Press
11-08-2007
Corn Exchange - Edinburgh, UK
By JILL CARBERRY
What better way to start a Silverchair gig than getting to stand right next to Daniel Johns’ mic in the front row?! As the train pulled into Young Modern Station and the strobe lights flashed, the crowd went totally crazy as Silverchair and Paul Mac strode onto the stage. Young Modern Station exploded the place and from that moment on, everybody was singing, chanting and screaming. The crowd’s unrelenting chants of ‘Silverchair, Silverchair’ went on for so long that Daniel rested his head on Paul Mac’s keyboard and pretended he was dreaming!
Daniel, Ben and Chris ripped through the set playing loads of Young Modern - The Man That Knew Too Much, Reflections of a Sound, Mind Reader and Straight Lines, interspersed with amazing versions of old favourites – Emotion Sickness, The Door, Tuna in the Brine and Ana’s Song, which was especially stunning owing mostly to a beautiful variation of Daniel’s vocal melody.
The crowd participation made the night and, even though the album hasn’t been released here, it was clear that that was totally irrelevant as everybody sang lyrics and yelled long and short screams on Daniel’s command. Straight Lines was so epic that it filled the place like a massive stadium and not ‘the Canadian ice-hockey rink’ that Daniel thought Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange really was!
With a screaming falsetto version of Happy Birthday for Chris and the wonderfully eccentric If You’ve Been Losing Sleep to close the night, it was clear that Silverchair gave their all to their tight performances, with Daniel moaning into the pickups and playing solos with his teeth, and the crowd loved it.