"Every time I come up with a good idea for a song it's about death," says silverchair frontman Daniel Johns.
Which is weird actually because aside from the somber tone of their frogstomp disc the silverchair boys don't have an angst filled bone in their respective bodies. Their secret? Surfing.
"In Newcastle (Australia) you ucan only surf, skate, or play music," Johns explains, his thick Australian accent revealing his homeland instantly. "Surfing is just something to do. You wake up early to go out for a surf, and it's just good catching waves. But when you've got a really good idea on the guitar you write the song first and go for a surf later."
For Johns and his bandmates (bassist Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies) life is as simple as that -- never mind that at the ages of 15 and 16 they're already a platinum plated, internationally famous band.
"We're not famous," Johns insists with charming and seemingly genuine modesty. "It's never going to happen. We're not good enough to be a famous band. We've seen better bands in Australia that just kick our ass who don't even have a record deal. We don't expect anything. It's just luck."
Actually, silverchair's music has the precious maturity of say, teenage actress Claire Danes or 19-year-old Kids screenwriter Harmony Korine -- frogstomp's grunge force is suprisingly eloquent with subtlely and grace backing tales of, well, death that have garnered the band constant (and annoying) comparisons to Nirvana and Pearl Jam. But more about that later.
"I just like writing lyrics that are more serious," says Johns. "I get ideas from dreams and stuff you see on the telly -- it's usually not very happy." Examples of silverchair's inspirations include a photo of a soon-to-be-dead-in-an-earthquake guy that led to Faultline and a news segment on teenage suicide that resulted in the sad Suicidal Dream.
"A lot of teenagers could relate to it," he explains. "We have the pressures of being teenagers -- sometimes it's school, sometimes it's people's friends, sometimes it's family. It can be anything. It's hard for some people. Some people just say 'f?!k it, I'm going for a surf,' but some people say 'I'm not doing anything, I'm so depressed.' God knows some people have worse lives than others," says Johns, his voice trailing off as if he's in deep thought about the problems of others.
His own life, admittedly, has been a total Cinderella story. At age 12 his buddy Ben, already a veteran of several years of drumming, kept pressuring him to learn the guitar so they could form a band. "I got this little electric guitar for $80 or something for a birthday present when I was 13," Johns recalls. "And we kept going, 'Chris you should learn to play bass.' So he got a really shitty bass and we started playing together in Ben's garage. We still practice there, only because we can't be bothered by taking a whole drum kit and setting it up (every time we practice)."
For several years they worked the kinds of gigs 14 year olds can get. "Sometimes we'd play in school, sometimes we'd just play in the street with other bands," Johns recalls. "Now we can get gigs (in places that serve liquor), but we can't go anywhere near the bar." But silverchair's fortunes took a sudden upswing in June 1994 when they entered a national demo competition in Australia.
"We'd entered some competitions before and got a letter back saying, 'We really appreciate you entering, but you came in last.' We were used to being the worst in anything. So we just entered that competition for something to do. When we won we were pretty shocked."
Their song Tomorrow was chosen from over 800 entries and the prize was a day in the recording studio of Australia's national alternative radio station, 2JJJ-FM. Radio play followed, and in a few months Tomorrow went No. 1 in Australia as their first single. They released a four song EP on an indie label: another No. 1 single, Pure Massacre, led to frogstomp being the first debut album in history to enter the charts at No. 1 and go platinum within a week.
Through it all, the band rejected interviews with fluffy teen magazines and stuck to fanzines instead. "We just wanted to avoid all the hokey stuff that goes along with being a young band," clarifies Johns. The fact that every news story focused on their age, Johns says, "used to bother us a lot, we used to get really pissed off. And then we realized they're just going to do it anyway, so now we don't care. But some magazines made up stuff about us, said we'd done an interview with them and made up all this shit. If I could I'd get rid of the power they have over people. People believe just 'cause information is in a magazine it must be true. It used to annoy us a lot."
Even more bothersome were the constant comparisons to Kurt Cobain, whom Johns vaguely resembles. "It doesn't bother us so much when we get compared to Pearl Jam, because when we were writing Tomorrow they were a major influence," he explains. "But when people say it sounds like Nirvana, no it doesn't. Especially the stuff they're writing now. It's quite a bit different, more experimental, heavier," says Johns. The Nirvana comparisons upset him so much that for a while he was threatening to shave his head just to look different. "But then I couldn't be bothered because that would have just shown I was getting really pissed off and I said f?!k it." He laughs and adds, "I want to get dreadlocks but my mum won't let me."
It was silverchair's mothers who perhaps, indirectly, pointed them toward a career in music by playing Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin records around the house when the guys were still toddlers. And for the first post contest winning year their mums managed the band. "We didn't want anyone to totally f?!k us up so we got someone we could trust. They took care of all the financial stuff and organized the things that... uh... we couldn't understand," he admitts breaking into guffaws. "We only got a (professional) manager two weeks ago."
Aside from that upcoming international tour, things haven't changed much he insists, and neither have they, Johns still has a fan's admiration when talking about his favourite band Helmet. "They're just the best band in the world!" he declares. "They have the best guitar riffs and the best songs, and Page Hamilton is a legend. My dream is to play on a four band bill with us, then Tool, The Rollins Band and Helmet. It'd be pretty good for us too 'cause we'd get to see all those bands for free!" The fact that silverchair are currently getting more airplay than those three bands combined and might soon be the headlining configuration not only doesn't occur to him, it also doesn't seem to matter.
As they are handsome, young, successful lads, girls must surely be flocking to see them and dying to meet them. "I really don't take any notice. I really don't, I just play," stresses Gillies. "I've got a shit view from the stage! A couple of cymbals, I can't see jack!"
His concerns are more simple. "We suck at English and art, I'm pretty good at math. We're still going to finish. It's something to do, and that's where all our friends are, it's the only time we get to hang out with them." Those inflated magazine stories are coming back to haunt them though. "We havn't really made a lot of money," says Johns, "but the media said that last time we went to America we made over 6 million and that we're millionaires and shit. So all of our friends came up to us saying, 'Hey, can I borrow a million dollars?' (They're) just trying to piss me off."
The money's not the important part anyway. Johns favourite memory of silverchair's first visit to America is of Magic Mountain in Southern Carolina. "It was unreal," he remembers. "We went on all the roller coasters. We didn't have much time but we wanted to be able to say we'd been on the biggest roller coaster in the world. They didn't get to surf in the Southern Carolina waters but maybe next time.
"Sometimes (the music business) is pretty bad because we don't get that much free time," he muses. "When your friends say 'Let's go for a surf,' or something you have to say no cause you're going to play a gig. I guess it's all right, 'cause we still get to play a lot of shows, it'd be bad if we were touring and we didn't like to play that much any more. And if we don't like it, we're going to get rid of it but we're not just going to hang around for a year and then disappear, unless we have a really big fight and end up hating each other."
That doesn't seem likely though. "We've had fights before and they last for about two hours," says Johns. "And then we just say, 'Wanna go for a surf?' and everything's OK." After all, tomorrow's another day and today looks pretty damn rosy for silverchair, "school or no school."