the radio and then come back to school and be these normal school kids with all the same friends we always had. And it happened so often, six weeks of being a rock star, six weeks of being nothing. It fucked with our minds a bit ’cause we were so normal. I mean, when we first started, even though we weren’t good looking at all…" Chris and Ben laugh again, Daniel looks at them,"…we were painted out as these really cute kids and it wasn’t until people saw us live that they realised we weren’t just a teeny manufactured band. We were just normal school kids." As he’s speaking Daniel plays with a fruit bowl in front of him. It’s obviously captured his interest and he starts to roll the fruit around so that the green apples collide with each other. "Don’t do that, you’ll bruise ‘em, you dickhead,"Chris speaks. "Nah, it’ll just make them softer," Daniel picks up an apple up to demonstrate,"….so you won’t hurt your teeth when you bite into them," Chris stands and takes the fruit bowl away. "Apples are meant to be hard, soft apples suck." For all their fame, there’s moments where I feel I could be talking to any 19 year-olds In the country. "It smells in here," Chris says, sniffing the air disapprovingly. "Yeah, it’s the chips," Ben speaks for the first time. Chris picks up the apple bowl and sniffs the apples. "Nah, they don’t smell." Ben leans over and pinches Chris’s arm hard: "They’re not chips, you retard." "It’s not the chips, it’s the air-conditioning, it smells really damp." Daniel provides the voice of reason. "And it’s making my throat hurt, I’m gonna go outside for five minutes." Chris and Ben are constantly messing around with each other, trading punches and funny insults. Daniel is a little more removed. It’s not like he disapproves, but he steers clear of it all, maybe it’ just when journalists are around. Maybe he’s just a little kid when the world’s not looking at him.
"With the first album there was a lot of high singing and with the second album I kind of stopped because I didn’t feel as masculine." Daniel Johns’s self-conscious words in silverchair’s biography still stick in my mind. So do a lot of his idiosyncrasies. He’s very personable, but he’s completely withdrawn. He acts interested, but his eyes are bored. He wears clothes David Bowie used to, but talks about how "normal" he feels. Who is the real Daniel Johns? Does really care what the rest of us think of him? I’m annoyed that after spending a few hours with him I feel I understand him less than before I met him. It’s like when you watch a confronting movie, it stays in your mind long after you leave the cinema: you’re still trying to work out exactly what you saw. Johns is as intense as Ben and Chris are relaxed, but when he laughs, it’s genuine, never contrived. Sometimes he seems like a little boy, but other times he shocks you with responses you wouldn’t expect from someone twice his age. He seems very humble for someone of his stature, but you wonder if that’s partly a façade, particularly given the attention the band receives from female fans. And hour before my interview I ran into silverchair’s new touring keyboardist, ex-Cordrazine member Sam Holloway. He’d just played his first gig with silverchair the night before in Newcastle and had noticed the risks girls took to get close to the band. "As soon as everyone saw it was silverchair they all rushed the stage," he’d told me. "And the girls there were so close and I was watching them getting bumped around by the older guys there and I was a bit worried about them." I ask Daniel about girls. "I’m surprised how many girls I know that were very interested in the fact that I was interviewing you today," I tell him. Johns doesn’t take that as a compliment. "Yeah, well that’s a reflection of how fucked humanity is really," he says. "I don’t get it, I’m nothing special. When we went big I didn’t have heaps of girls after me like everyone seemed to think. I think I had less girls interested in me after silverchair got big than before. And I’m not saying I had heaps of girls after me before. I didn’t even have a proper girlfriend after that for ages. Everyone’s perception is that it’s girls, girls, girls; I mean that just doesn’t happen."
A humble man, but when we talk about touring with the Big Day Out in 1995 much later he can’t help throwing in, with a wry chuckle that "Courtney Love wanted me pretty bad"- Courtney Love being one of the most famous females on the planet. I don’t want to openly pry into his emotional state, that’s no business of mine, or yours, but you can’t help but feel you’re prying when you listen to the new album. "These songs are definitely a lot more personal," Johns admits. "On the first album we were only 14 or 15 so we hadn’t had many experiences to inspire songs. With the second one it was really about the aggression and hate that I was feeling toward certain people at the time. On this album there’s probably a wider range of moods and themes in the lyrics and they’re more based on direct experiences." There is a recurring theme on Neon Ballroom- that Johns has no one to love. "A lot of people think it’s a love song but it’s actually about not having love and that’s why it says ‘miss you love.’ When people hear it on the radio they’ll probably think ‘yeah, that’s a love song,’ but once they read the lyrics they’ll realise that it’s really an anti-love song…"- Johns on ‘Miss You Love.’ "It’s about just feeling like everything is collapsing on you because you don’t have anyone to love…it’s all contained, and then all of a sudden anger comes out for six bars or whatever…"- Johns on ‘Black Tangled Heart.’ He also seems preoccupied with self-esteem: "It’s about being in a vulnerable state and then someone taking advantage of you.."- Johns on ‘Point of View.’ "It’s about being scared to be yourself because you don’t want to get attacked so that whole song is bout people punishing your self-esteem…"- Johns on ‘Steam Will Rise.’ Maybe we all look deeply into song lyrics, but remember this is coming from a guy who only five years ago sang "..the water out of the tap is very hard to drink."
"I could’ve been a plumber, I s’pose. I probably would have done an apprenticeship," it’s Chris speaking back in the Scooby Doo van. "Yeah, you could’ve been a pretty good plumber, I reckon," Ben mocks. "But fuck that, sticking your hand up sewers all day checking out why people’s toilets are overflowing." "Yeah," Ben adds. "You’d be better off playing in a rock band. It’s not a bad job." They all laugh. "Imagine Chris as a plumber…" Ben laughs again. It’s the thought of Chris the bass player donning overalls and carrying a wrench. Although it’s probably a lot easier to imagine Chris the plumber than Daniel the plumber. As a day job, playing in silverchair hasn’t been so bad, although it has its moments. "In a perfect world, there’d be no tours and no interviews. We’d just play music, we’d rehearse heaps and do an absolutely perfect show and put it on the Internet and everyone could see it and we wouldn’t have to tour," Johns says, looking very tired all of a sudden. For the past year, the trio have avoided both touring and the media rat-race. They haven’t had to do much but think about recording their third album. The six months leading up to the album’s release on March 8 had been spent solely on writing and honing songs. The two pervious albums, Frogstomp and Freak Show, were written and recorded during school breaks. While other kids went surfing and watched movies, Johns wrote ‘Cemetery,’ ‘Freak’ and ‘The Door.’ "I really wanted to do a different sort of album," Daniel says. "We’d taken the three-piece rock thing as far as we could, I was getting a bit bored with it. We wanted to go a bit further with it all."
"We don’t really care is this album sells four million copies or not," Chris says. "We’re just interested in making good music and we all like it heaps." And why not? It’s a great album. Daniel Johns’ voice has matured, the band gels and they’ve proved four million plus record sales wasn’t a fluke. Even if you don’t buy it, they’re not really going to care… as long as you like it.
Chris, Ben and Daniel take turns to leave the room to get made up for their video clip. Over an hour has passed since I joined the band in the van. I keep expecting a knock at the door with someone telling me to leave, but it doesn’t come. silverchair are starting to fidget, my questions are getting more and more obscure. For the most part, our interview has been nothing but four young guys sitting around a table having a few laughs. As I play the tape back days later I can’t help noticing how much laughing there is, Daniel Johns included. silverchair are an easy band to like. They take themselves seriously, but not to the point of a Radiohead or U2. On the other hand, they’re not Frenzal Rhomb. Playing back my tape I can hear the hum of the air-conditioner, but it’s still easy to make out voices. Ben’s voice is easy to transcribe, particularly as he spoke the least of the trio. Chris’s voice is loud and clear. But it’s Daniel’s, as I expected, that I struggle with. Sometimes I can’t hear a thing and go to rewind the tape. But then his long pause lapses and you can hear his soft voice. Although it’s hard to decipher, everything he says is notable. There will one day be a story on silverchair which will contain nothing but a giant quote form Johns. For a band who have to sit through about 10 merciless interviews with music journalists every day when they’re on the promotion trail, they showed me more courtesy than they had to. I hope Johns isn’t offended by my attempts to understand him. There’s a knock on the door and the guy with the worried face tells me five minutes. I’ve run out of questions and by now we’re all looking at our feet a lot. I thank silverchair for their time and wish them luck on their tour. We shake hands again and the trio are led away to film the single.
Johns looks uncomfortable on the set. There’s fancy bright lights, chandeliers drape from the ceiling and the steam keeps billowing out with no regard for anyone’s lungs. There’s at least 70 people on set, all focused on three people- Daniel, Chris and Ben. silverchair’s been waiting for 20 minutes, since our interview ended. It’s been a very long day for Daniel, he’s been on location since 10am this morning. He stares, waiting for the producer to start things rolling. I’m standing at the back of the hall with my photographer and I think for a minute he’s looking at me, but then I realise he’s just preparing himself for the first take. I look at my watch and see it’s way past seven on a Friday evening and I’m anxious to get back for drinks with some friends. But Daniel, Chris and Ben won’t have the opportunity. While most 19 year-olds are pysching themselves up for a night on the town after a week or work, silverchair’s work is just beginning. A perfect time for the cliched ending to a story about a successfully marketed rock’n’roll band. If ‘it’ all ended tomorrow, would you miss ‘it’? "some days are better than others," Ben says. "Sometimes I wish that we never did it at all," Johns confides. "And other times I think it’s pretty great we’re getting this sort of opportunity and I wonder what I’d be complaining about instead if I wasn’t in silverchair."