article and photos by Christine Natanael
LINKS:
When
you talk about successful bands from “Down Under”, (that’s
Australia for all those of you clueless ones), there’s really only
a few really big names. You’ve got AC/DC, who had three number one
albums there in their homeland; Crowded House, who also had a respectable
three number one’s; and the legendary Midnight Oil, who clocked
in with a none-too-shabby count of four number one albums. Then you’ve
got this band of young upstarts, all still under the age of 30, called
Silverchair, who’ve smoked them all with their tally of five number
one albums—albums that sparkle and shine with vast brilliance and
difference like their, 1995 debut, frogstomp, with it’s
juggernaut alterni-grunge single “Tomorrow”; their expanding
sophomore release, Freakshow, with its three singles, “Freak”,
“Abuse Me”, and “Cemetary”; the darkly glittering
and haunting fusion of heavy rock and orchestral flourishes, on their
critically-acclaimed third outing, Neon Ballroom, with its heavy-weight
tracks “Miss You Love”, “Emotion Sickness”, and
the spine-shivering “Ana’s Song (Open Fire)”; and their
ever-ambitious album Diorama, which saw the boys make use of
legendary Beach Boys/U2 collaborator Van Dyke Parks on the track “Luv
Your Life” (as well as two others), and which also yielded the singles
“The Greatest View” and “Without You”. And it
looks like the Silverchair guys, guitarist/vocalist Daniel Johns, bassist
Chris Joannou, and drummer Ben Gillies are pretty much just getting into
the groove of things by the looks of the sales figures on their newest
release, titled simply, Young Modern.
After their recent gig at Roseland Ballroom in NYC, I got to have a chat
with drummer Ben Gillies about their career trajectory, the new album,
and a legends dinner party. Read on to find out just what I mean.
BEN GILLIES: Fine, thanks. How are you?
CN: I’m wonderful. How was the rest of the after party?
BG: It was pretty cool. We tried to wrap it up reasonably early because we were all pretty tired and worn out after all the touring, and particularly all the stuff in the last week with the album coming out. So, it’s been pretty crazy. So, you know, we tried to—we’re trying to be well-behaved over the last couple of weeks, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. But you know, it’s all good.
CN: Right. Everyone wants to have a really good party experience with you because you’re there for the first time in forever, but they don’t realize that that’s an every night thing for you.
BG: Yeah. Well, it’s the same for us, as well.
You know, you come off stage, particularly if you have a good show, and
your adrenaline’s pumping and everyone’s—we’re
excited and if people really like the show, they get excited as well,
and sometimes it can be hard to come off stage and just go, “Okay,
I’m gonna have a shower and just go to bed.” (laughs)
CN: No, it doesn’t happen that way.
BG: No, it doesn’t. Sometimes you have one or two beers and you’re just too tempted and you have to rip in.
CN: But you have the advantage here in America because our beer is really weak compared to yours.
BG: I actually don’t know if it is. Mind you, I think on our rider the beer that we get is actually Heineken. We get Heineken usually anywhere in the world because we find that’s pretty much the standard beer that everybody likes and it’s the same percentage everywhere, and it just works.
CN: So, how are you different now than you were when you first came out? How do you think you have changed as to the person and musician you were then, as to who you are now, and how do you think you’re grown?
BG: Oh, I don’t know. I’ve probably calmed down a little bit, but there’s times when I still go pretty nuts. I think when we first started, when we were 14 and 15 and 16, anyone in their mid to late teens, you’re at that time in your life when you think you’re pretty invincible. We just happened to be in a band that was pretty successful and toured around the world. So you know, the combination of the two, like, it made me go pretty crazy at that stage, but I guess just getting a little bit older and having gone through that and had more experience, taught me to calm down a little bit. You know when to let your hair down and when to kick back.
CN: Well, you went through it at an age that is so much younger than the average musician, like a lot of them are 19, maybe 22, when they hit that peak, and you did it at such a younger age, that’s why I was asking. It’s such a formative age.
BG: Yeah, I mean, even at 27, we’re still considered a pretty young band, really, in the industry. I mean, it’s a pretty weird experience, but I think the pros far outweigh the cons, having a band that’s so successful at a young age. It just gives you opportunities that you wouldn’t normally have at that kind of age, and it also, it almost pushes you to—I don’t know, it pushes you to become a better band really quickly, that kind of being at a pretty high level from the start. I think it definitely helps you become a better band at the age that we are now. You’ve got more of a chance to grow musically and push yourself musically. If you weren’t thrust into that position, you may not have been that way inclined to kind of push yourself far musically, so, I think it’s a good thing.
CN: Well, musically, you do everything. You play a lot of different instruments. You don’t play just drums. In Tambalane you do guitar and other things too.
BG: Yeah. I think most musicians, when they get to a particular point, they can usually dabble on a few other instruments other than their own. I mean, you know, most professional musicians, anyway, can. Maybe not guys that haven’t been defining their skills, but most professional musicians that I’ve seen can jump on a couple of other instruments from their main instrument and kind of get away with it for a certain extent.
CN: Right. So, the new album is just so dynamically different from the stuff you did when you were a child, do you sometimes wake up in the morning and have to pinch yourself over how far you’ve come and how much your life has changed?
BG: You know, I think it’s more of a—I think that those first, and particularly that uh, you know, finishing Diorama, like, it just felt like such a whirlwind. Like, we had had a couple of breaks between albums, and there were definitely times when we weren’t doing band stuff, but it just almost feels like up to that point, after Diorama, Silverchair had engulfed our lives. It was the only thing that we had every really done, and I think after Diorama when we started doing other projects and had a bit of time off and a bit of time to look back and get a bit of clarity on what we’d actually achieved and what we’d kind of done in that time and, you know, put out four albums and I don’t know, I guess I had achieved a lot for the age that we were. At that point, I guess it did kind of amaze me a bit that we had done so much in such a short amount of time, and we were only about 23 at that stage. I don’t really have to wake up and pinch myself, but it really does amaze me that we’ve done what we’ve done and achieved everything that we’ve achieved and remained still, I think, reasonably sane. That may or may not be true, but (laughs) I don’t know, you may have to ask somebody else that.
CN: Don’t ask me, I’m quite insane. I’m extremely mad. (laughs) So, who is Ben the person when he’s not in Silverchair? What is he doing in-between records?
BG: Oh, I
don’t know. I think, uh, for all of us, anyway, and for me as well,
when you are in your teens, you’re not really thinking about what
are you gonna do. Well, you are thinking about what you’re gonna
do for the rest of your life, but you’re also worried about when
the next party is and all that. That’s around the same time we had
all the band stuff, and I don’t know, as I’ve gotten older,
I think, God, you just realize more and more and more that music is, that’s
your number one love and that’s what I always seem to be doing.
CN: Pretty useless for anything else, are ya?
BG: Yep.
CN: Well, you’re in the right profession, then.
BG: Yeah,
no definitely. I love what I do, and I think we all do. I think that’s
the reason we’ve had such longevity, but geez… I guess I’m
like a lot of people when I’m not—I don’t really see
music as a job, so the more I get to do it, it’s fantastic, you
know? Like, we’ve been really busy at the moment, doing a lot of
press and playing shows, and sometimes you’re tired and sometimes
you’re grumpy, but every day I try and remind myself that, fuck,
we’re all so lucky to be here and I’m doing something that
I love. When I’m not doing music, or even the side project that
I have, you know, I kind of came out of Silverchair in the big picture
after Diorama, I went straight into this other band, pretty much.
But yeah, I’m just doing, constantly, music. But I’m kind
of like most people I guess, I enjoy hanging out with friends, hanging
out with my lady, or going to nice restaurants, going on holiday, travel,
or I don’t know. I guess when we’re not busy doing music,
I guess I just like to relax, you know, take as much time as I can, because
when it’s on, it’s bloody on. And it seems to be on a lot,
so you’ve just got to take those opportunities to relax and go surfing,
I like a bit of cooking.
BG: Yeah, I still do a bit of surfing, cooking, hanging out with friends, drinking…
CN: What’s your favorite dish? What do you cook the best? Like, if I were coming over, what would you cook to impress me?
BG: I don’t know. I kind of, uh, occasionally I’ll just kind of wing it and go for it, but if I want something really, really special, usually I’ll go for a recipe and make a couple of additions to it, or whatever. I do a pretty mean roast pumpkin and pea risotto, which is pretty crazy.
CN: I love to cook, so I’ll go toe to toe with you any day. (both laugh) It’s definitely relaxing. I can see why you would enjoy it.
BG: Yeah. I don’t have much time to do it
CN: Too bad you can’t take a grill with you in the bay of the tour bus.
BG: That’s a good idea, but it’s one of those things that if we got it, we'd use it once or twice and put it in there, and we’d probably never see it again… (laughs)
CN: So let me ask you, what do you think is the boldest song on the new album in terms of creative and recording process and why?
BG: You’ve probably already got an idea of what I’m going to say. Either, “If You Keep Losing Sleep” or “Those Thieving Birds (Part1)” and all that stuff [full song title: “Those Thieving Birds (Part 1)/Strange Behaviour/Those Thieving Birds (Part 2)”--ed.]. I think that either one of those would be the most, the boldest statements on there, like, you know, from the creative point of view and the production point of view. They both, um, I think they’re both very, very ambitious creatively and musically, and as far as instrumentation goes as well, it’s pretty ambitious.
CN: Tell me about it. Get in-depth with me. How long did you go into the studio and—you brought in Paul, Daniel was doing his thing—Paul and Daniel were already working together with The Disassociatives, right?
BG: Yeah, yeah, Paul and Dan had done some stuff together and Paul had spent a lot of time in the studio. He played with us on all the rhythm tracks, you know?
CN: Right.
BG: And this record was the first time that we kept all the original rhythm tracks. We were so adamant from the start, you know, like, we don’t want to just record the drums and then just kind of replace every instrument. We want to keep every single instrument on that first tape, whatever tape we decide on, we want to keep that original performance with all of us together, because, you know, it just captures, it just captures, I don’t know, whatever that magic is. It’s like when you play live, and it’s like the heavens open up, it’s almost religious. And that’s the hardest thing to try to capture and put on tape. And because we had never done it before, I mean, we had always played live, but then, we’d take away the guitar or the bass and then kind of replace it with the sound that we ended up using, but I kind of think it maybe lost a bit of something. But we were really very adamant on this album that’s what we wanted to do [keep the original tracks]. But on “Those Thieving Birds” we recorded each section, like, we recorded the “Thieving Birds” and “Strange Behaviour” all separately. We didn’t play it through as one song. We did a lot of like, tape chopping. We’d record each section like, a half a dozen times and then just pick the best. And usually we all knew which one felt the best, and everything like that, but then we’d kind of cut it up and we’d just splice the tape together.
CN: Oh, the old-fashioned analog splicing! That’s like what I learned in audio engineering…
BG: Yeah, and it wasn’t like splicing the tape together with um, to get the best parts of the song, it was literally like, “Okay, this section’s gonna go from here to this section.” We didn’t want to play it through. We could have played it through, but we thought, just to get a really drastic kind of change, we thought, “Let’s just play it all differently then chop it all together.”
CN: In a way, it’s kind of like the way an orchestra records when they do movements.
BG: Yeah. It was really challenging as well, because you’d hear the first section and then you go, “Okay, I’ve got to try to play this next one so it sounds and feels natural and the segue into it doesn’t feel really jerky and kind of unnatural, so it was really challenging. And then, I think, because of the way we recorded that, when it comes to Van Dyke Parks doing his stuff on it, it was really challenging as well, knowing, because there was no couching for this or signposts for the orchestration where they needed to play, so, it definitely was probably one of the most challenging things we’ve ever done.
CN: And he [Van Dyke Parks] had people in Prague do it, right?
BG: Yeah.
CN: That seems to be pretty popular. That orchestra in Prague gets a real workout, I tell ya.
BG: Well, apparently, that’s one of the cheapest places to do it.
CN: They work on a lot of records.
BG: Yeah, it’s really cheap there to do orchestration. I think it’s, um, you can have an 80-piece orchestra and it’s like half the price of what it would cost in L.A., you know? There’s no way you would get 80-piece. You’re maybe talking 30-piece… And although we had an 80-piece orchestra, we didn’t use all those parts. Like, we had to go through and there was just so much, it was ridiculous. I think at one stage, there was like, 200. We thought we may have had some sort of Guinness Record because there was actually 200 tracks at one stage. As soon as the song came in at 200 tracks or something crazy, Dan actually started wading through it and kind of pulling out some of the unnecessary stuff and kept the really integral lines and so, yeah, that’s most definitely probably not only the most challenging on this record, but probably the most challenging to date, of our career.
CN: And, how does the writing process work with you guys these days?
BG: Well, you know Dan’s the primary songwriter in the band.
CN: How and what do you guys add to that, is what I’m asking.
BG: It’s pretty open for suggestion, you know? Like, Dan might come in with four kinds of finished songs and we simply just kind of play and put our...christen our good luck stars, inevitably, when we play on it, it’s gonna give it a whole new flavor. A lot of the times when we play on songs, you know, it might have been like a more chilled-out song and once we play on it, it becomes more of a mid-tempo kind of rock-ier tune. Or sometimes Dan comes in with two sections, like a verse and a chorus in middle A and we just jam, sit and jam and see where it takes us. There’s a lot of different ways we kind of go about it. Some songs—it’s always up for different ideas. I guess it depends on what the song needs, really. The good thing with Dan is he’s really open to suggestions to make the song better, you know? We’re not all ego like, “I want a songwriter credit.” There’s no egos involved because we’ve known each other for so long, and we’ve been doing it for so long and everybody’s goal is to make the songs as good as they can be, so. We’re kind of all headed in the same direction, so it makes things really easy. You know Dan’s a great songwriter and once we kind of get together and start jamming and stuff, it all just feels really natural and easy. I wouldn’t say easy, actually, we’ve still got to work at it, but…
CN: It is still “work” on some level, yeah. It’s like I enjoy and love interviewing bands and photographing bands, but it is still work when I have to get back to the house and type it.
BG: Yeah, there’s always gonna be an element of “work” in whatever you do. But you’ve still got to try to make it a little bit fun.
CN: Yeah. Now, I asked you about the boldness as far as creativity and recording process, but which of Daniel’s songs do you think is the boldest in terms of emotional and lyrical content?
BG: On the new record?
CN: Yeah.
BG: Hang on. Let me look in my iPod. I can’t remember them off the top of my head.
CN: You only think in drum beats and not lyrics?
BG: No, I think in lyrics, but my head’s a bit of a mashed potato this morning, so…I’d have to say “Thieving Birds” again. All around, that’s probably, you know.
CN: Why?
BG: Well, lyrically, if you want to go the boldest, you could arguably say “Straight Lines” as well. I mean, just to come out—half of Dan’s lyrics, I don’t really know what they mean, and to be honest with you, I’m not sure if he really knows what they mean, but “Straight Lines” is probably one of the most positive and filled with hope the most out of any song that we’ve done in the past. I think Dan, the way he sings that song and the way he delivers it, it’s like he’s a little bit unsure or like he’s a little bit on the edge. A lot of it’s in the delivery as well, but like I said, I’m not the biggest person on lyrics. Obviously, lyrics and melody are really important. It’s all really important, everything, any part of a song is important, but lyrics aren’t my forte.
CN: I believe the delivery on that is much more positive than a lot of the previous lyrics. It’s almost like he’s come out the far end of a tunnel and is seeing the light and the air there, because he’s been through these ordeals with his physical conditions, physical conditions which also wear on the mental and the emotional, so, to actually come out the other end and be positive is a great accomplishment. That song is really positive.
BG: Yeah. The lyrics are like, “shedding your skin,” or something like that…
CN: Yeah, it’s a really cool song. Let’s see. Now I’m going to get into the intriguing questions. I’m gonna start picking your brain—the painful questions. What is your earliest memory of music, like a situation or a song you remember?
BG: It’s my dad showing me a song called the “Baby Elephant Walk”.
CN: The “Baby Elephant Walk”, I’m not familiar with that one. Can you explain to me what it is?
BG: It’s all instrumental. It was on a 45 or whatever those things were called, and it was just like this little instrumental thing. It was pretty bizarre.
CN: Was it like, jazz or something? [Gillies is actually referring to the tune written in 1961 by composer Henry Mancini for the 1962 release of the film Hatari!, which I knew, at the time of this interview, only by its tune, and not by name. The tune is commonly heard throughout Philadelphia Phillies games in Citizens Bank Park, and is heard on Nickelodeon’s show The Angry Beavers in a sped-up version during the show’s end credits. It has also been used in The Simpsons…so enjoy this bastardized youtube Simpsons moment if you’re unfamiliar: by clicking here --ed.]
BG: I can’t remember. It kind of reminded me a little bit of, you know the really kind of tripped out acid-y bit in Dumbo?
CN: Yeah.
BG: We were over at a friend’s house and they’ve got a couple kids and they had Dumbo on in the background and I remember it got to the trippy bit with all that and we were just watching it going, “Fucking hell! This is a kid’s movie?”
CN: Yeah…and it’s really tripped out when he sees the pink elephants and shit.
BG: It’s sort of like LSD. It’s crazy. But yeah, I haven’t heard that song in years, it must be, but it kind of reminds me of the perception of that movie, kind of. It’s kind of a little bit ‘70s/tripped out, I don’t know, weird music.
CN: When you decided to do music as more than a hobby, how did your family react?
BG: Uh, I don’t know. Actually, the same, as they’ve always been really supportive. And I don’t think there was ever really a point where we consciously said, “We’re no longer doing music as a hobby.” It all happened so quickly, and um, we never really made that decision.
CN: I mean, because, obviously, you were young enough where you had to have people drive you around, still, when you were doing these big shows. You didn’t really have a driver’s license at 14.
BG: Yeah, they had to drive us around, and they had
to chaperone us on tour for a while. A lot of the venues we weren’t
allowed in because we were underage, and so yeah—they were great
at the beginning. They really supported everything we did, and obviously,
at 14, a lot of the bigger financial decisions, they were there to help
us as well. They’ve been great.
CN: Do you have a favorite philosopher?
BG: No, not really.
CN: Do you read anything at all; are you a big reader?
BG: No, I’m not, really. I’d like to be. I’ve never really found anything that, that really inspires me, so maybe one day when I do I’ll become more interested. But I’ve just got to make more time, I guess.
CN: You’re like, “Hey, I’m a drummer. I hit things. That’s what I do.”
BG: Yeah.
CN: Okay. What is your greatest fear?
BG: My greatest fear? Oh geez, I don’t know, probably like, losing the ability to use one of my limbs, or like, losing my hearing or something. That would be pretty fucked up. But Rick Allen from Def Leppard is doing all right, so maybe the limb thing is not all that bad.
CN: Yeah, right? Who are your musical influences are far as drummers?
BG: John Bonham and, I don’t know, probably a little bit of Ringo, this guy called, he’s not a huge influence, he’s probably more James Brown, but I really like the drummer who drummed for him called John Starks.
CN: Which of your musical influences would you most like to meet, or have met, if they are deceased, and why?
BG: I don’t know, I guess—I don’t know. There’s so many I would like to meet, but they are mainly deceased. The obvious answer is that it would be friggin’ cool to meet John Lennon. Like, I’m sure that’s what everyone says, but, you know, it would be. He was a pretty amazing guy, an icon, and an amazing musician. I don’t know, maybe Jimi Hendrix. He’d be pretty darn cool to meet. You know, John Bonham as well. I reckon I’d probably sit down and chat to John Bonham for bloody, you know, for hours. I don’t know. That’s such a hard question. There isn’t any one person that I’d want to meet more than any one. I wouldn’t want to meet John Lennon more than I’d want to meet John Bonham, you know, so I can’t really just give you one person.
CN: Ah, but wouldn’t it be great to have a dinner party and cook for all of them?
BG: There you go. A dinner party would be perfect. Then you can invite them all!
CN: What’s in favored rotation in your iPod at the moment, and why?
BG: It’s always forever changing, but at the moment I have, it’s probably a band thing as well, it’s in the band room before we go onstage. Tradition is that we actually do play James Brown just before we go onstage to get our groove on. We’ve been playing a record backstage by a band called Whitey. I think it may be a one-man-band, like, one guy, he plays all the instruments. It’s kind of kind of dance-y stuff, but it’s all instruments, like, all the drums are real, and all the stuff is real, and I think he may actually play it. But yeah, it’s really cool. [ click here for myspace page] It’s definitely been on high rotation. Even when I’m not in the band I’ll occasionaly I put on my iPod and listen to it, but, I think that part of the beauty of the album is that. I don’t know why I tend to listen to the same thing over and over, you’ll be scrolling down your artists and you’ll see stuff you haven’t listened to in ages and pop Whitey on. Actually I’ve been listening to a lot of the new Amy Winehouse lately.
CN: Yeah, that was playing right before you guys went on, so I guess we were getting to listen to what you guys were listening to in the band room.
BG: Yeah, a little bit, yeah. That’s our cue. Every night before we go on we know that “Rehab” is gonna come on and that’s when we know that we’ve got to get ready.
CN: What disciplines other than music inspire you?
BG: I guess anything to do with, like, music is an art form and I think any kind of art is pretty inspired. I think there’s a lot of cross-pollination, with all the arts, I think, so any art, really. Obviously you’re going to see stuff that you’re gonna get really excited about. And I think Dan actually got really into the Dali stuff during Diorama. I really didn’t know about Dali, but now I really love his stuff and I think it’s amazing. Last time we were in NY, Christian, myself and Paul went down to the Guggenheim and it was pretty awesome to see Dali’s stuff.
CN: You should check out the Dali Museum when you go to Spain. That’s where I’d like to go see Dali.
BG: Yes, now that would be incredible.
CN: Who came up with the idea to use the Mondrian-inspired graphic for the Young Modern album cover?
BG: That was actually, I guess, it was our management. They had an idea. We kind of wanted something really iconic and at first we were kind of, we were thinking about using a—there’s a really famous architect in Berlin, a woman, and I cannot remember her name. I really have to find out who she was. At one stage we were thinking we may even get her to do like, an architect’s drawing of like, you know some of those crazy buildings you see around the world. I think she’s done a lot of stuff in Berlin. I wish I could remember her name. She’s really famous and she does really kind of crazy, bizarre kind of stuff. It’s really pushes the envelope as far as architecture goes, and we were thinking of maybe using her. We tried to cover things based on a lot of her work, but it kind of didn’t make any sense, and then someone came up with, someone from management sent through a couple of Mondrian things with the 3-D and, yeah, I don’t know. We just wanted something really, really modern and iconic and once we started seeing the Mondrian stuff coming through, it just felt right. We instantly all went like, “It’s really modern, and it’s still art-y, and it’s still interesting, and you could pick it a mile off.”
CN: Well, that's it. Thanks so much, Ben.
BG: Thanks,
and I’ll see you soon.
