Knight-Rider Tribune News Wire
By Ben Wener
At the end of 1995, as part of its typically maddening wrap-up of the year's recordings, Rolling Stone gave passing mention to silverchair, Australia's fire-hot trio of alterna-teens that had just taken Down Under, and to a slightly lesser extent, America, by storm. The magazine, like many others, criticized the band's debut, frogstomp, as imitative and immature, but it also half-jokingly noted, "When these guys turn 18, they'll really be dangerous."
Well, guess who just blew out the candles?
If you thought silverchair and its catchy now-we're-Pearl-Jam-now-we're-Nirvana sound was just a one-note one-hit wonder, think again. While their latest album Freak Show isn't exactly a groundbreaker, it does prove that silverchair can rock hard (and with variation) in its own right.
"We realize how much we exposed our influences on the first album," Johns said by telephone from his home in the industrial waterfront town of Newcastle, Australia. "We really wanted to get away from that this time, try out new ideas. And because of that, this one is not nearly as accessible.
"But I don't care. I don't think that the new album will sell as many copies as frogstomp, and I don't care about that either. All we want to do with this album is establish who we are, what silverchair sounds like. You can always hear a band's influences on the first album. It's that way with everyone. We're over it. Now we want to do something that in 10 years, we could listen to again and say, 'Yeah, that's our sound.'"
To a large degree, Johns and his mates -- bassist Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies -- have done just that. True, theirs is a noise still likely to get lost in the unwieldy alternative radio mix, but unlike, say, Bush, silverchair is at least experimenting with its beginnings. Shades of Indian instrumentation turn up on Petrol & Chlorine; acoustic guitar has become more prominent, particularly on surprisingly wistful songs such as Pop Songs for Us Rejects; and the melodies are deeper, sharper and obviously born from a coming of age done under the hardest pressures "overnight" success can bring.
More importantly, that success has brought a unified theme to Johns' lyrics, albeit an oft-heard one: the trappings of popularity.
"There's a load of songs that were all written around the same time, stuff like Slave and Freak and Abuse Me. And yeah, a lot of that came from what I'd experienced and felt on the road. But it's not like we're totally complaining about success, either. We're not one of those bands that gets success and then turns around and complains about how terrible it is. It's just that the negative stuff that I see is what I like. It's what's important to me.
"Part of it, too, is just the privacy you lose when you're a hit," he added. "People chasing you down, people turning up at your house, sitting out on the lawn waiting to take photographs. That's not easy for anyone to deal with."
Nevertheless, Johns may have to do more of it. Freak Show's singles, the album's overriding notion of alienation, and Johns' age are likely to add up to another media-generated "spokesman of his generation" tag. Johns knows it, and is wary of it.
"I really hate that," he said softly. "People have said that in Australia, too, and it annoys me, just as it annoys anyone who
doesn't particularly like our music. I don't think any one person can be a spokesperson for a generation. It's too much weight to
carry around when all you want to do is play music. I just throw out my ideas, that's all."
