SEE Magazine
By Richard Cairney
August 28, 1997
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
When the rock group silverchair takes the stage at Edgefest this weekend,
they'll be in friendly territory. Not only will the band be playing for
thousands of appreciative fans, they'll also be gigging for one of their
web site contributors.
If you want to see the band, go scoop up tickets before they're all
gone. If you wanna see the website, point your browser to the chairpage. It's a rockin' good site.
Morinville's Chris Pietrzykowski is a loyal silverchair fan who has
contributed graphic works to the site. The chairpage icon that greets
surfers, mounted on a Freak Show-style banner, is a pretty cool welcome
mat.
And up-to-date? Yeah, that's an understatement. Tuesday, the site featured
an update on the band from Vancouver, where they played with Edgefest Monday.
The report from the coast even included transcripts from an interview between
band members and a deejay with Toronto radio station 102.1 The Edge. It
gives important information on the band's Edgefest play list: brace yourselves
for Suicidal Dream, Cemetery, Tomorrow, The Door and Israel's Son.
And if the group plays around the way it did at Vancouver, the band
will stop playing altogether on the chorus of Freak, allowing frontman
Daniel Johns to lead fans in an a cappella version of the song.
As far as design goes, this site's a gem. Simple is the best advice
anyone can give or receive when it comes to web site construction. But simple
and effective is quite another thing.
Thankfully this site achieves both. And you can tell it is tended to
regularly. When a site has a news bulletin on the top so it's the first
thing you see, you just know someone's working on it everyday. Beneath
that is a story of the group's planned tour across Australia this fall.
And the last thing you see on the page is a registration sheet. Sign up
here and you'll be notified, by e-mail, every time the page is updated.
Now that's service!
The page is informative and interactive. It gives fans of the band an
opportunity to vote for the trio as part of an MTV music video award it's
nominated for. It also provides links to other silverchair web sites and
offers a cool section called Reports from the Road.
Want to know about the band's music? Plug into the discography section
for album-by-album, song-by-song information.
You can even listen to drummer (and sometimes songwriter) Ben Gillies
in an interview posted at the site in RealAudio or WAV. And you can tune
in to hear Johns discuss the latest single, Freak.
No band's web page would be complete without a photo library and this
one wins for one clever feature missing in so many other music web sites:
a brief description of what the photo shows.
