Former Silverchair front man and current lone wolf Daniel Johns is about to release his debut solo album, which means that he’s currently in the midst of the obligatory round of press interviews to promote it.
During one such recent interview, with Fairfax‘s Joel Meares, the elusive singer opened up about the end of Silverchair, after which he shut himself away, needing to take four years to just “disappear” in the wake of the band’s dissolution.
Daniel, Chris Joannou and Ben Gillies formed Silverchair when they were just three 12-year-old Newcastle boys, and at the time they announced their hiatus in 2011, had spent their whole adult lives in the band.
After putting the band into “indefinite hibernation”, Johns retreated to his ocean-side home at Merewether, south of Newcastle – which he describes as a “’70s porn palace” out of Boogie Nights – closed the blinds, and stayed there.
“I just wanted to not be in the industry and not be famous and not have anything to do with it,” he said. “I felt like I was losing who I was. I was becoming the lead singer of Silverchair more than I wanted to be.”
Though he hasn’t surfed since his teens, Johns said that he would still check the surf conditions obsessively every morning, looking out at them with his binoculars.
A shar-pei-whippet cross named Gia – described by Johns as a “really weird girl” kept him company throughout much of this time, as did Apple TV, where he watched movies with the blinds closed.
Johns was also excited to discover that supermarkets in the area did online delivery. “It was like, ‘Man, I don’t have to leave! It’s going to be genius – I’ll just sit at home with the puppy dog!’” he said.
“It wasn’t like I was sitting in my dressing gown, shaking, with a cigarette,” he clarified, “but I wasn’t in a very social stage. Those first four years of hiding were more about just shutting everything out.”
Last week, Johns was briefly hospitalised after a fall outside a Sydney bar; in February of this year, the singer was disqualified from driving for three months after he blew a blood alcohol reading of 0.126 near his Newcastle home.
Johns has ruled out a Silverchair reunion happening at any time in the near future, saying he wouldn’t get the band back together for “a million bucks.” His first solo effort, Talk, is out May 22.
Photo: Mark Metcalfe via Getty Images
