Woman's Weekly
December 25, 1995
When we introduced them 18 months ago (Inside Scoop, June 20, 1994), they
were just three high school students from Newcastle, NSW, whose garage band,
Innocent Criminals, had just been chosen from 800 hopefuls to record an
original song, complete with the state-of-the-art video clip for the now
defunct SBS-TV music show Nomad. “Now we want to get a record contract,”
guitarist-vocalist Daniel Johns told us at the time. They got the contract,
with Murmur Records, renamed themselves silverchair the rest is, as they
say, is pop history.
Their competition-winning single, Tomorrow, enjoyed six weeks at the top
of the Australian charts, and the follow-up track, Pure Massacre, had
similar success. The debut album, frogstomp, was released in April and they
became the first Australian act to enter the charts at number one. Though
frogstomp has since gone double platinum here and sold more than one-million
copies in the US, fame has not gone to the long-haired heads of the band
members Johns, 16, drummer Ben Gillies, 15, and bassist Chris Joannou, also
15. “We didn’t like go spastic or anything,” Johns has said of success, “But
we were pretty happy.”
As they should be. In September, during school holidays of course, they
briefly toured the US and gave a spirited performance on the roof of New
York’s Radio City Music Hall that was broadcast for the MTV Video Music
Awards. They also appreared at England’s Reading Festival and have been
asked to tour the US with the Red Hot Chili Peppers early next year. Despite
rave reveiws (“a wonderful union of heavy metal and uplifting melodies”,
said The San Fransisco Examiner) and constant comparisons with bands such as
Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, silverchair-who are each accompanied by
a parent when travelling-are determined not to indulge in any unseemly
rock-star behaviour.
“People’d hate you and they wouldn’t buy your records and it’d be bad,”
Gillies observed while in the US. And besides, as Johns has humbly said, “we
still think we kinda suck.”
[Thanks to Katherine Waddell for the transcript]
