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Silverchair is really getting this rock-star thing down. It seems like only yesterday that the guys were spending their off hours playing Game Boy and dropping water balloons out of hotel windows.
Now, two years later, they've graduated to having roadies go out and distribute backstage passes to winsome young ladies (a preponderant number of them blonde, we might add) and have peppered their onstage banter with a number of choice expletives.
We at TLN are no prudes, but it was somewhat of a shock to hear lead vocalist Daniel Johns demand that the
crushing throngs put their "fucking hands in the air" during Israel's Son.
18-year-old Johns -— who is now a devout vegan and dangerously emaciated, looking nothing so much as a blonde Geddy Lee, circa 1978 (albeit a better-looking Lee) —- has a little more angst and bitterness in his delivery, and seems much more at home on the stage than in earlier tours.
At one point he jumped atop the massive stack of amps, and alternated riding astride them in an unabashedly masturbatory motion and savagely feeding back his guitar into them with a particularly spastic dry-heaving thrust. This guy has a lot of stuff pent up inside that's only now beginning to surface in his
music — but as the saying goes, neurosis makes for good art.
If there was any doubt in our minds that the silverchair boys weren't kids anymore, it was during opening band Local H's set. The silverchair members had pooled their money together and hired two male strippers to saunter onstage during H's set and strip down to their scanty little G-strings.
Local H's Scott Lucas attempted to return the favor during silverchair's set. He walked onstage about six songs into it carrying a chair and a banana, and proceeded to sit down and unpeel the latter —- not
lasciviously, we might add —- and bop his shaggy head to the music. None of the band acknowledged his presence, but bassist Chris Joannou and Johns did break into a verse of Local H's hit, High-Fiving MF. After silverchair finally wound up the number, Lucas, still avoiding eye contact, neatly folded up the peel, gently picked up his chair, and padded off the stage. Lucas returned one more time to accompany the band on guitar during a particularly vicious version of Black Sabbath's Paranoid.
We knew that the two bands had bonded, but witnessing them trashing a hotel room on this last night of their American tour was really a sight to behold. They turned all the pictures upside down, upended the bed, and turned the fax machine and the television on their heads. Oh, did we mention emptying the mini-bar? We're not sure why they chose this eccentric means of expressing themselves —- it must have had something to do with growing up beneath the equator.
But how does that explain Scott Lucas's part in all this?
silverchair was swamped by a legion of underage fans, but there was at least one more elderly devotee who called Epic Records for tickets and a chance to meet the band. Former Van Halen vocalist Sammy Hagar asked
if he could take a photo with the boys, but when the road manager asked them if they wanted to take a picture with
Hagar, they —- perhaps anticipating the reaction of the record-buying masses when the Hague's new album,
Marching To Mars, is released this month —- asked, "Who?"
