silverchair have a pretty interesting past! They weren't always called silverchair. They were called the Innocent Criminals, and then had a fourth member named Tobin Finnane. They started a band one day because they were borded. But this wasn't Ben and Daniel's first band. They were in a band called Short Elvis which was Ben's nickname. But they didn't think that it sounded good so they got two more people in it and called themselves the Innocent Criminals.
So they all started practicing in Ben's garage. (which they still do) They turned everything up to 10 and just played. They weren't all that bad either. They still didn't have a singer though. At their first show Daniel had to be the singer cause Ben, Chris, and Tobin made him. He didn't want to be though. The whole show he just stood facing the wall cause he was so embarrassed! They each got payed only $10 for this show.
After a little while Tobin had to move to England with his family. He would be gone for a year. So he wasn't a member of the band anymore.
One day Daniel's next door neighbor, Sarah Lawson told Daniel about a contest called "Pick Me" sponsered by a show called Nomad. They sent in an 8 minute long cut of tomorrow. After a while someone called Daniel and told them that they had won and they got to shot a film clip for it. But first they had to go into the studio and record a proper version of it. After this video was shown all the record companies wanted to know who they were. At this time they were still under the name of the Innocent Criminals. "Tomorrow" was starting to be played a lot on JJJ.
At this time the Innocent Criminals hated their name, and John Watson (their manager) used the request show to start a competition for a new name. Hundreds of names came up. But the Innocent Criminals finally came up with one on their own. They were listening to the radio and wanted to request a song. Ben wanted to request "Sliver" by Nirvana and Daniel wanted to request "Berlin Chair" by You Am I. While they were waiting to get through on the phone, they asked Chris to write it down so that they don't forget what songs they wanted. So Chris wrote "Sliver Chair" just to abbreviate it. But he accidentally wrote down "silverchair." So they decided that it was a pretty cool name and kept it. They make the 's' lowercase becasue they think that it looks dumb with a capitol 'S'.
The tomorrow ep was recorded in early September in the JJJ studios. For 4 weeks the EP had a sticker on it that said "By silverchair, formerly know as 'Innocent Criminals'". After a while they started playing the second song on the EP called "Acid Rain", and it also became very popular. The Tomorrow Ep spent 6 weeks as #1 on the Australian Singles chart. It was now time to release their second single, "Pure Massacre". They had got a spot on the Big Day Out lineup.
They didn't want to get all into the media and stuff, so they tried (and still do) to stay away from all the interviewers and magazines.
Murmur got Kevin Shirly to produce the bands record. It was recorded in the JJJ studios and in just 10 days. The albums name "frogstomp" came from and old song title from the '60's. "frogstomp" was released on March 27, 1995. the next single to be released was "Shade." they then released "Israel's Son". Which the video had to be edited cause some people thought that it was too violent. Also a boy killed his parents cause he claims that "Israel's Son" made him do it.
They got ready to fly to the US for the first time. The first show they played in the US was at the Atlanta 99X Freeloaders Concert, on June 21, 1995. Soon after albums were selling very quickly in the US. And it was on the US charts, the first Australian album to do so in seven years.
silverchair had been chosen as supporting act for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The tour was scheduled for December. But the Chad Smith, the drummer of RHCP, had broke his wrist in November and was unable to play so they had to postpone the tour till he was able to play again. So silverchair quickly set up a tour of their own to be played in smaller venues. They started playing some of their new songs at these concerts.
In the end of January they recorded a song for the Sufriders Foundation. They chose to do a cover of a song but the Trashmen called "Surfin' Bird". The RHCP tour was back on and scheduled for the end of January/February. For their final show RHCP sent strippers out on stage during silverchair's final song "Israel's Son". After this they went to Europe and toured with Everclear for a few weeks.
silverchair played the Royal Easter Show in Australia on April 9, 1996. This show will probably always be remembered. It was infront of 25,000 people. They played many songs from "frogstomp" and many new songs.
After a while of touring, they decided it was time to make a new record. So far they had about 8-10 songs ready, but they needed more. Daniel and Ben wrote some new songs. They named the album "freakshow" because they felt that being in a touring band sometimes felt like a "freakshow" casue your just doing you thing and people come and look at you and think you're different but you're really not. So they decided that it would be a good theme for the album. The last song to be included into the album was "cemetery". Daniel was keeping it back because he didn't think that it was a silverchair type song and he wanted to use it later. But now he is happy that they put it on because it adds more diversity to the album.
It took about 3 weeks to record "freakshow". Nick Launay produced the album. The first single off of the album in the US and Cananda was "abuse me" while everywhere else in the world it was "freak". The album was released on Feb. 4, 1997. It did good but has not sold as many albums as "frogstomp" did.
Now it was time for them to go on tour again. They first played a 10 city promotional tour to kick off "freakshow". Then they played a really big tour all across the US. They then went back to Australia and had a bit of a well deserved break. They are now going to be doing some shows in Canada and then come back to the US for some festival shows.
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