By Sean Plummer
WARNING -- HIGH SOUND LEVELS -- HEARING PROTECTION AVAILABLE ON REQUEST.
Signs with this advisory are taped to amplifiers and TV monitors throughout MuchMusic, where Australia's silverchair are set to perform songs from Freak Show, the follow-up to 1995's multi-platinum debut, frogstomp. Outside, rain-soaked adolescent girls scream as singer-guitarist Daniel Johns, drummer Ben Gillies and bassist Chris Joannou take the stage. One wears a homemade T-shirt that reads "Abuse Me Ben."
Harder and louder than frogstomp, Freak Show borrows less from Pearl Jam and steals more from Tool. The teenaged trio deliver new songs like Slave and Freak with power and authority beyond their years, as the teenage audience bob their heads instead of moshing. Fortunately, no such restrictions apply to the band. Johns may dismiss comparisons to Kurt Cobain, but it's hard not to think of the late singer when he whacks Gillies' drum kit with his guitar at show's end and collapses on the floor.
The next morning I catch up with the exhausted trio at their hotel. So how's summer vacation, Ben? "It was going good until we had to fucking fly over here." The drummer may be joking. So, did you ever catch up with that girl in the T-shirt? Gilles nods: "I offered to abuse her, too, but..." She didn't go for it? "No, I'm just kidding."
silverchair kids around a lot. They don't want to act like spoiled rock stars. "I think you'd lose a bit of your respect if you did that," the shy Joannou says. "People would say, 'Oh, they're just rock stars, they're just faking it.'" Did you ever think you lives would be so interesting? "Some people find our lives more interesting that what they really are," he says. "Travelling around, if you just cut that out, it's the same old boring life as everyone else."
Johns says the freak show which is being part of silverchair is not glamorous. "I just enjoy being at home," he says. So what do
you do when you're not rocking the world, Daniel? "I just sit at home with my dog and watch telly." You just have a normal life,
then? "I don't know if sitting home every day is normal, but that's what I do."
