Sauce

It’s hard work being as hot as Daniel Johns, which is strange for one of Australia’s coolest musical exports. Our very own young modern, David Williams, chatted to Silverchair’s laid back leading man about the upcoming tour and taking his cues for cool from James Brown…

Hey Daniel, how’re you going?
I’m good thanks, how are you?

Yeah, I’m hot!
You’re hot?

Yeah, I’m hot. It’s hot down here!
Sorry man, I thought you were, like, sexually hot. I was like, “Wow, such a big start!” [Laughs]

[Laughs] Well, I’m flattered that that’s the first thing you’d think about me, thanks a lot! Look, you’re hot too, Daniel. We’re both hot.
[Laughs] That’s cool; let’s start the interview by confirming we’re very hot.

Yeah, we are. Look, if we don’t tell each other, who else is gonna do it, you know?
There’s no room for humility anymore. Gotta get straight to the point.

You’ve got to push your own barrow.
[Laughs] No one else will!

So where are you?
I’m standing outside the Newcastle Entertainment Centre… we’re rehearsing, and we’re just about to go in and do some interviews with those guys, then we’re gonna rehearse until, I think, tonight… yeah. Just back to Newcastle yesterday from Europe.

In terms of the whole tour, it’s like five minutes before you go on stage, isn’t it?
Yeah, yeah. Definitely.

So how’re you feeling all about it – are you pretty relaxed or nervous? What’s going through your mind?
Nah, I’m chillin’ like Dylan… pretty relaxed. I feel really happy about the tour, really positive, really looking forward to it. It’s gonna be a long, nine week trip through Australia but we’re all, yeah, very much looking forward to it. We’ve just played quite a lot of our own shows in America and quite a lot of festivals and our own shows in Europe and England and… yeah… we just feel really well trained, confident, and happy to be doing it.

Cool. To use a sporting analogy, you’ve gone through the main rounds and are just about to head into the finals, I guess…
Yeah, I’d say that. I’d say Australia would be the finals. But I dunno, “the finals” implies that after this it’s over; we’ve still got about three American tours after this and about two European tours [Laughs]… we’re not even half way through the last of this record, but… it definitely feels like it’s something important to be doing this tour and going all over Australia, yeah… and everyone feels really happy in both camps. I’m really excited to be doing it.

[You’ve] almost forty Australian dates to come [and] you’re starting very consciously in your hometown of Newcastle – that was something you’d decided from the outset?
We don’t do our own scheduling, someone else does it but… I think we do Newcastle and then Powderfinger’s hometown of Brisbane next but it’s uhm… I don’t know how conscious it was to start in Newcastle to tell you the truth – just ask our management – but it’s all… we look forward to playing all our shows, really. We don’t have a favourite place or anything; we just want to play everywhere. Everywhere’s equally important. If you have a bad show you feel as bad in Newcastle as you would in Brisbane.

How do you prepare? What’s it like in the hour before you go on stage? What do you do in the last hour, the last half-hour, and the last five minutes? What goes on?
We don’t really have a ritual or anything. We just listen to a lot of music and have a couple of drinks or whatever and just get ready. The only ritualistic thing we do is we always listen to James Brown just before we get on stage. Everything else – we just listen to a lot of electronic music and just dance. [Laughs] We just site backstage and have a beer and dance and everyone just laughs and we hug a lot [Laughs]… nothing really major goes on. We don’t do lines of coke off a stripper’s back or anything!

That was gonna be my next question!
Yeah, I know… everyone thinks we do but we don’t. I don’t know what gives people that impression.

I’ve asked that so many times, I’ve worn myself out on that one.
Yeah, you get sick of it after a while…

So is there a particular James Brown song that you guys [listen to]?
I don’t know what the name is, you’d have to ask Dan – it’s always because Ben’s doing his kind of, drum warm-up thing with his sticks and pads… It probably started around the time of Diorama. There was this one song where I did a particular exercise to and it just became a ritual, you know. If we don’t listen to James Brown before we go on stage we feel really unprepared [Laughs]. So I don’t know what it’s called – it’s generally, backstage we just listen to a lot of music and, if anything, we just try and keep our minds off playing. I don’t think about. I don’t try and prepare or sit there and you know, work myself up. It’s not like going out to play a game of football – we just listen to music and try and avoid thinking about playing before we get out on stage and then we focus on the task.

Okay. Tell me about Europe please, and tell me about the States. How’d it all go?
It went really great actually. We went over to America first and the first week was a bit fucked because within two days of being in LA I got laryngitis and we had to play on the Jay Leno Show and I was really sick, but after that first week things started to pick [up]. We played our first show in Portland… yeah, the response over in America at the moment’s been just really overwhelming and flattering and we’ve… enjoyed being over there again. We haven’t really been there since 2003 when we played two shows in New York for Diorama and two shows in LA or something, and that was pretty much all we did, touring-wise, and before all that we hadn’t really done anything except for the Neon Ballroom tour in ’99. So we haven’t really been to America that much in the last seven or eight years, and to go over there and Straight Lines is really taking off over there and people are really receptive and responsive… yeah, it just felt really great in America and people are responding predominantly to the Diorama stuff and the Young Modern stuff as opposed to the really early stuff which, to be honest, we kind of expected the audience to want nostalgia, but they’re really moving forward with us… and then we went to Europe; the record’s not even out in Europe, [so] that was a whole different experience as well. No-one’s even heard Straight Lines so we’re kind of playing it and used to starting with that song and everyone roars and responds, but in Europe it’s just another new song, so I think we’ve kind of been on both sides of the fence and we feel really, really good about it, and all the shows that we play we’re just getting better and better as a band and the crowds are all really great, and it just feels like we’re prepared to do anything we need to do. We feel like we can make things up on the spot or we can just play the songs as we wish. [Laughs]

It sounds like you’ve [found] a real freedom and that anything’s possible… that’s how it sounds to me.
Well, yeah we… don’t really have a set way of doing anything, that’s for sure. We just go on stage and jam it out – that’s the kind of band I wanna be in and that’s the kind of band we wanna be, and I think a lot of the more recent stuff that I’ve written and the more recent records we’ve put out kind of lend themselves to that freedom… you know, there are some songs where, obviously you want… to play note for note because it’s like a composed piece of music, but there are other songs like Mind Reader or If You Keep Losing Sleep that we’ve never really played any of them the same way [Laughs]. Every night… we always try and push the boundaries, and some nights you get off stage and you go “That was the best show we’ve ever played!” and some nights you get off and go “Fuck, possibly pushed it a bit too far in that bit!” [Laughs]

Cool… hey, that song, If You Keep Losing Sleep; you first started playing that in The Dissociatives – how did you end up with Ben and Chris agreeing to make that a Silverchair track?
I’m always writing songs, and when I was touring with The Dissociatives I wrote If I Keep Losing Sleep and All Day because I wasn’t sleeping and there was a pattern forming, and as soon as I wrote them I played them to The Dissociatives guys and they wanted to play them live as part of the set; we only had the ten songs off The Dissociatives album to play and we needed some extra songs and I said, “I’ve got two new ones!” They were really into playing it and then when The Dissociatives got off the road I just started working on them more… finishing lyrics, making them more complete, I guess. Ben and Chris really didn’t agree. I just said, “This is the new album,” and played it to them and then we went in and recorded them! But they were… definitely aware that we’d played them with The Dissociatives – I like both versions, but the Silverchair version’s the most complete, yeah.

Silverchair is currently touring nationwide.

Listen to the full interview Below