Press
08-12-2001
"The Pursuit of Happiness"
By Rod Yates (Kerrang! Issue 882)
In a studio in Sydney, Daniel Johns has just put the finishing touches
to silverchair’s new album ‘Diorama’. And he’s feeling more optimistic
than ever…
The second you walk through the doors of 301 Studios, you can sense the
buzz in the air. It’s nothing you can pinpoint – sure, it’s a beautiful
sunny, spring day, but the atmosphere rolling lazily through this
pristine, state of the art Sydney recording studio is down to more than
Mother Nature’s kindness. At a pinch, you’d say it had the relaxed and
expectant air of the last day of school before summer holidays.
Appropriate, really, given that today is silverchair’s last day here.
Work on the trio’s fourth album ‘Diorama’ finished last night, eight
weeks after it began. Save for a brief session in another studio
located on California’s Central Coast, the band have been bunkered down
here for two months with Tool/Muse producer Dave Bottrill. For a man
who has spent every second of that time labouring over each note of
music – he even slept upstairs in the studio’s accommodation – and had
a few celebratory drinks last night, vocalist/guitarist Daniel Johns
looks positively on top of the world.
Indeed that’s probably the first thing you notice about him. Gone is
the pasty, frail waif of the past; instead, he’s beaming with health,
smiling and chatting happily, barely able to contain his excitement at
the new album. As Johns describes it, album number four is quite an
adventure: if 1999’s ‘Neon Ballroom’ took a few tentative stylistic
steps forward, then ‘Diorama’ – with its full orchestra, woodwind and
brass sections, and influences lifted from ‘60’s pop (the band used the
arranging talents of Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks) and ‘50’s
musicals – is the sound of a band leaping wholeheartedly into the fray.
As bass player Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies entertain
themselves by challenging their manager to games of table tennis inside
the studio, Daniel sits in a small, leafy enclave in the studio’s sun
bathed courtyard and prepares to give his first interview since
completing ‘Diorama’. Or, as he calls it, ‘Diarrhoea’.
“I thought I’d chuck that in because the first journalist who hates the
album is gonna say that, so right now I’m just gonna say it,” he
laughs. “It’s no longer a good thing to say cos I’ve just fucked it for
them!”
How are you feeling about everything?
Daniel: “Really good, yeah, really happy. When we first finished
recording, which was yesterday, it was a real sense of relief, and then
last night there was a sense of excitement, and then today there’s a
sense of sadness. Because you realise, there’s eight months of writing
and then months of preparation and then you do it, and now you feel
like, ‘It’s done, see ya!’. The real sense of sadness comes when the
albums’ released. Because then it’s done, you’ve kind of built up to
this climax and then you’ve just got to tour and then do it all again
(Laughs).”
What’s the feeling in the silverchair camp at the moment?
Daniel: “There’s a real enthusiasm that we haven’t had since we were 14
years old. When we were first playing, even though it was derivative,
we were really enthusiastic: playing music was the best, there was
nothing better. And then by the second album (‘Freak Show’) we were
like, ‘Playing music makes me angry’, and by the third album (‘Neon
Ballroom’) I was like, ‘I need to play music cos life sucks’. And now
all of a sudden there’s this really youthful enthusiasm in the band,
everyone around us, there’s this real positivity and everyone’s vibing
off this music. Whether it be successful or not it really irrelevant to
us, it’s been such a good experience in out lives. Like I’ll always
remember the period where I wrote this album and we recorded it. It was
just a magical period.”
How did recording this album compare with making ‘Neon Ballroom’?
Daniel: “With the last album, there was a whole period where I just
felt sick. I just wanted to go home. I just wasn’t in a good space
mentally, I shouldn’t have been doing it, I felt like I should have
been recovering at home. With this album it was just smooth sailing the
whole way through. It was partially to do with the people involved and
also because mentally I was in a much better place and ready to do it
and confident, and I didn’t really care what the outside response to it
was.”
How are you different as a person now from when you recorded ‘Neon Ballroom’?
Daniel: “Well I’m not on anti-depressants, which is new.”
When did you come off them?
Daniel: “I don’t know, what year is it?! (Laughs). It was this year, the start of this year.”
Was that difficult?
Daniel: “Yeah, it was really hard, because I took them for quite a
while. When you first come off them you feel really down, but then as
you get used to it you also start to experience highs that I hadn’t
felt for 12 months prior to that because they just equal everything
out, you’re just in this holding pattern for such a long time. You
start experiencing real natural human emotions again. It’s a total buzz
when you start to feel real, genuine excitement about things. When I
was writing I’d be getting these total highs. It would be four in the
morning and I’d been writing since six at night and I’d just be totally
high. I hadn’t done any drugs or anything, I’d just be like, walking
around my house going, ‘Yay! This is fucking great!’. That’s one major
thing. I’m just happier in general.”
Why did you decide to come off them?
Daniel: (Pause) “I just started realising what was happening. After
you’ve taken them for a while you realise you’re not feeling anything,
you’re just kind of sitting there. You’re not really living. I
experience really extreme emotions a lot of the time, and I was almost
ashamed of that for a really long time, so I took the anti-depressants,
and that’s what equalled it out. And I just thought, there’s no point
being ashamed about it, just fucking live and be how you are, and ever
since I did that everything is so much better.”
What role did that play in the sound of the new album?
Daniel: “A major role, actually. As soon as I started feeling every
emotion, that’s when I really made the decision to write a record which
caught all of it. A lot of the songs were written when I first came off
them, which obviously have really dark moments, and then there are
moments when I’d just be feeling ecstatically happy for pretty much no
reason so I’d be like, ‘I’m gonna write a song!’. This album’s the only
one we’ve had which has a real sense of optimism throughout the whole
thing. Even in the darkest moment, there’s a real light there, which
wasn’t really deliberate to be honest, it’s just the way I felt. It’s a
real musical journey as well; if you’ve got the attention span to put
up with it and actually give it a chance, I think it’s a really
interesting listening experience.”
Tell us about a few of the songs on the album.
Daniel: “I almost had a fixation with fantasy and escapism on this
album, cos the last album was so based on reality, I was kind of over
that. It keeps coming back to this pit of reality and then going into
this magical world again. There’s a song called ‘Across The Night’,
which is about falling in love with falling asleep, because you go to a
new world and every time you sleep you think new things and you wake up
reinvigorated because you’ve just gone to a new place. After I wrote
that song, I was awake for 24 hours, I couldn’t sleep! It kind of
sounds like a ‘50s musical but you can tell it’s a rock band playing
it. There’s a song called ‘Tuna In The Brine’ that’s about preserving
yourself by not exposing anything about yourself. It’s about kind of
lying in a sea of lies and using that as a preservative so you don’t
have to expose yourself and become worn out by the realities of living.”
Is that based on personal experience?
Daniel: “Not so much lies. I didn’t lie, but I never exposed myself. I
never showed anyone what I was really feeling, and I wrote ‘Tuna In The
Brine’ after I decided, ‘I’m gonna live’.”
How many songs did you record for the album?
Daniel: “There’s 14 that we recorded, and we’re gonna put 11 on the
record. There’s a song called ‘After All These Years’, it was written
in about 15 minutes. I was just sitting at the piano and came up with
this chord progression and just wrote a song about getting over
hurdles. I was feeling happy and optimistic, and I thought, I’m going
to write a song and try and capture this feeling. And it’s not corny
happy, it’s not like life is beautiful so get used to it. That’s
something I’d never done before so I was really proud of that song.”
When you first described your vision of the album to David Bottrill, what did you say?
Daniel: “I said that I’d written all these songs that – a lot were
really fantasy based – I just wanted to take people to another world.
There’s just so much music out there that’s just straight for the mob,
it’s so fucking boring, and it keeps a lot of people happy, which is
great, but it doesn’t make me happy. I wanted to do something that if I
was a music fan looking for something that could take me somewhere
else, get away from reality, I wanted to make that album, I wanted to
make something that was just really heightened. I told him the
instrumentation I wanted to use – French horns and full orchestras,
brass, I wanted a woodwind section.”
Sounds like there are a few shocks in store for silverchair fans…
Daniel: “Yeah, definitely. I’m really excited about it, actually.
There’s probably songs where I knew this record was going to be
challenging to silverchair fans and different, so there are two songs
where I kind of made a compromise and said I’ll write these songs
because this is what I think silverchair fans will like. They’re back
to what silverchair was originally about, just rocking out. And they’re
the two songs where I kind of made a compromise and said, ‘I’ve got to
be fair about this, I can’t just disappear into myself and be a total
wanker!’.”
You write all of the music and have a co-production credit on this
album. By taking the lion share of responsibility, you also have to
wear the fallout if the album fails. Are you comfortable with that?
Daniel: “It did bother me on the last record, but on this record it
didn’t bother me at all. I was fully aware that I was in control of
this and the last album, it was my sole responsibility to make sure it
was good. And I enjoyed it. I just thought, ‘If it fucks up, it’s my
fault, but if it’s great, I’ll take the credit’.”
Complete this sentence: the key to happiness is…
Daniel: “Being open to it. I was scared of it because I thought that
maybe happiness isn’t as good as people say it is, and I didn’t want to
experience it and be disappointed. And although I always wanted to be
happy, I was fearful of it. It’s not as easy as saying, ‘Oh, I want to
be happy’, and then you’re happy. But if you really truly want to be
happy, you have to be open to it and you have to try and get it. It’s
not something that just falls in your lap, you have to work at it. It
kind of happens after a few months of coming off these pills and
saying, ‘I’m not taking them anymore, so I’d better fucking deal with
it’.”
(Thank you to Emma for transcribing this article)