This is silverchair's first tour without chaperones. You're officially adults. 
You can do the rock thing and go to strip clubs.
 
"This is our first, large, two-and-a-half month tour without chaperones. But I 
can't imagine it being too wild in comparison to what we've done before."

Are you mellowing yet? I heard you guys used to spit out 
of hotel windows.

I wouldn't say we're mellowing. I just don't think we spit out of windows anymore. 
That's something you do when you're 14-years-old and you think it's fun and cool.

Now you've graduated to TV sets?
Yeah, we're more into trashing hotel rooms and turning things upside down, basically 
doing rock & roll.

This was a very different process making Neon Ballroom. You're 
not in school anymore and it sounds like you had a lot more confidence 
in your voice, writing skills and musicianship.
 
By the end of touring for Freak Show, I started getting a little frustrated with myself 
because, with the first album, we wrote most of the songs when we were 14 years old, so 
I kind of excused myself for the things I didn't like. With the second album, although 
all our songs have been very natural and sincere, after we toured and heard them a million 
times, I started feeling like maybe I rushed it and didn't put enough thought into it, 
because we were still in school and didn't really have enough time to focus on doing what 
I wanted to do. I was getting creatively annoyed.

But the seeds for Neon Ballroom were planted on Freak Show with the use 
of strings, sitar and timpani.

There were even more ideas there that I don't think we took as far as we should've on the 
second album. Once I finished school, I really had a vision of what I wanted to do with music
and how I wanted to treat it, so this album is really what I was leading to.

You couldn't have made this record when you were 15, though.
 
Exactly. The first and second albums were basically traditional rock music that really just
pounded it out. We just enjoyed it being loud and angry, and, after touring that kind of music
for three years or so, I started getting a bit bored with it. I wanted to do something that was
more gratifying, so I wrote this album. I really did exactly what i wanted to do on this record. 
I had a vision for it. Creatively, I'm already satisfied with it.

So you realized you're capable of other emotions besides anger?

I was really tunnel-visioned. Basically, every song was about anger.

What were you so angry about, being a successful 15-year-old musician, 
touring the world? 

Just the way I was treated by some people.

Even after you became successful?

Before we became successful, I was always treated negatively by the majority of people
around my age, or older, because at 12, I was in a rock band and people couldn't accept 
the fact that I listened to rock music, insted of going to pubs, drinking beer and basically 
being a jock.

Were you "the weird kid"?

I guess I was always viewed as the freaky one. But in some ways, I played up to it because I
enjoyed scaring people and making them feel uncomfortable. But I still didn't appreciate
being treated the way I was treated, so I was very angry for the majority of my teenage years
and that's how I expressed myself through music. Once I left school, I started really
discovering new emotions and exploring new methods of writing.

Neon Ballroom has traditional rock instruments, classical instruments as well 
as samples and other production tricks.

I wanted to combine really futuristic sounds with very traditional sounds, which aren't very
common. There are many bands doing songs with strings in them, but they sound generic and
boring. I didn't want to have a rock song with strings. I wanted to have a string song with rock
underneath it. So the songs are all written with strings in mind. They were written to be very
classical with a rock element to them, rather than the other way around.

By: Karen Bliss