Silverchair: Same name, new outlook

Twelve years ago, the world fell in love with a trio of 15 year olds who sang about murder and the day after today. After many hit albums and band member illness, Silverchair are back in the spotlight and on the charts. Their recent album Young Modern is not what many people in North America saw coming for the group who continually kept the grunge vibe alive up through the year 2000, but none of the members of Silverchair are those kids anymore and bassist Chris Joannou says it was a natural progression for them.

“I think that one of the hardest things to understand because a lot of people didn’t get to hear Diorama,” Joannou says, “So for them it must sound like a really drastic change. I think that there are a couple of pages missing, but they’re all there. That’s been one of the weird things for us so far. You talk to a lot of people and they reference earlier albums, whereas Diorama a lot of people just ignore it. It’s like an underground cult record almost. It’s really strange having it described like that. Here people definitely missed a huge piece of the band’s progression.”

Young Modern holds a definite poppier sound then Silverchair is known for, but despite that fans have embraced it charted another number one selling disc in Australia and garnering the threesome the praise of critics. This album has been a new chance for them personally as well. After a long break the included lead singer Daniel Johns recovering from anorexia and reactive arthritis and side projects for all three of them, Silverchair realized they had something special at a reunion gig for Tsunami relief.

“It was a definite break and that’s the way we saw it as well. We always knew we’d do another album. With Daniel recovering from arthritis and not knowing how long that was going to take, and that took quite some time. Health comes before everything. That was the main priority. After that we were doing other things for a while. It wasn’t really as planned as what people think it was really just using that time to do something else and doing other stuff. We all had to wind those things up before we could start doing Silverchair again. We didn’t know how we were going to do it or where or what….playing that show and watching people go nuts and getting that adrenaline rush, I think it made us realize what we have together. I think it worked out well, because it gave us the opportunity to get out of the whole Silverchair world for a bit. Go and have some experiences on our own.”

Now that it’s over Joannou says that he, Johns and drummer Ben Gilles look back on the making of Young Modern as some of the best times of their career so far. They took this new disc as a chance to go out alone and only worry about finding a label to back them once it was complete.

“I think it’s maybe where the three of us are at in our headspace. I think it’s also the way we went about it just paying for it ourselves. We just rented a little country house. We set up in the lounge of this house and played music everyday. It had its ups and downs still but overall it was just a really good experience…it was like, I don’t want to say whole new beginning, but there was no issues, no nothing.”

Hopefully this will be a happy beginning that keeps these guys going for another 12 years playing whatever format they morph into next.

- Stephanie Joudrey