Unmasking the ‘creatively-charged chameleon’ that is Daniel Johns
He is arguably one of the country’s best musical prodigies. But who is the real Daniel Johns? Author Jeff Apter set out to find out, revealing all in his latest book, The Book of Daniel: From Silverchair to DREAMS.
So who is the real Daniel Johns? Like all great, slightly crazy artists, he’s a shape shifter, a complicated, driven, frequently brilliant guy who refuses to stand still creatively.
Daniel’s very human, too.
Once too often of late he’s been snapped looking not-so-elegantly wasted; he’s even needed at least one trip to the ER to be patched up after a lively night.
Hey, plenty of us have done that, but none of us is Daniel Johns, artiste/public figure/wealthy muso. Perhaps he’s just making up for all the teenage years he spent living in the cocoon that was Silverchair.
So, let me break this down.
One Daniel Johns I met was the guy in 2002 suffering the effects of chronic reactive arthritis, a young guy trapped in a broken body.
I — insensitive clod that I am sometimes — rang the doorbell of his Merewether home for our scheduled interview and stood there impatiently, cursing under my breath about the rudeness of rock stars.
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What I should have been realised was that it was taking a long, painful time for Daniel, who needed a cane to walk, to cross the floor of his stylish crib and answer my ring. As we spoke that afternoon, looking out from his rock-star eyrie down over his native ‘Newie’ (Newcastle), I felt genuine concern for the man — child — he wasn’t yet 21 — who’d lived much of the last half-dozen years in public. He was in a bad way.
Then there was the emotionally fragile Daniel Johns. While working at Rolling Stone, I snaffled the prized gig of charting the evolution of Silverchair’s Diorama album, in the studio and elsewhere.
I spent time with Daniel and his bandmates, Chris Joannou and Ben Gillies, over a period of months in Sydney, Newcastle and Los Angeles. I found Daniel friendly but also a tad wary; sometimes he could be distant, withdrawn, not willing to give too much away.
He wasn’t in great psychological shape.
In the background, trouble was brewing with his American record label; they’d part ways after Diorama.
There was also the rock-star Daniel, a bright blazing whirlwind of onstage charisma and energy — and oft-overlooked wit. Again, I saw this Daniel during the Diorama period; he and the band were playing a homecoming gig in April 2003, at Newcastle’s stately Civic Theatre. One loud power chord away was Jewells Tavern, the venue where in June 1994 the Silverchair odyssey began.
Newcastle was the Silver-three’s turf; they’d all been raised there and retained strong ties to the working-class city (bassist Joannou opened a venue there named The Edwards, which unfortunately burned down earlier this year).
Daniel Johns circa 2003 was a wild man; shirtless, his pants hanging low on his barely-there hips as he cheekily humped the onstage speakers.
He looked great, lean and sinewy, primal even, his body a mass of tatts. Daniel owned the stage. I did a double take: this was the guy who only recently had a cane and a limp and a broken body?
Afterwards, in the cramped and humid backstage green room, as friends, parents and then band partners Natalie Imbruglia and Sarah McLeod drifted in and out of the conversation, Daniel Johns was a most gracious and affable host, someone who made sure your glass was full and that proper introductions had been made all round.
A lovely young man, as my dear mum would say. With pierced nipples.
Project forward a dozen years and a vastly different Johns emerged, dressed in designer white, sporting more bling than Beyonce, crooning the sexy, futuristic love songs from his album Talk. How could this possibly be the same person who wore grungy flannel and growled ‘fat boy / wait until tomorrow’ like he wanted to rip out someone’s heart?
So which of these was the real Daniel Johns?
Or were they simply different parts of the man, someone with so many sides he might well be round? I get the sense Daniel likes to keep at least a little of himself off the record — and off the stage, too, because he’s refused to tour in the wake of Silverchair’s ‘indefinite hiatus’ which began in 2011.
But since then virtually everything he’s done has been about evolution: from Talk to Atlas, the epic orchestrated piece he composed for Qantas, or his various low-key cameos with dance-groove acts 360, Zhu and What So Not, no two projects have been alike.
And, of course, there’s his collaboration with Empire of the Sun’s Luke Steele in the electro-rock outfit called DREAMS, who’ve recently, finally, released their debut album, No One Defeats Us.
It’s taken more than a decade for the pair to put out some music, in part because their first recordings, made way back when Daniel was living in London with Natalie Imbruglia, were lost, the end result of a stoned solidarity pact between the two.
The idea of ‘let’s bury the tapes’ probably seemed great in the moment, but not so terrific when they tried to retrace their steps (and their music) the next day.
It’d be tempting to say that all his recent dabbling is a reaction to being ‘freed’ from Silverchair, but that’s not necessarily true. Even while leading the band, Johns threw himself into such projects as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rock (with Paul Mac) and the Dissociatives (with Mac and Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes from the Presets), making vastly different music to Silverchair.
He’s always been restless, exploding with ideas.
So where to next for Daniel Johns? Judging by the wildly varied music he’s released of late, it’s impossible to guess — the only genres he seems to have skipped are reggae and disco, so don’t count those out.
But you can definitely forget about a Silverchair reunion: the band, and at least one of its members, according to recent reports, are most definitely in his past.
As is his former wife Imbruglia, who recently admitted that they haven’t spoken for years.
One thing I can say for sure is that Daniel Johns is a puzzling, challenging, creatively charged chameleon — the leap from 1994’s raw Frogstomp to 2015’s sophisticated Talk and beyond makes my head spin — who for me has been the standout figure in my 30 years of writing about music and musicians.
Jeff Apter’s latest book is The Book of Daniel: From Silverchair to DREAMS (published by Allen & Unwin)
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