Ex-Silverchair singer Daniel Johns talks new band DREAMS, new neck tattoo, and why he’s not plugging his guitar back in
Casual fans who haven’t followed Daniel Johns since the mid-’90s — when his Australian rock trio, Silverchair, rode the grunge wave to the top of the alt-rock charts with “Tomorrow” and “Pure Massacre,” and earned comparisons to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden — might be shocked to see and hear him now. The 39-year-old artist, who has joined forces with longtime friend Luke Steele, of Empire of the Sun, in the superstar electro-duo DREAMS, barely resembles the lank-haired teen of Silverchair’s Frogstomp and Freak Show.
In the dystopian video for the glitchy, post-punk/disco title track of DREAMS’ debut album, No One Defeats Us, Johns (going by the stage name “Dr. Dreams”) and Steele (now known as “Miracle”) prowl through a graffiti-scrawled, downtown L.A. hellscape, wielding baseball bats and megaphones — with a shorn-headed Johns a rocking a post-apocalyptic-party look of fun-fur coat, sequined skort, and A Clockwork Orange-style neon contact lens. And, just in case anyone doubted Johns’s commitment to this new project, he has the word “DREAMS” tattooed in a large Gothic font across his entire throat.
“Pretty much in the last two years, this record has become its own monster, and we put all the other stuff to the side to focus on this band,” Johns tells Yahoo Entertainment, sitting with Steele at KROQ’s Coachella house as Dreams prepare to play their first-ever live show.
“You should’ve seen his face when we couldn’t get the [Dreams.com] domain name!” Steele quips.
“We had a photo shoot arranged, and we were talking about the look, getting everything organized,” Johns says of his decision to permanently ink himself with his new band’s name. “And then the night before, we had talked about getting temporary tattoos. And I just went, ‘I’m just going to get [a real tattoo]!’ We were right in the middle of recording the record, so we were deep in DREAMS. I just thought, ‘I’m just gonna get it and make a point.’ Now I’m stuck with it.”
“Well, there’s something I want to tell you: The band’s over,” Steele jokes.
DREAMS are, in fact, just getting started, and they’re definitely “not some side-project we cobbled together,” Johns stresses. And those who have been closely following Johns’s career in recent years shouldn’t be so surprised that he is taking yet another artistic risk. He’s constantly evolved since Silverchair’s early days, be it via the confessional anorexia ballad “Ana’s Song (Open Fire)” in 1999, the sweeping orch-pop of Silverchair’s breakthrough Diorama in 2002 and the sleek electro-rock of its 2007 follow-up Young Modern, or his techno project with DJ Paul Mac, the Dissociatives. His 2015 debut solo album, Talk, was even almost completely guitar free and had a trippy, experimental R&B vibe.
Johns is aware than many old-school fans would love for him to return to the classic Silverchair sound, but he’s not bothered. “People still remember ‘Tomorrow,’ right? Oh well. That hasn’t been a struggle for me. I think it’s been a struggle for them,” he says. “I don’t know what my reaction is supposed to be to that. Am I supposed to like, ‘Gosh, sorry, I apologize!’ And plug my guitar back in?”
Johns says it was “probably when [he] left school” that he became more artistically adventurous. “I’d started writing different stuff because I knew I wasn’t going to get hassled,” he says. “Diorama is the record is when I thought to myself, ‘F*** this. I want to be really, really good.’” That album, Silverchair’s fourth, wasn’t as big as its predecessors (although it did go to No. 1 in Australia and No. 7 in New Zealand), but it was around that time that Johns and Steele first became acquainted, and they became fast friends and mutual admirers.
Johns knows that Empire of the Sun’s fans may be resistant to it as well. But to that, he shrugs: “We’re going to do whatever we want. We don’t give a f***. … The thing is people really have to realize is, as important as it is to us, it’s just art. It’s just music. We’re not stealing your mate’s laptop or kicking your bins over. We’re just writing music. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to listen to it. I never understood why people get so uppity about it.”
“Music is so spiritual and it’s so emotional — how can you not change, right?” Steels adds. “You’re not gonna make love to your wife the exact same way every night. Or as a surfer, it’s never gonna be the same wave.”
So far, though, the response to the project has been largely positive — as evidenced by the crazy crowd reaction at their incendiary Coachella debut on a Mohave Tent stage decorated with flaming garbage cans, inoperative pay phones, and Commodore 64 graphics to look like a scene from one of the duo’s favorite films, The Warriors. And regardless, the two are having a blast with Dreams’ DIY, punk-rock approach. “A lot of other people might think we’ve lost our minds, but we’re not changing anything. This is how it is,” Johns says, chuckling.
“We’ve been directing the videos; I’ve been editing the videos. We’ve been styling all the wardrobe. It’s come back to high school, basically, and we just make art, which has been the most therapeutic thing I think I’ve felt for years,” says Steele, describing their wild creative process as tapping into their shared “brain tentacle.”
And so, DREAMS are here to stay. But don’t expect their next album — which, hopefully, won’t take another 14 years to come out — to sound just like No One Defeats Us, because like everything Steele and Johns do together, this band is very much a work in progress.
“It’s really character-driven,” says Daniel “Dr. Dreams” Johns. “It’s like there are animals inside us that need to come out. I think Miracle and Dr. Dreams are still kind of coming into their own as characters. Like, next year’s Coachella might be a bit weird.”
Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
Daniel Johns looks to tomorrow, talks bold solo debut ‘Talk’
2018 fall music preview: The albums we’re most excited to hear
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