Daniel Johns’ body started ‘eating itself’ after record label shelved Silverchair’s bold Diorama album

Silverchair’s frontman Daniel Johns has paid a horrible price for his fame, which left him in once locked inside a hotel room.

Daniel Johns suspects the stress he suffered after his American record label rejected Silverchair’s ambitious 2002 orchestral rock record Diorama triggered a crippling and rare auto-immune condition which left him bedridden for months.

In a new Who Is Daniel Johns? podcast episode, Johns says he remembers Atlantic Records “locking me in a hotel room” and demanding a “rock single”.

When the then 22-year-old refused, the album was shelved in the US. It was finally given an American release months after it topped the Australian charts.

Johns could barely play when Silverchair performed at the 2002 ARIA Awards. Picture: NCA.

The band would end the year on a high, with Diorama – now acclaimed by critics as Silverchair’s finest album – and its single The Greatest View picking up five trophies.

That bold record was ahead of its time in the early 2000s pop era, when bands such as Creed and Limp Bizkit held sway on the rock charts and the American gatekeepers told Johns his “masterpiece” wouldn’t work.

“That really made me angry and it really upset me to the point where my body started eating itself,” he said.

“I woke up in the studio and my knee was twice the size and I thought, ‘Something’s up, maybe I’d just sprained it in my sleep’. And then it spread all through my body.

“I looked like an alien, everything was swollen and weird. I couldn’t walk at all, I couldn’t have a shower because the pressure from the water would make me scream.”

Daniel Johns’ then-girlfriend Natalie Imbruglia helped to care for him while he battled an auto-immune disease. Picture: NCA.

Johns tried to continue with the touring and promotional duties to launch the record in Australia but was unable to play guitar or sing properly, and everything was cancelled.

“This was the record I thought all of my life was leading up to,” he told Spotify interviewer Kaitlyn Sawrey. “And then I was sleeping in my sister’s childhood bed and having to piss in a wee bucket because I couldn’t move and everyone was angry at me for some reason.”

Diorama was a dramatic reinvention for Silverchair, which had surfed to the crest of the global alternative rock wave with its debut record, Frogstomp, in 1995.

Silverchair arriving the 2002 ARIA Awards. Picture: NCA.

It was influenced by Johns’ desire to experiment with piano after years of writing on guitar and his then-romance with future wife Natalie Imbruglia.

The singer-actor gives an intriguing insight into Johns’ creative “genius” in the new episode.

“I remember he would go to sleep at night and start tapping his third eye and talking in another language,” Imbruglia said.

“And I’m like, ‘What the? What is going on?’ And then he’d wake up and he’d have a horn part in his head.

“And I’m like, ‘Dude, who are you communicating with on the other side? This is trippy.’”

The podcast, which has been at No. 1 on the Spotify charts since its release two weeks ago, also reveals Johns’ love of a good prank.

Johns could play guitar … and prank like a rock star. Picture: NCA.

When Silverchair was offered its first record deal when he was just 14, he had a very special request.

His parents had made a deal with him they would divert the household budget set aside for a new dishwasher for a guitar amp on the condition he washed the dishes every night for a year.

“The first record contract I ever got, (I asked) ‘Can we please put it in the contract that my parents get a dishwasher so I don’t have to do this f--king shit anymore?’” he said.

“And they did it.”

Who Is Daniel Johns? is on Spotify.