SilverChair Book Extract

Home | Bio | Current Releases | Upcoming Projects | Book Reviews | Contact

High Chair
While making their ARIA-winning fourth album, 2002’s critics’ favourite Diorama, Australian trio Silverchair underwent a creative makeover, endured tension with their label Atlantic, cemented a bond with legendary arranger Van Dyke Parks, and won a new fan in Bono, as revealed in this extract from Jeff Apter’s book, A New Tomorrow, published by Random House, 2006.

As cohesive as it would eventually sound, both thematically and musically, Diorama was an album with a false start. The lengthy, exhausting Neon Ballroom tour had wrapped in December 1999, and Johns had started writing new songs during 2000 and early 2001. But he felt dissatisfied with the music he was making; the songs seemed too easy, too familiar, full of the crashing riffs and heavy feelings that had marked the band’s first two albums, Frogstomp and Freak Show, and to a lesser extent Neon Ballroom. Johns’s frustration reached a peak in February 2001, soon after returning from Rock In Rio. He spent two virtually sleepless weeks walking Merewether beach and fretting about whether he’d ever move forward with his songwriting. At the end of this period of uncertainty, he made a big decision. He erased the two hours worth of material he’d recorded so far.
‘They just sounded too much like the last album,’ he told me, when I covered the making of the album for Rolling Stone. ‘I knew it was a risk, but I [also] knew if I kept them they’d be a safety net.’
Not surprisingly, the act was extremely liberating for Johns. And gradually, the songs for the album that was originally called The Time Machine started to take shape. (Guy Pearce, who, oddly enough, starred in the video for ‘Across the Night’, appeared in a film of the same name. Two weeks before the film’s release, manager John Watson found out about the coincidence and the album was changed to Diorama.) The elegant ‘Luv Your Life’, the sprawling ‘Tuna in the Brine’, the hook-heavy ‘The Greatest View’: these were all written after he’d scrubbed those early songs. Ignoring even his bandmates, Johns previewed the new tunes only to his brother, Heath, manager John Watson, and Paul Mac. ‘Tomorrow’ producer, Phil McKellar, who would soon reconnect with the band, was another of the chosen few to hear these songs-under-development.
Paul Mac might have developed a rapport with Johns during the creation of their own EP, but he wasn’t quite ready for the shock of the songs Johns was preparing for Diorama. ‘I didn’t get it,’ Mac laughed when I asked him how he reacted. ‘Because he’s not [musically] trained, here’s this incredibly complicated stuff. I was going, “Fuck, what is this?”’ Mac’s new role was to act as musical translator, helping Johns get on paper the music he was hearing in his head. Later on, Mac also contributed several piano parts to the album.
Mac’s surprise at the new material was shared by Joannou and Gillies. Prior to the recording that was planned to begin in April, Gillies and Joannou got a call from Johns to visit him at home. For Johns, there was a little of the same trepidation he had felt unveiling the Neon Ballroom songs, when Nick Launay acted as mediator. But this time around he was more assured. He lit a joint, sat down at his grand piano and played ‘Tuna in the Brine’ to the Silver-pair. As he recalled later, ‘Ben said, “How the fuck are we going to remember that?” It was great.’
Pot had become a handy writing aid for Johns in this period of his life, as he would reveal to me: ‘I smoked a lot of pot writing Diorama, but I don’t consider our music pot music. Sometimes when I write I don’t want any outside influences apart from my own thoughts, but sometimes I need to break through that self-conscious barrier and I smoke.’
‘We sat around and he played them one by one for me,’ the ever-amiable Gillies recalled of these very early Diorama sessions, in September 2001.‘He said things like, “This one sounds Beach Boys-y.” It was very cool.’ Joannou made a neat understatement when he commented that ‘some of the arrangements were quite complex.’ Not only did Johns have the thumbs-up from Mac, his bandmates were on board with the new music he was writing. It was just the encouragement he needed to keep going with these bold, cinematic pieces of music, songs that were the logical step forward from such Neon Ballroom tracks as ‘Emotion Sickness’ and ‘Miss You Love’.
But this time around there was a key difference – Johns wasn’t digging into his heart of darkness for themes; instead he was opening up to the world around him. He wanted to make a hopeful, outward-looking album rather than another forty minutes of self-flagellation. It also helped that for the first time he was writing on piano and recording music on reliable home-recording gear (which Mac had helped install), instead of banging out demos on his guitar and recording them on cheap cassettes as he’d done in the past. Now he could experiment with vocal ideas and more complex arrangements before the band hit the studio proper. It was to have a major impact on Diorama.
Choosing a producer wasn’t as easy for Diorama as for their first three albums. Frogstomp, Freak Show and Neon Ballroom were rock albums, in essence, so they needed a producer who could translate that raw rockin’ energy to tape. Now the band needed someone different, someone who could understand where Johns was heading. This was an entirely different band to the rocking runts who blitzed the world with ‘Tomorrow’ six years earlier. The band’s new American label, Atlantic Records, proposed a shortlist of producers. Watson was keen for the band – especially Johns – to work with someone fresh, someone who would push him into the new directions his songwriting was taking. Launay wasn’t on the shortlist, in part because he was too familiar to the band, but he listened to the demos, and put forward a couple of names as possible producers: Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie, who knew and understood the band and their work, having contributed various parts to Neon Ballroom; and, oddly, Brian May, the guitarist for Queen. The epic scope of these songs reminded Launay of Queen’s A Night at the Opera and he felt that May would connect with that. Both were first-rate ideas, but not what Atlantic and the band had in mind. (Soon after, the reclusive May would record with American arena-rockers the Foo Fighters.)
American Michael Beinhorn, who’d worked with nu-metal giants Korn, as well as Soundgarden and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, was the first producer agreed on by the band and Atlantic. While the trio fine-tuned the songs in three months of rehearsals, after returning from Rock in Rio, they waited for Beinhorn to finish Korn’s latest album, Untouchables. But as the Korn sessions dragged on, the Silverchair camp simply ran out of patience, and the deal fell through. In hindsight, this was fortunate, because Johns needed someone who could bring out what he would call the ‘colours’ and ‘light’ in his new songs; Beinhorn specialised in modern rock miserablists. Other contenders for the production job included Americans Bob Rock and Bob Ezrin, the latter a highly regarded veteran who’d produced masterly albums for Lou Reed and Alice Cooper. The nod eventually went to Canadian-born, British-based David Bottrill, a bookish type with a shaved skull, glasses and a thoughtful nature. He’d produced albums by skilled metallers Tool, art-rockers King Crimson, baroque pop guy Peter Gabriel – even belter Toni Childs – so he’d proved his diversity. Bottrill’s work with Tool proved he could handle heavy sounds, but his production work with Gabriel was just as impressive. The erstwhile Genesis frontman was a songwriter who shared Johns’s anything goes ambition.
Before disappearing into the studios, the trio spent some time at Mangrove Studios on the Central Coast during April, fine-tuning their home recordings with Phil McKellar. For the Sydney-based producer it was a sort of homecoming; he’d never really dropped off the Silverchair radar since producing the first version of ‘Tomorrow’ for the TV show nomad. It was further evidence of John Watson’s insistence on keeping his friends close. ‘Maybe I got the call,’ McKellar figured, when I asked him about this in early 2006, ‘because it’s a close family; maybe they trusted me.’ The way McKellar read the situation, the band needed someone who could work quickly. ‘There was no real “producing” to be done,’ he added. ‘They just needed some decent sounding demos.’ As soon as he heard these new songs, McKellar, in his own words, was ‘blown away’. He thought that ‘Tuna in the Brine’, in particular, was a stone-cold classic. ‘Hearing those demos,’ he recalled, ‘I knew something magic was going to happen. I really liked the immediacy of the demos; I had shivers up my spine.’ (Some of these demos would end up as B-sides of the various Diorama singles.) Although he’s too much of a gentleman to say it out loud, I sensed that McKellar wasn’t as excited by Diorama’s finished product. ‘But Daniel’s such a talent,’ he added,‘and these are journeys you have to take. But there was a certain fragility to those first demos.’ (‘They sound great, don’t they?’ commented Johns, when I raised the subject.) Frogstomp producer Kevin Shirley was another who was underwhelmed by Diorama. ‘It was over-produced to the max,’ he believed.
Johns, Watson and Diorama producer Bottrill first met in LA; not long after that, Bottrill had an interesting meeting with reps from Atlantic, including their head of A&R, Kevin Williamson. ‘There was no secret about Daniel’s grand plans [for the album],’ Bottrill said to me, ‘but they felt he’d still write the big rock hit. But he simply didn’t want to do that.’ Bottrill’s previous exposure to Silverchair was fairly limited, although he did recall one incident that pointed out how much other players respected the band. During early sessions with Tool – a band as renowned for their prog-rock chops as their extreme attitudes towards sex and drugs – while they were recording their 1996 long-player Aenima, Bottrill asked guitarist Adam Jones what type of guitar sounds he was hoping to create. Without another word, Jones whipped out a copy of Frogstomp. ‘Make me sound like that,’ he told Bottrill.
Bottrill met up with Silverchair in June 2001, in the band’s comfort zone of Newcastle. It was a strangely familiar environment for Bottrill, who’d grown up in the very blue-collar town of Hamilton, Ontario. (‘But it doesn’t have a beach,’ he laughed when I asked about this.) Bottrill was quickly introduced to the harder edge of Newcastle after the first day of rehearsals, when he and Gillies hooked up for a drink in a nearby pub. They’d barely sipped their first beer when a fight erupted, with the brawlers spilling over the two of them.
Bottrill would convene with the band at 10.30 am each day for the next few weeks, and they worked through the new songs, plotted out their upcoming recordings, and then disappeared until the following day. It was the first time since they were teenagers that the band had made music in the morning. It wasn’t done on a whim; Johns was making a very conscious effort not to replicate what he called the ‘night orientated’ vibe of Neon Ballroom. Instead, he wanted an album that was all about new sensations. Given that rock and roll is a world where nothing ever happens before lunchtime, at the earliest, playing before noon was definitely unfamiliar. ‘I was trying to reverse things this time around,’ Johns said, but added that ‘it was really weird to play music’ so early in the day.
‘They’re absolutely world class, without question,’ Bottrill said of Silverchair, when I first spoke with him in September 2001.‘Everybody in this band is of the highest quality I’ve ever worked with.’ Bottrill was also impressed by the band’s studio savvy. ‘They knew what they were doing [in the studio],’ he said. ‘They knew the process; it was no mystery to them.’
Once these rehearsals were wrapped – and after the band’s first meeting with Kevin Williamson, who travelled to Newcastle to check in on his new signing – sessions for Diorama began in July at Sydney’s Studio 301, the ground zero for most well-budgeted local recordings of the past ten years. (While Silverchair took over Studio One, the Whitlams and Midnight Oil were recording Torch the Moon and Capricornia, respectively, elsewhere in the complex.) Erecting the Silverchair table-tennis table was one of the first priorities for the band, as they settled into 301.As always, videographer Robert Hambling was everywhere, recording the making of the album for the 2002 DVD Across the Night: The Creation of Diorama. Engineer Anton Hagop was producer Bottrill’s quietly spoken, super-efficient sidekick (and went on to win an ARIA for his work).Assistant engineer Matt ‘Gizmo’ Lovell, a Novocastrian who’d learned his trade at Sydney’s Festival Studios alongside Kevin ‘Caveman’ Shirley, helped out on the technical side, and then, at the close of business each day, would document the day’s events for the band’s website. As Lovell would tell me, he was hired for various roles: to utilise his mastery of ProTools technology, to write the album diary and to be ‘the vibe guy’ in the studio. (During the more difficult moments of the Neon Ballroom sessions, Lovell’s amiable, cut-the-crap attitude had helped alleviate some tension.)
Basic tracks were recorded during July and August. Paul Mac chimed in on piano. Jim Moginie, who’d played on seven of Neon Ballroom’s tracks, added some keyboard squiggles to ‘The Greatest View’ and ‘One Way Mule’ (the latter was the only song Johns had resurrected from the tape he’d scrapped earlier in the year). Bassist Joannou and drummer Gillies spent a lot of time playing ping-pong with Watson, but Daniel Johns rarely left the control room. He was absorbed in the making of this record. Bottrill explained: ‘This was absolutely Daniel’s album and the band were happy about that. He really wanted to make this statement. Ben and Chris were curious as to how it would play out – they were happy to run with it. I’m not sure if they shared Daniel’s vision, but there was no backroom bitching.’
Bottrill also revealed that, even in these early stages of production, Johns knew exactly which songs on the album were better suited to a big production: he could hear where the orchestra belonged. Just like McKellar before him, Bottrill thought ‘Tuna’ was an ‘epic’. ‘My first reaction was, “What a great piece to work on.” [And] that is the album, right there.’
In late September 2001, the band (plus Bottrill, his two engineers and Johns’s dog, Sweep) had shifted camp to Mangrove Studios, the tranquil and very desirable musician’s escape then owned by INXS bassist Garry Gary Beers. Here they started to experiment with some of the songs, adding extra texture to the basic recordings laid down at 301. Johns’s mood was up – the songs were coming together almost as he had planned them in his head. The only interruption was when a crew visited from cable station Channel [V] to announce that the band had won their fifth consecutive Viewer’s Choice award, even though they’d been the invisible men of rock during the past year. Johns, Gillies and Joannou laughed their way through the interview, which was aired at October’s ARIA awards. ‘We know other bands deserved it,’ Johns mugged to the camera, ‘but we’re the ’Chair!’
By early October, the band was back in Sydney, at 301, confronting the most challenging – and costly – stage of the recording: the orchestration for six of the album’s tracks. Once again, Johns co-composed the arrangements for three of these songs (‘The Greatest View’, ‘World Upon Your Shoulders’ and ‘My Favourite Thing’) with Larry Muhoberac, whose previous encounter with Johns was when the singer, in his green beanie, had lain on the floor shouting out the notes to Neon Ballroom’s ‘Emotion Sickness’. After this came the real glittering prize: a fortnight with the legendary Van Dyke Parks, who penned the orchestral arrangements for ‘Across the Night’, ‘Tuna in the Brine’ and ‘Luv Your Life’, writing parts for strings, woodwind, brass, harp and percussion.
The sixty-something Parks – who Bottrill quickly figured was ‘the campest straight man I’ve ever met’ – is twenty-four-carat rock and roll royalty. Born in Atlanta but based in California, he collaborated with Beach Boy Brian Wilson on his great lost album, Smile, and is often cited as the man who steered Wilson away from the more commercially orientated Beach Boys, freeing his music while helping to mess up his mind. Parks also co-wrote the classic ‘Heroes and Villains’ (and the not-so-classic ‘Vegetables’). Described as ‘some mad cross of Stephen Sondheim, Burt Bacharach, Cole Porter and Randy Newman’ and the ‘cult figure of all cult figures’, Parks has worked his sonic alchemist’s trick on albums from the Byrds, Fiona Apple, Ry Cooder and U2. He’s also spun some magic on his own hugely eccentric albums, recorded intermittently when he wasn’t working with others. These records included 1968’s Song Cycle and 1984’s Jump!, which was a bizarre attempt to mould a pop opera out of the Uncle Remus tales of Chandler Harris (complete with all their very un-PC dialect). Avuncular and often downright hilarious, Parks is a studio master, but not so self-obsessed that he couldn’t recognise a spark in Johns that he recalled from his own musical youth.
‘I see all the musical qualities in him I heard and saw in Brian Wilson,’ Parks told me, during the only interview he granted while in Australia. ‘[Daniel’s] an undefeated romantic; an informed optimist. I know there’s a lot of dark meat on that bird but lurking in there is the voice of the human spirit. When I got the new material, I was astounded by the musicality, the lyrics, brimming with enthusiasm and a life force that guarantees this group as a continuing major force in music.’ Or as Rolling Stone’s David Fricke put it, when I asked him about Parks: ‘Van Dyke Parks doesn’t work with clowns. He’s got very high standards about music and musicality. The fact that he worked with them on Diorama is as much a tribute to what Daniel can do as a songwriter and the band can do as players as the fact that Van Dyke Parks has eclectic tastes. He doesn’t just take a job for the sake of taking a job.’ (Typically, Parks would downplay this lofty praise, calling himself a ‘whore’ who makes his living in the whore’s paradise that is Hollywood.)
Mind you, Parks almost didn’t make the trip at all. When Johns said he was hearing lush, cinematic arrangements for many of these new songs, Watson had put forward Parks’s name, but with a caveat. ‘I think he’s dead,’ he told his star. (Parks found the anecdote so funny that he now sometimes signs off his emails as ‘the recently deceased Van Dyke Parks’.) Johns wasn’t familiar with Parks’s work, but got very interested when Watson learned he was both alive and kicking (and still making music). Johns vividly recalls their first phone conversation: ‘The first thing we heard was Van Dyke on the other end, playing the piano. I thought we were on hold before I realised. That was a good lesson: sometimes it’s best to give yourself up musically rather than saying something.’ These phone conversations are hilariously documented on the Across the Night DVD, as Parks outlines his orchestral needs and dollar signs collect at the bottom of the screen.
Even though the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York delayed Parks’s arrival by a fortnight, the connection between him and Johns was deep and true. ‘I know a lot of talented guys, I’ve worked with them – I’ve almost made a career out of surrounding myself with talented people,’ said Parks, in his unreasonably modest way, during a rare moment of downtime at Studio 301. ‘I’ve been very fortunate. I’m a musical grunt in LA, I work in the TV and film industry. This offer came out of the ether; it was a blessing. When I looked into this work, immediately I wanted to weep. I thought the vocalist was in dead earnest; I liked that person, I wanted to know who he was. And this beat seeing David Crosby in a jacuzzi. This is someone I wanted to know.’
Silverchair’s early music had been implanted in Parks’s mind, almost subliminally, because his children were big fans of the band’s debut album, Frogstomp. ‘It was throbbing through the walls, especially when they had guests. I got curious about it, but could never have imagined that I would be fortunate enough to work on a project of theirs.’ Parks recognised that the music Johns was now writing was far more advanced than the simple riff and roar that won over his children. He also recognised that development as a mark of the musically gifted: ‘All of the artists I like have a tendency to do that: to leave me in shock. The artist has a special faculty for pulling along his or her audience and with difficulty they move forward with them. It can get kind of dull if the artist rests on their laurels.’
Johns would have loved more time to work with Parks, but they did conjure up some true musical magic in the two weeks they shared. The orchestrations are signature Van Dyke Parks: epic, sweeping and dramatic, full of rich sonic detail and golden melodies (possibly too much detail, because a lot of what was recorded was trimmed during the album’s final mix).The best songs of Daniel Johns’s life had been transformed into the band’s best recordings and some of Parks’s finest work. It said a lot about how rewarding it was for Johns to work with people he trusted and respected. Bottrill was duly impressed by Parks’s skills; he said that this fortnight was the ‘highpoint’ of his Diorama journey. ‘To watch him work the orchestra was brilliant,’ Bottrill said. ‘He was a comedian working a crowd and then he was a music professor.’ Sometimes Parks would dumb down his act, swearing at the various players assembled in 301. ‘He used profanity as a motivator,’ Bottrill pointed out, ‘as a wake-up call.’
But by early December, the mood surrounding Diorama had changed. Johns had been in Los Angeles for a fortnight, mixing the album with Bottrill. Throughout the making of the album, the band’s American record label, Atlantic Records, had liked what they were hearing, but they still hadn’t heard that one key song they felt would get the band airplay on the Rock and Modern Rock radio stations, the only radio formats that touched Silverchair in North America. Bottrill explained to me that Kevin Williamson was conflicted. ‘I think personally he thought the music was amazing, but he was also under pressure from his label to extract another big hit from the band.’
Atlantic’s concerns reached a peak while Johns was absorbed with finishing the mix of the album. But writing a song to order wasn’t Johns’s specialty, especially when he had almost finished work on Silverchair’s most accomplished and detailed record. When I met him in LA, briefly, he was moody and sullen, clearly distracted by the demands of Atlantic. In the past he’d been shielded, wisely, by Watson, from many of the machinations of the record industry, but now he was coming face to face with the commercial expectations of a major label. This was a new and weird environment for him.
‘That DVD [Across the Night] made out that we hated each other, but we didn’t,’ Johns insisted, when asked about his relationship with Williamson. ‘We just weren’t right, we weren’t compatible. He was just doing his job and his job fucked with my head. He knew that Americans wouldn’t buy that record, while I was eternally optimistic that if it’s good enough they would.’ Bottrill, for one, could see that Johns’s heart simply wasn’t in the idea of writing this ‘contractual obligation’ tune, even though he did have one more song under construction, and there had been some talk about rejigging ‘The Greatest View’ for US radio. ‘He’d made his statement,’ Bottrill figured, ‘and he had nothing left.’ Eventually, a compromise was reached when Johns wrote the song ‘Ramble’, but this meant that he, Bottrill and the crew had to fly back to 301 in Sydney and reconvene with Gillies and Joannou to record the song. According to the band, it was the most extreme act of record company profligacy they’d ever witnessed.
‘Ramble’ was ‘an arthritis-induced piece of shit,’ according to its author. ‘I hate it.’ The last laugh was on the record company suits: this watered-down, by-the-numbers rocker ended up as a B-side for the ‘Without You’ single, even though Kevin Williamson thought it ‘a good song’. Further complicating an already uncomfortable scene was the increasing pain Johns was feeling in his knees, an early sign of the reactive arthritis that would soon leave him a virtual cripple. There were several contributing factors at work here: the stress brought on by both finishing the record and trying to pull a hit out of his backside, and the fact that his diet, although improved, still wasn’t quite what a nutritionist would recommend. In fact, David Bottrill can only ever recall seeing Johns eat fruit throughout the months they spent together. ‘He was starting to get these rashes,’ Bottrill revealed, ‘and I said to him, “Don’t just eat the fruit plate!”’ Although Bottrill insists that Johns was well enough to walk away from the studio when the mix was eventually completed, he could see that Johns’s health was failing. ‘He was getting tired more often – and a lot quicker.’
Johns was in the unfortunate position of being amongst the 6 per cent of Caucasian males – usually in their twenties – who, due to a certain type of blood tissue, are predisposed to reactive arthritis. (Another sufferer was Australian cricketer Michael Slater.) Similar to the over-all ‘achiness’ that you experience during a bout of influenza, but way more debilitating, the reactive arthritis ‘bug’ typically attacks the joints of the knees, ankles and/or toes, but can also affect skin and muscles. Because Johns’s immune system had been weakened during his eating disorder, and due to his susceptible blood tissue type and high stress levels brought on by the album sessions, reactive arthritis hit him hard and fast.
There was, however, one highlight from their stay in LA. Johns, Bottrill, engineer Matt Lovell and Natalie Imbruglia had a chance meeting with U2’s Bono in a club, and he invited them back to his suite at the Chateau Marmont, LA’s premier rock and roll hotel. (This was the same site where the Red Hot Chili Peppers had recorded much of their Californication album, and John Belushi died of a massive drug overdose.) Bono asked what they were doing in town. Reluctantly, fearing that they’d be seen as abusing his hospitality, the Silverchair crew handed him a tape of the Diorama track ‘Luv Your Life’, which he then proceeded to play over and over again, to the increasing chagrin of his other guests, No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani and Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan, who, of course, had their own reasons for being in the company of the man from U2. Bono loved the song, later declaring: ‘Swim to Australia to hear it if you have to.’ His statement, ironically, would prove to be more accurate than even he could have imagined, given the album’s rocky ride in North America. © Jeff Apter 2006