Just before their sold-out show at Festival Hall in Brisbane on June 19, 1997, silverchair sat down with Molly Meldrum, host of Channel [V]'s The Drum, for a wide-ranging interview. The band was about to head off for European and North American dates, and Freak Show had been released four months earlier. Following is a transcript of the conversation:

Molly: Welcome to The Drum... your third single Cemetery has just been released -- great video, I might add -- tell us about Cemetery, Daniel?

Daniel: The song was written in my bedroom with an acoustic guitar. I did a demo with friends, it wasn't originally meant to be a silverchair song. I thought I'd keep it for something in the future cos I didn't think it sounded like something we would do. Nick [Launay], who produced the album, heard the song and liked it, gave it to Chris and Ben and they liked it, so we went ahead and recorded it.

Molly: When I first heard this song in November last year, I thought, this is different. What has the reaction been from the silverchair followers in this country to Cemetery? Was it too much of a change for them?

Daniel: No, a lot of people have written in and said they like it more than the other songs, and a lot of people have written in and said they like it less. I think you either like it or you don't. It's very quiet.

Molly: That's the third single off the second album. Back to the Newcastle days -- Ben, back in your garage, you were just mucking around playing -- what were the aspirations of the three of you back then?

Ben: None really, just to keep playing in our garage. We didn't plan on touring the world and playing shows and writing albums and stuff like that, just having fun, that's all we wanted to do and I guess we just got a lucky break and kind of went with the flow of things, and it brought us where we are today.

Molly: It's hard enough for a band that's in one of the bigger cities -- you are not that far away from Sydney, nonetheless, your Sydney bands, your Melbourne bands -- they're playing the circuits, that get the chance to get a recording contract, those live gigs. None of that happened, apart from your following in Newcastle. What was the following in Newcastle at the time?

Ben: Probably next to nothing was our following in Newcastle. Some people had heard of us, I'm not sure if they even liked us, we didn't have like regular people coming to our shows, we were lucky if we got five people to a show.

Molly: Well then, Chris, with the J's tape -- how many songs had been written before you decided, OK, that's the tape we'll send to Triple J?

Chris: We had quite a few covers, there was probably -- five? I can't remember. There was a few.

Molly: Did it surprise you when the J's accepted it as such?

Chris: It was a Nomad competition, it was Australia-wide -- they rang back and said you're in the final 10. They gave Daniel a call on a Tuesday and said that we'd won. We were all pretty excited to get out there and record in a studio and such.

Molly: You go to Sydney to record. What were the thoughts of the three of you then?

Chris: When we first walked into the Triple J studio we were like, our eyes wouldn't keep closed, we were all excited. We just talked about it for ages after that.

Molly: Doing the first recording, signing up to Murmur -- tell us how that happened. I know that after you had won the J's thing, there was a lot of pulling the finger out of the arse thing, saying we've gotta have them on our label.

Chris: We were doing a few things around Newcastle and John [O'Donnell] and John [Watson] came up to a gig in Newcastle, and there was half a dozen people sitting around having a beer and there was a couple of bikers there, mucking around, I think we got paid 10 bucks each or something and that was it. And then people came to gigs and we were in another band competition and people came up to the gigs. Then we ended signing with them [Murmur] and it was a case of who we got on with, the people were, nice guys.

Molly: The decision for the first release, the song into the market, where did that come from?

Daniel: We only really had like four songs that were on the first Tomorrow EP. Tomorrow was a song that already had the radio support and a bit of a following so we thought that would be the best single. Then we just put three songs on there, we didn't expect much -- I think we printed 2,000 copies and expected to sell around that. And it ended up selling a lot more, so it was a big surprise.

Molly: Then Tomorrow was released and suddenly other radio stations started picking it up and then it was like a snowball, taking on amazing momentum. You're back in Newcastle, what was the feeling like and how were you dealing with that?

Chris: We didn't really grab onto what was happening until about six months down the track and realised, wow this is actually happening. We thought of it as -- you know, we get to play at small gigs now and we never thought that we would get to play overseas, playing at festivals and all that sort of thing.

Molly: With that momentum growing, how do the three of you still going through your studies, and not breaking into your studies -- a lot of people find it hard to balance the two. Was it hard to do, also you being with your school friends all the time?

Ben: It actually came pretty easy -- when we went on tour and missed work then we would get home and catch up as much as we could. Sometimes we would miss some, but we thought, we're still doing our best. But actually this year, because this is final year, it's most important because if anything does happen in the band then it's over soon and we have to have something we can fall back on. So we have a tutor coming on tour with us, helping us out, but it's been pretty easy -- it's not as hard as you think.

Molly: OK, so after Tomorrow, then to concentrate on the album Frogstomp -- were the songs coming easily?

Daniel: They were coming relatively easy, cos we didn't really feel any pressure, any obligation to complete an album. We just thought, we have released this EP and it's not going to do anything so we will just go back and do what we used to do, and we just kept writing songs until we had enough for an album, and there was no real pressure, there was no one saying, you have to do an album by this date -- it was just a natural progression.

Molly: OK, by this stage in silverchair's career, while you were doing this album, the press concentration from all sides was pretty intense. How did you not let that affect the recording side, the focus of actually recording?

Daniel: You're talking the press as in media? That was something that we've never really cared about, we purposely haven't done very much TV stuff, because we just want to play music and let the music do the talking really and all that media crap that goes on is nothing to us. We know some people who read it and take it all seriously, but to us it is just a big bullshit media circus and we don't pay any attention to it.

Molly: Nonetheless, with the reviews you were getting, there is an expectation of, what is this band coming from Newcastle going to come up with as an album, and that can have an effect, even for a seasoned group. How did it not affect you?

Daniel: It didn't affect us cos we didn't care. I think a lot of people read it and really worry what the media are thinking and what other people are thinking and we didn't care at all, so it didn't worry us or affect anything we did.

Molly: The album then being released, getting incredible reviews, having great success in this country; then in such a short period of time, America, which is a totally different market -- you can be top of the U.K., European charts and still find it hard to break into the American market and certainly the tracks didn't have that problem.

Daniel: Yeah, we were aware that it was becoming bigger, but that's not why we set out, like, we are big in Australia, now we want to break in the States and become this huge rock band -- it didn't bother us, we didn't go out and promote ourselves to be like these three young guys from Australia. We purposely did what we did in Australia and a radio station got hold of Tomorrow and it just built from there. We didn't do TV ads and stuff like that.

Molly: The first gig in the U.S., can you remember it?

Ben: It was in Atlanta, it was called The Roxy and it was for a radio station that picked up the import of the Tomorrow EP.

Molly: Because I remember, going back 18 months ago, being in Boston, I went to see Alanis Morissette for the first time, and you were coming up in the next couple of weeks and even then people were coming up and saying, what is this band like? It was a small club, the American audiences seemed to take pretty quickly to you, I remember you did the MTV thing on the roof -- what was that like, doing that on the roof?

Chris: Different. You could see the back of the crowd across the street and you had to walk right up to the edge to see the reactions. It was something different. It was kinda strange.

Molly: Then a couple of nights later down on 42nd Street, in one of the gigs down there, the Academy, that place went ape. Was it nerve-wracking to do that sort of gig?

Daniel: No, we weren't really nervous. To us it was just like another gig, we expected the same reaction everywhere, cos it's not like we're bringing over some Aboriginal tribal music. They're kind of used to rock music and anyone who likes heavy guitar rock music will like our stuff. We didn't expect 'I wonder what Aussie music is like.'

Molly: When you are building, the media want to put music into different boxes and labels, they found it hard to put a label on you, but they were saying, grunge, Nirvana, well that is furthest from the truth from your musical influences you have got anyway.

Ben: We listen to Zeppelin and Sabbath and a lot of old '70s hard rock kind of stuff.

Daniel: We are kind of a retro funk band as well, get into a bit of James Brown, stuff like that.

Molly: What did your families listen to at home? What were your parents into?

Daniel: Zeppelin, Sabbath, Deep Purple -- they were old rockers and from the age of about 11 or 12 we started getting into it, and hearing them playing it, and my dad would go 'Black Sabbath!' and we would go 'yeahhh!' Big fans since then, and they're kinda our main influences. Maybe cos grunge was a big thing at the time everyone asumed that we were trying to be like Nirvana but we weren't. We think they're a good band and respect what they were doing but they are not an influence -- we are into more traditional hard rock.

Molly: With the first album doing what it did, the second album, Freak Show, the approach to the second album -- had you been writing songs on the road? Had you been writing songs at home or did you write purposely for the second album?

Daniel: We don't write on the road ever. We like to focus on the playing and that's it. We just wrote it how we usually did. We didn't have any pressure from anyone, it was just whenever it felt right, we just wrote until we had enough material to go into the studio and felt ready to do it. It wasn't like a big build-up and we weren't under much pressure at all.

Molly: Ok, Nick Launay, your producer, how did that come about?

Chris: It was a fluke actually -- just the fact that we actually asked Kevin Shirley to come again but he was working with another band. Nick kinda popped up and we had a bit of a talk with him and we liked some of the bands he worked with, and he did the radio edit for Tomorrow. We really liked him and we worked great, his ideas and our ideas working together, worked out well.

Molly: Was it that much different from working with Kevin Shirley? Were you learning from Kevin?

Daniel: It was totally opposite working with Nick and Kevin cos when we recorded Frogstomp we were still inexperienced and we really didn't have much studio knowledge, so it was really Kevin saying this is what you do in the studio and we were like, yeah right, cool we'll do that, and we just played, which was a good way to do a first album -- it was really raw, really rough. But with Nick we had so many more ideas and just wanted a collaboration of ideas and experiment a lot more. With Kevin he was telling us what to do and with Nick it was, he was telling us ideas and we were telling him ideas. There was no fights which was a stroke of luck.

Ben: It was our Sergeant Pepper's album!

Molly: I was talking to Kevin Shirley when I went over to do Aerosmith and I was saying, going from silverchair to Aerosmith, he said that silverchair were willing to try things just on a raw level, compared to Aerosmith who had already done this album once before and he was re-doing it. There are 13 songs on Freak Show, so how many songs were written?

Daniel: There was about 15. One of them was never finished and the other one was a song called Punk Song No. 2 which was on a B-side for Freak, which is just really a four-chord, pop/punk song. We don't think it's anything special, it's just some song we never play, so we put it on a B-side.

Molly: When did you first all start writing songs and thought you could play them ourside the garage?

Daniel: Me and Ben started writing songs together when we were about eight, Ben played drums but I didn't actually play an instrument, and he used to sit behind the drums and we'd be grommets, and he'd start playing this funky beat and I'd start rapping and we were just a two-piece rap band, and then I picked up a guitar and got into rock, and started jamming to Elvis Presley songs, playing Deep Purple and Sabbath songs, and the Chris joined and it just all developed from there.

Molly: A song like Abuse Me -- how does that come about?

Daniel: I wrote that in my bedroom. Usually when I write a song by myself I show it to Ben and Chris and see what they think. I walked into practice and they just liked it, and we just jammed at it for a while and moulded it into a good song and that was it.

Molly: And Freak?

Daniel: Freak was pretty much the same as that. It was just really a riff and I walked into practice, and said, yeah I've got this song, and they joined in with the beat, and started playing bass and that was it.

Molly: You were saying that with Cemetery you wrote the song but you didn't think it was a silverchair song. Are there other songs that you've written that you think aren't silverchair songs?

Daniel: I've got like 20 songs at home, but a lot of them are just crap, a lot of them are good, but not good for silverchair. A lot of them are just sitting there waiting to be rewrote properly.

Molly: On the touring side, you are here in Brisbane to do Festival Hall -- you're off to Darwin tomorrow and doing an Australian tour back in November?

Ben: We go to Europe and then come back here after we have been to Manila, then we head to the States and Europe again in August-September, then have about a month off and then head around Australia.

Molly: Is it taxing doing all this? Do you enjoy it?

Ben: I s'pose the last few days especially when you do a long tour you are, aahh, can't wait to get home and sit around and go to the beach and blah blah blah, I s'pose it's like anything really, it gets a bit boring if you have been doing it for a long time.

Molly: You were saying before that you are in your final year, doing your studies. How do the three of you cope with that?

Ben: Actually we do quite a bit of work on tour. This last year we've been, like everything people have been doing at school we have been doing on tour, but the Australian tour at the end of the year, we will be finished school by then anyway, I think the HSC finishes in November, the 21st.

Molly: I heard before in the soundcheck, you [were] playing a song you've written, a song for the Spawn movie which has not been named yet. Tell us about that.

Daniel: It's like the same thing as the Judgment Night soundtrack -- they got rock bands and rap bands to collaborate, and with this it's rock bands and electronic bands which seems to be the new thing, like The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, stuff like that. We had this song lying around and we thought it would be a good song to give to a techno band to tweak around with.

Molly: So you recorded it here and then it was mixed in England -- by who?

Ben: Hmmm... Vertigo or something?

Daniel: It started with V.

Molly: When does that come out?

Ben: Nope, wouldn't have a clue.

Molly: I gather with you doing that at the soundcheck you are doing that live already then?

Daniel: We don't actually perform it live. We might put it on the next album, but not as the techno verson -- as we did it originally, without the collaboration, so we do it in the soundcheck to get it tight for when we do play it live, if we do play it live.

Molly: I believe there is a tribute to The Clash?

Daniel: Yep, we're doing a Clash tribute album with a few bands on it, Rancid are one of them, a few other bands I can't remember, but we did a song called London's Burning which is off one of the their first two albums. Cos most bands were doing later Clash stuff, so we thought it would be good to do an earlier song, and that was really our favourite Clash song.

Molly: There's the tour, Manila, then Europe, back to Australia, then what?

Chris: Probably just some time off, January, February -- haven't really thought about anything after that.

Molly: When you're overseas do you get to see other bands?

Chris: We are doing a few festivals in Europe so we will get to see quite a few bands. It's good doing the festivals.

Molly: We talked about influences before -- what other bands do you like at the moment?

Daniel: We like really anything with integrity and intensity, anything that you can kinda, when you hear it you can feel it.

Molly: Do you still get the chance to go out and buy records?

Daniel: Yeah, we still do. The whole reason we got into music is cos we're music fans, we're not jaded rock musicians who think of themselves as the only rock band on the planet. We're big fans of music, we listen to anything we can, unless its crap. We don't listen to it then.

Molly: Are there any producers you'd like to work with?

Daniel: There's a lot of producers but none that I want to say. Steve Albini is one of my favourite producers, but he's done work with a lot of bands that I wouldn't want to be put next to. He's worked with Bush and Nirvana and if we did record with him, we would get all those comparisons again. So we wouldn't do that, but all the work he's done with his own band, Shellac, and with PJ Harvey is really cool.

Molly: Well boys, thanks for the interview, congratulations. You've done it with style and integrity and it's not crap and I guess a lot goes to your parents for, over the last two or three years, as a very important part of silverchair.

Daniel: Cool, thank you.