It’s debatable whether you could actually call Silverchair a trio by the end of it all. Perhaps if one removed from the equation major players like producer Paul Mac, Presets front man Julian Hamilton, legendary orchestral arranger Van Dyke Parks – not to mention the hundreds of chattering bohemian voices inside Daniel Johns’ cranium – the group would be reduced to its core elements. At the very least, those other guys who were just messing around when they entered an SBS music competition and suddenly were told that they didn’t have to go to school every day were constants; you’ll see them listed and hear them play on all five records this band released over their two-decade history. And if you listen closely, stripping away all of the augmented reality that Johns was so deep into after the turn of the millennium, it’s still just three guys from Newcastle rocking out and cracking stupid jokes. Everything else just got in the way, eventually.
Australia spewed out many great bands in the ‘90s, but none of them would reach the stratospheric heights and international recognition of Daniel Johns, Chris Joannou and Ben Gillies. The group had it sweet from the word go; their breakout competition winner, ‘Tomorrow’, slotted in perfectly with everything Kurt, Eddie and the other plaid-shirted howlers were doing over in Seattle and before they knew it, they had a hit not only in Australia, but abroad as well. Long-haired and bright-eyed, the sixteen year old rock stars had incited a three-way bidding war with only one song to their name and by the end of the next year, touring with Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Ramones, had their album go double platinum in the US. Breaking America has typically been a notoriously difficult coup to pull off for Australian acts, the last guys to do it in such a fashion being INXS. But with their radio-ready, drop-D chug and Johns’ possessed howling, Silverchair were onto a seriously big thing.
Having won ARIAs and Billboard awards before their friends had even sat their final exams, Silverchair were under extraordinary pressure from their fans and themselves, and the one who felt it most was Johns. The band’s third record (and arguably their best), Neon Ballroom, highlighted Johns’ internal struggles with depression and anorexia, the latter eventually resulting in a condition which crippled him to the extent that he could not perform and had to walk assisted by a cane. It also marked a time when Silverchair broke with their traditional fan base and moved away from the grunge aesthetic that had boosted them to the top, experimenting with new instrumentation, OTT arrangements and some serious balladry, which incidentally made them even more popular. ‘Miss You Love’ and ‘Ana’s Song’, both from this record, were huge hits, while the dramatic centrepiece, ‘Emotion Sickness’, showed where the band would go next.
Up until this point, despite their forays into the majestic worlds of glam and prog, Silverchair were still at heart, a rock band. Joannou and Gillies, both heavy hitters and Black Sabbath fans, propelled the band forward and turned their live shows into the stuff of legends (see above.) As the arrangements became more grandiose, so too did their appropriateness for festivals and ARIA’s appreciation of them; by the time they capped off their career the trio had a record-breaking 49 nominations and 21 wins under their belt. But with Diorama and Young Modern, both punctuated by long stretches of inactivity, the band became something more orchestral and arrangement-heavy, or as many would argue, the Daniel Johns Project. This wasn’t helped by the front man’s side project with Paul Mac or his insistence on enlisting Parks to fully realise what had started on Neon Ballroom. It became obvious, however, that the rhythm section and their singer were moving in different directions, despite writing consistently phenomenal music together. By Young Modern, the ‘Silverchair sound’ was almost unrecognisable, buried in a wash of synths and avant-garde-pop phrasing that won another swag of awards, but represented the creative end point for the group. Phenomenal live performers until the end, the trio called it quits in 2011, leaving behind a back catalogue which not only shows their range but also their considerable legacy to Australian rock.