Too Much of Not Enough: A Silverchair Podcast

That’s right, I’m breaking format! 

This episode is a bonus episode, where I speak to Kristen S. He, an award-winning music writer and one half of the pop duo Elle. She's always got a really interesting take on things and we had a great, wide-ranging talk about Silverchair that touched on their writing process, their perception overseas, their place in the culture and keeping their music alive into the 2020s. I really...

The difficult second album. Released February 3 1997, Freak Show hit number 1 on the ARIA charts and the first three singles were all in the top 10. It went double platinum in Australia and gold in the US, where it peaked at number 12 on the Billboard 200 (before slipping quickly). Was it the sophomore slump or an underrated work by a quickly maturing band?

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Recorded over nine days in late 94-early 95, Frogstomp saw a band raring to go and prove themselves as more than a one-EP wonder. Released March 27, 1995, Frogstomp hit number one on the ARIA and NZ charts, it was a top 10 hit on the US Billboard 200, the first Australian band to hit the top 10 in the US since INXS. Off the back of Frogstomp, Silverchair did a 46-date world tour, opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and then the R...

It’s a tale as old a time: a band of 15-year-olds enter a battle of bands competition run by a TV show and a radio station. They win the competition and their prize is to record a four-song EP. That EP spends six weeks at the top of the charts, the band gets signed to Sony Records and becomes one of the biggest bands Australia has ever seen. Well, that’s the story if you’re Silverchair. 

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Don’t get excited (please!). Just a little update to let everyone know I might be re-uploading old episodes. I’ve noticed people still download the show regularly, so I thought if they came up organically in your feeds, that might be more helpful than having to dig into the archive. (Also I just realised it's been 5 years since this the first episode of the podcast went live, so thanks to everyone who listened!)

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In this episode, we’re going all the way back to 1995 to talk about Silverchair’s first true single from their debut album Frogstomp (if you’re Australian, anyway). I wanted to take a deeper look at Pure Massacre from a songwriting perspective, from a performance and production perspective and also see if we could find hints of the later Silverchair in this early track. 

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Don’t get too excited but I’ve just uploaded a mini-episode that’s essentially a repost of the Tuna in the Brine section from the first Diorama episode. Those episodes were really long and I noticed fewer people listened to the second one so I figure maybe some people didn’t finish the first one either — but it just so happens that’s where the Tuna in the Brine stuff was. Anyway, if you happened to not make it to the end of that ep...

In this episode, I speak to someone without whom you probably would never have heard of the band Silverchair. Not only did he essentially discover them and, in his role as a Sony A&R sign the band to Murmur, he also not long after became their manager and mentor and navigated their career basically from start to finish.

His John Watson Management company currently manages some of the biggest names in Australian music, such as Mi...

Wait, what is this episode? I’m glad you asked. I’ve decided to go back and delve a bit deeper into some of the older songs and give them the treatment I would have given them had they appeared on one of the later albums. This episode I’ll be covering Abuse Me, the second single released from Silverchair’s second album Freak Show (unless you were in North America, where it was the first single). It entered the ARIA chart April 6, 1...

Young Modern got great reviews at home in Australia but, by now, even the good reviews overseas failed to set the world on fire. An early promotional tour of the US in mid-2007, where they gritted their teeth on commercial radio and TV Morning Shows, as well as perform for the late-night programs proved not to be the silver bullet the band might have hoped. Stylistically, Young Modern might have pointed the way forward for Silverch...

Released March 31, 2007, Young Modern debuted at number one on the ARIA chart, eventually going three-times platinum in Australia. The album also won six ARIAs and its lead single, Straight Lines, placed second on the Triple J’s Hottest 100. For all the acclaim though, it was another departure in sound for the band and, for some fans, it remains controversial to this day. Let’s explore. 

 
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The long-fabled mailbag and FAQ episode has arrived. In this episode, I answer your questions and share my thoughts on a lot of different things, including but not limited to: what happens when I run out of Silverchair albums, why I think Silverchair need a legacy web presence, my favourite music for each year Silverchair released an album, whether I think Silverchair ever made a musical misstep and even some non-Silverchair relate...

In this episode, I welcome another very special guest. He’s the guitarist from multi-platinum selling band Good Charlotte and, as it happens, he’s also a MASSIVE fan of Silverchair. It’s the one and only Billy Martin! 

I had a really fun chat with Billy, talking about how Silverchair influenced him musically, the multiple times he met them and hung out, and also about the state of rock music in 2020. If you want to hear two grown me...

Daniel Johns and Paul Mac’s The Dissociatives was largely recorded in a two-week period over the English summer, where Daniel was living with his fiancée Natalie Imbruglia. The idea behind the songs that would become the Dissociatives project was to create a new band with a different set of rules, one that sounded nothing like what either of them had done before. The Dissociatives album came out April 5, 2004 in Australia, debuted ...

In this episode, I welcome a very, very, very VERY special guest. And I know I say that a lot and it’s always true. But this time, I’ll be talking to Ben Gillies. That’s right, the drummer from the band we’re all here to celebrate! The co-writer of Tomorrow! The guy who rammed his head into a bass drum at the 1995 ARIA awards! Bloody Ben Gillies!

Among other things, we talked about Ben’s songwriting process, some favourite memories ...

In this episode, I welcome a very, very special guest. David Bottrill is a legendary producer, mixer and engineer who has worked with everyone from Peter Gabriel and Rush to Tool, Dream Theater and Coheed and Cambria. He’s won three Grammys and an ARIA. He is also the producer of the one and only Diorama by Silverchair, as well as the mixer of Young Modern.
 
David Bottrill’s website is www.davidbottrill.com and is on Inst...

This episode is the conclusion to our two-parter on Silverchair’s fourth album Diorama. 

Diorama was released March 31, 2002 in Australia and debuted at number one on the ARIA chart, the band’s fourth straight album to do so. It eventually went triple platinum in Australia and won five ARIA awards. Diorama is a work of genius but it came at a cost to the band, especially Daniel Johns. But time has been kind to Diorama. Almost two de...

Designed to capture a positive new energy and explore a broad spectrum of emotion, 2002’s Diorama was an album that featured some of the most ambitious songs of the band’s career. Although it went triple platinum in Australia and won five ARIA awards, the album was never as successful as it should have been. The band was unable to tour the album due to Daniel developing reactive arthritis, stagnating their momentum overseas. Despit...

This episode is a VERY special guest episode, where I speak to the one and only Nick Launay, the producer behind Silverchair’s Freak Show, Neon Ballroom and Young Modern. Not only that, Nick has worked with some of the greatest artists in history, working with everyone from Nick Cave and Kate Bush to Arcade Fire and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. We had a free-flowing talk about his time with Silverchair and shared some classic stories.