Hi-Ho silverchair
Time to flush counter-clockwise with silverchair's Daniel Johns
By Karen Bliss - July 9, 1999 HITS Magazine
This is silverchair's first tour without chaperones. You're officially
adults. You can do the rock thing and go to strip clubs.
This is our first, large, two-and-a-half month tour without chaperones.But I
can't imagine it being too wild in comparison to what we've done before.
Are you mellowing yet? I heard you guys used to spit out of hotel windows.
I wouldn't say we're mellowing. I just don't think we spit out of windows
anymore. That's something you do when you're 14-years-old and you think it's
fun and cool.
Now you've graduated to TV sets?
Yeah, we're more into trashing hotel rooms and turning things upside down,
basically doing rock & roll.
This was a very different process making "Neon Ballroom." You're not in
school anymore and it sounds like you had a lot more confidence in your
voice, writing skills and musicianship.
By the end of touring for "Freak Show," I started getting a little frustrated
with myself because, with the first album, we wrote most of the songs when we
were 14 years old, so I kind of excused myself for the things I didn't like.
With the second album, although all our songs have been very natural and
sincere, after we toured and heard them a million times, I started feeling
like maybe I rushed it and didn't put enough thought into it, because we were
still in school and didn't really have enough time to focus on doing what I
wanted to do. I was getting creatively annoyed.
But the seeds for "Neon Ballroom" were planted on "Freak Show" with the use
of strings, sitar and timpani.
There were even more ideas there that I don't think we took as far as we
should've on the second album. Once I finished school, I really had a vision
of what I wanted to do with music and how I wanted to treat it, so this album
is really what I was leading to.
You couldn't have made this record when you were 15, though.
Exactly. The first and second albums were basically traditional rock music
that really just pounded it out. We just enjoyed it being loud and angry,
and, after touring that kind of music for three years or so, I started
getting a bit bored with it. I wanted to do something that was more
gratifying, so I wrote this album. I really did exactly what i wanted to do
on this record. I had a vision for it. Creatively, I'm already satisfied with it.
So you realized you're capable of other emotions besides anger?
I was really tunnel-visioned. Basically, every song was about anger.
What were you so angry about, being a successful 15-year-old musician,
touring the world?
Just the way I was treated by some people.
Even after you became successful?
Before we became successful, I was always treated negatively by the majority
of people around my age, or older, because at 12, I was in a rock band and
people couldn't accept the fact that I listened to rock music, instead of
going tp pubs, drinking beer and basically being a jock.
Were you "the weird kid"?
I guess I was always viewed as the freaky one. But in some ways, I played up
to it because I enjoyed scaring people and making them feel uncomfortable.
But I still didn't appreciate being treated the way I was treated, so I was
very angry for the majority of my teenage years and that's how I expressed
myself through music. Once I left school, I started really discovering new
emotions and exploring new methods of writing.
"Neon Ballroom" has traditional rock instruments, classical instruments as
well as samples and other production tricks.
I wanted to combine really futuristic sounds with very traditional sounds,
which aren't very common. There are many bands doing songs with strings in
them, but they sound generic and boring. I didn't want to have a rock song
with strings. I wanted to have a string song with rock underneath it. So the
songs are all written with strings in mind. They were written to be very
classical with a rock element to them, rather than the other way around.
