"Reckon it's better when bands jam,"says Daniel Johns, singer/guitarist for Australia's silverchair. It was in early '94 that spurred the band's debut single,"Tomorrow," No.18 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart.

"One day me, Ben[Gillies], and Chris[Joannou] were jamming in Ben's bedroom because we had just seen the Led Zepplin video 'The Song Remains the Same' We saw that 'Dazed and Confused' went for half an hour,so we were trying to make a song for half an hour.

"We were just going for ages and we ended up going for 45 minutes just on one song, and I came up with that riff in the chrous. Afterward, Ben said he wanted to write a song to it, but I didn't really like it, so I said no. About two days later, he rang back and said,'I really think we should write a song to it.' And I said'Aw,yeah,all right.'

"It's about an overindulgent guy. The 'fat boy';[in the song] is not like 'fat' as in overweight but as in overindulgent. And he gets told to experience the life of a poor guy. So the guy takes him to a hotel that he stays in, and the rich guy's complaining he wants to get out. And the poor guy's telling him [to] wait until tomorrow to get out and stuff."

The idea sprang from "a television documentary on a station in Australia. I get a lot of ideas out of TV; news and current events and stuff."

Along with songwriting, perhaps that thrist for current events helps Johns with his homework-- he and the band members are only halfway through their teens and high school. Johns is 16.

In order to promote "Tomorrow" the band took 10 days off from classes--its ongest band-related break to date--to travel to New York and the U.K. So far, it doesn't sound as if the band members' parents have to worry about their boys courting danger so far from home. Johns reports that on silverchair's first night in Gotham City,"we went out for tea. That was pretty good."