Maybe it was a Melbourne thing but Silverchair always seemed to be a divisive band … They were obviously popular but I never met anyone who admitted to liking them. Then when I first went to the UK a friend of mine would swap seamlessly between thrash metal and Silverchair (he even had posters on his wall) which always seemed weird. Still, even though we hadn’t heard from them in a few years, news of their breakup made big news and one friend of Pop’s felt like penning a bit of a tribute for us to post. Read on for some nostalgic words from Erin Bromhead.
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After All These Years – Silverchair: 1992 – 2011
I received an email from my mum on May 25, 2011, informing me that Silverchair, the band that defined my adolescence and early adulthood, had called it a day. I’ve spent the week reminiscing, reconnecting with old friends who shared my love of the band, and listening to all of their albums with a bittersweet ear. Now I’m here, writing this thank-you letter, because I feel compelled to pay homage to a band that I quite truly loved and admired for most of my life.
At the age of 8, my 16-year-old aunty gave me a cassette of a song she had recorded off Triple J. The song was called “Tomorrow” and I listened to it with the urgency and fervour of someone who believed there would never be one. Then my parents gave me money to get the whole Frogstomp album, which I ran home everyday from school to put in my portable CD player and head-bang to until I exhibited similar symptoms to those of severe whiplash. Within weeks, their posters were plastered all over the walls of my childhood room in the southern suburbs of Sydney. I scrawled ‘silverchair rulz’ (back before they decided to capitalise the S) wherever there was space on my Rip Curl pencil case made of wetsuit material. By the time they had released the last single from their second album, Freak Show, I had accumulated quite a collection of Silverchair memorabilia. I remember one hot summer, when I was 11, our house was under threat from bushfires. Whilst my parents packed up irreplaceable valuables like family photos and drawings from when we were kids, my mum sent my brothers and I to our rooms to pack a bag of “our most important things.” When we were in the car leaving our house, mum asked me to show her what was in my bag. I pulled out 2 Silverchair albums, 7 Silverchair singles, a framed Daniel Johns autograph, a ticket stub to a Silverchair concert, a VCR of some Silverchair film clips I had taped from Rage, and a photo of my aunty meeting Daniel Johns. My whole world of importance, right there.
When Neon Ballroom came out, I stopped eating meat because the lyrics in ‘Spawn Again’ gave me a target to aim my teen angst at when I needed it the most. It wasn’t long after that Daniel Johns began experimenting with his appearance as well as his music. Johns, a once surfy looking guitarist from the blue-collar town of Newcastle, had begun wearing eyeliner and shirts adorned with sparkles while he played songs that sent mosh pits into a frenzy. Everyday Australians didn’t know what to do with him. Am I buying Big Day Out tickets to watch a pansy play? Should I just stay home and watch the footy? The tall poppy syndrome was alive and well by the time Johns had the balls to come out with an album like Diorama and basically tell the world, ‘I am an eccentric, prolific, miracle of a musician and I am never going to sing like Eddie Vedder again, no matter how much better you tell us our old stuff was.’
By the time Young Modern came out, I was out of school, out of pencil cases to write on, and had no need for a bushfire bag of keepsakes. But I still found hope and release in the fantasticalness of songs like ‘If You Keep Losing Sleep’ and ‘All Across the World’.
Silverchair really were the band of my youth. Maybe even the band of my life. Sure, you could say that this is a band that is easy to get nostalgic about, because so many of us grew up with and to them. But it’s more than that. They helped me figure out who I was, and even more importantly, what I wanted to be. And they did it all through 3 instruments and 5 albums.
– Erin Bromhead
