Press
09-02-2001
From Despair to Here
By Steve Mascord (Kerrang! Issue 839)
Playing to 250,000 people in Rio is the biggest thing that
silverchair’s Daniel Johns has ever done. After years of depression
it’s remarkable that he’s here at all.
“This is so Spinal Tap,” says Daniel Johns, busting to use the men’s
room. We have just been led down a secret passageway at Rio’s
Intercontinental Hotel, into a kitchen. We may be lost. No, there’s
another secret passageway, leading to a room with blacked-out glass
doors. When he finally finds the toilet, Johns is escorted there by two
six-foot, suited Brazilians who you suspect, as children, were taught
not to smile.
Welcome to the biggest day in the life of silverchair a day which almost never came.
This afternoon, the band are back on the media merry-go-round for the
first time in a year. Tonight they are to reach the giddiest height of
their live career, playing Rock In Rio to no fewer than 250,000 people.
Yet eight months ago, this trio of 21-year-olds from Newcastle, New
South Wales, seriously considered never playing nor recording together
again. Daniel Johns, suffering from chronic depression and an eating
disorder, had brought things to a screeching halt just when they had
begun to recapture the momentum of their early days as 15-year-old
grungesters.
Weaning himself off prescription drugs, he had agonised over the
decision to continue. A decision that has brought them here, to pick up
where they could never have dreamt of leaving off. Daniel Johns’
journey from the depths of despair and loneliness has just about
reached its end. Relief is in sight.
Daniel does not attend silverchair’s official Rock In Rio press
conference at the Intercontinental. His tanned, short-haired
associates, bassist Chris Joannou and drummer Ben Gillies, do their
best to make apologies.
“He’s decided to rest his throat, because tonight’s a big show,” says
Ben, a statement which his frontman will later concede to be well a
lie.
Waiting in an adjoining room, Daniel stands in the corner, preparing
for a TV appearance. He looks enigmatic, in baggy jeans, sneakers and a
green t-shirt. Although friends say he has gained weight, he’s still
extremely thin. Astonishingly, given our location, there’s not even a
hint of a tan on his skin.
“They say I’m the palest man in Brazil,” he says idly. “It’s a title I’m proud of.”
The silverchair story so far has been brief but glorious. American mall
rats first became aware of them in 1994 when they released ‘Tomorrow’,
a Gen-X anthem of musical power but lyrical naffness (tellingly, they
no longer play it live). Debut album ‘Frogstomp’ was devoured by a
post-grunge world. 1997’s ‘Freak [Show]’, with its diversity and
musicianship, was on a different plain entirely, and 1999’s ‘Neon
Ballroom’ was a spectacular leap forward again. There was thrash, there
was rock, there were ‘Miss You Love’ and ‘Ana’s Song’ twisted ballads
which challenged the sure knowledge they were written by a 19-year-old.
Then came the ‘Neon Ballroom’ tour, then nothing.
silverchair’s manager, former journalist John Watson, thinks for a
while when he is asked to identify the precise moment Daniel Johns was
transformed from scruffy schoolboy to fully-fledged rock star.
“I remember once,” he finally says, “in Germany. The band were still
feeling their way on big stages. There was a camera on a track in front
of the stage. For some reason, Daniel started stalking it. When the
camera could go no further, Daniel spat on it and rubbed the spit all
over the lens. There was this gigantic, blurry picture of his face on
the giant screens. We looked at each other and said, ‘Where did that
come from?’.”
Johns is not the tortured, awkward Cobain-esque figure you may expect,
but he is probably the most gentle person I’ve ever met. He speaks
softly and deliberately and seeks consensus, with phrases like “You
know when you…”. When he points out that he did not become a musician
to do interviews, he quickly adds “no disrespect to you, of course”.
“I just get really uncomfortable around lots of people,” he says,
coming clean over the press conference boycott. “I tend to get really
nervous and do things I’m not proud of after I’ve done them.”
It turns out that Johns crying off sitting in front of a room full of
Brazilian hacks is actually quite significant. In fact, it’s a
condition of silverchair still being around at all.
“After the recording of ‘Neon Ballroom’, it was like a whole weight was
lifted off my shoulders and I felt really free and happy that I’d got
that out,” he explains.
“But halfway through the touring…. the whole weight was back. It was
like every day I was doing two hours of therapy with those interviews.
It all came back. That’s why I needed that time off, to understand
myself better.”
Johns’ illness clinical depression is a savage double edged sword.
On one hand, it provides him with inspiration for his music. On the
other, it makes it difficult for him to go out and perform that music.
This remember, is the man who wrote lyrics like ‘C’mon abuse me more I
like it’.
“A lot of the stuff I was writing last year, after the touring of ‘Neon
Ballroom’…. I was in a pretty bad state,” he says. “Obviously that was
one of the main contributors to having some time off. I was doing a lot
of therapy, trying to sort myself out. But it was just getting worse.
So a lot of it’s about dealing with that and going through that. ‘Neon
Ballroom’ was more about…. a lack of hope, I guess. This time, it’s
more about the light at the end of the tunnel.”
During 1999, Johns says he was in self denial, talking handfuls of
pills to get onstage every night and spending hours alone in hotel
rooms.
“I realised I hadn’t gotten over a lot of the stuff that I was claiming
to have gotten over,” he explains. “I had to get off the drugs. I
wasn’t doing coke or anything; I mean I was taking heaps of
anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication just to tour, to deal with
it. Publicly I was claiming to have gotten over it, which was, I guess,
a defence mechanism.
“You never know if it’s going to come back because it’s medical but at
the moment I’m feeling really good. It’s because I’ve just had time to
understand myself and realise that the things that are different about
me aren’t faults. It’s just the fact that I’m different to the rest of
the people I know. Once you understand yourself and you’re comfortable
with it, that’s when you’ve truly dealt with it.”
You realise that people do start to wonder what a rock star has to get depressed about.
“I think the answer’s really simple actually,” Johns replies. “A lot of
people get depression and sadness mixed up, which is bullshit. I’m sick
of people coming up to me and saying that they’re depressed when
they’re not, they’re sad. There’s a fucking huge difference. You can be
sad for two weeks but it doesn’t mean that you’re depressed. Depression
is more medical. I was clinically depressed, I wasn’t sad. It’s got
nothing to do with wealth or fame, it’s a medical thing.”
Thanks largely to their enforced absence, rumours began to circulate
that silverchair were on the verge of splitting. How true is that?
“It was really close to the brink,” Daniel admits without hesitation.
“But it was nothing to do with personal differences. There was never
any tension in the band, we’re always been really good friends.
“It was more a personal thing. Can I handle it? And if I can’t, I’m
going to leave. I’ve sorted myself out and I’ve realised I can handle
it as long as I avoid certain situations, such as the press conference.
If I was to do that stuff, it would defeat the whole purpose of getting
back in the band. The whole reason I did this was because I understood
there were certain things I couldn’t do.”
Joannou remembers the decision like this:
“We just went up to Daniel’s house, sat around as mates, really casual.
Everyone voiced an opinion and everyone was still thinking the same
thing. We said, ‘Let’s do it’. It was good in a way, because we decided
at the same time not to be half-hearted.”
While Gillies and Joannou enjoyed a year’s anonymity, Johns didn’t have
any such luxury. Sick or well, he has become a tabloid darling in
Australia. Is he dating Natalie Imbruglia? Is he leaving silverchair?
Is he gay?
He blames himself for saying too much in past interviews.
“The whole purpose of life, I guess, is to have an understanding of
yourself and to have things which no-one knows about you,” he says.
“That’s what gives you personal identity.”
A red Lamborghini is parked outside the Sheraton, the band’s spectacularly-appointed hotel.
“This is mine,” says Daniel, as his bandmates board a coach for the gig, “I’ll see you there.” He’s joking.
En route to the Rock In Rio site, the band’s bus crawling through
agonisingly slow traffic, Daniel learns that Iron Maiden travelled to
the venue by helicopter.
“Wow! How cool would that be? Can we get the chopper back? How long would it take? Only 15 minutes?”
Ben Gillies sleeps, Chris Joannou burns off nervous energy by just
looking out the window. Daniel talks and listens, keen to keep his mind
on something else.
When Johns talks, it’s the talk of a 21-year-old, not of a rock star.
It’s curing the munchies after a joint, it’s the origins of the word
‘fuck’, it’s about other bands as if he’s just going out for a look. He
calls his drummer ‘Gillies’, as if they’re jumping the queue together
in the school canteen.
Then Joannou leans over the back of his seat and says, “Hey, guess
what? It’s a sell-out. Two hundred and fifty thousand people!”
“Fuck.”
When Daniel Johns walks out onstage in front of a quarter of a million
Brazilians, chaos erupts. A sea of faces stretching out to the horizon
crane to catch a glimpse of his drop-dead cool mirrored jacket.
‘Pure Massacre’, ‘Emotion Sickness’ and ‘Ana’s Song’ all fly past. This
might be silverchair’s finest hour, but Daniel looks nervous. Between
songs, he struggles to think of anything to say. But then adulation on
this scale is difficult to conceive. During ‘Miss You Love’, the video
screen is filled with the image of a young girl hoisted onto someone’s
shoulders, weeping.
They play two new songs, ‘Hollywood’ and ‘One Way Mule’ both tough,
riff-heavy stompers, before ‘Freak’ inspires the sort of mass pogo that
most of us thought we’d only see on the television. When it’s over
Daniel leaves his guitar, strings snapped, wailing in front of his amp
and walks off in a faux huff. It lays there for a while before a roadie
tugs it away by its lead.
It has all happened in just one day, a day that you would expect to
conclude with sex and drugs and anything else that’s available.
When I return to the hotel I’m told everyone is ‘down by the pool’. I
don’t know whether to anticipate the best or fear the worst. Instead,
Ben and Chris are sitting at a table with the band’s inner circle,
sipping lager.
“Want some pizza?” says A&R man Simon Moor. Pizza?
Daniel finishes the day as he began it absent. Tomorrow, he will go to hospital with glandular fever.
There are better memories one might take away from such a day than that
of a microwaved ham-and-pineapple pizza at 4:30am. The best of all
comes from some eight hours earlier.
Just before the band are due onstage, it’s possible to peer through the
chain-mail barrier at the rear, to the area the band walk through from
the dressing room. Johns, his jacket so reflective as to be blinding,
leads silverchair up a ramp. Workmen clearing equipment, ferrying amps
and tugging at cables, used to the sight of rock stars, stop in their
tracks and stare. Johns, looking straight ahead, keeps walking, right
up and out into the spotlight, leaving his demons in the shadows.
Nigel Tufnell would be proud.
(Thank you to Emma for the transcript)