Unofficial website
Silverchair's founders, Ben Gillies and Daniel Johns, attended the same primary school in the Newcastle suburb of Merewether. As teenagers, singer-guitarist Johns and drummer Gillies, started playing music together – in one class they built a stage out of desks and played rap songs for their schoolmates. When they moved on to Newcastle High School, a fellow student, Chris Joannou, joined the pair on bass guitar. In 1992, they formed Innocent Criminals with Tobin Finane as a second guitarist – but he soon left.They played numerous shows around the Hunter Valley region in their early teens, their repertoire was cover versions of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. In 1994 Innocent Criminals entered YouthRock, a competition for school-based bands. Early in the year they recorded demos of "Acid Rain", "Cicada", "Pure Massacre" and "Tomorrow" at Platinum Sound Studios.
In April, the band's mainstream breakthrough came when they won a national competition called Pick Me, using their demo of "Tomorrow". The competition was conducted by the SBS TV show Nomad and Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) alternative radio station Triple J. As part of the prize, Triple J recorded the song and ABC filmed a video, which was aired on 16 June. For the video's broadcast, they had changed their name to Silverchair (styled as silverchair until 2002). In a 1994 interview with Melbourne magazine Buzz, the band claimed the name derived from a radio request for "Sliver" by Nirvana and "Berlin Chair" by You Am I being mixed up as Silver Chair. It was later revealed they were named for the C. S. Lewis-penned novel The Silver Chair from The Chronicles of Narnia series.
Following a bidding war between rival labels, Silverchair signed a three-album recording contract with Sony Music subsidiary Murmur Records. Initially the group were managed by their parents. Sony A&R manager John Watson, who was jointly responsible for signing the group, subsequently left the label to become their band manager. In September, their Triple J recording of "Tomorrow" was released as a four-track extended play. From late October, it spent six weeks at number-one on the ARIA Singles Chart. In 1995, a re-recorded version of "Tomorrow" (and a new video) was made for the United States market, becoming the most played song on US modern rock radio that year.
Silverchair's debut album, Frogstomp, was recorded in nine days with production by Kevin Shirley (Lime Spiders, Peter Wells) and was released in March 1995.At the time of recording, the band members were 15 years old, and still attending high school. Frogstomp's lyrical concepts were fiction-based, drawing inspiration from television, hometown tragedies, and perceptions of the pain of friends. The album was well received: Allmusic and Rolling Stone rated it in four and four-and-a-half stars respectively, praising the intensity of the album, especially "Tomorrow". Aside from Innocent Criminals, the band has used The George Costanza Trio and Short Elvis as aliases.
Frogstomp was a number-one album in Australia and New Zealand. It reached the Billboard 200 Top 10, making Silverchair the first Australian band to do so since INXS. It was certified as a US double-platinum album by the RIAA, triple-platinum in Canada by the CRIA and multi-platinum in Australia. The album sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide. As Frogstomp and "Tomorrow" continued to gain popularity through 1995, the group toured the US where they supported Red Hot Chili Peppers in June, The Ramones in September, and played on the roof of Radio City Music Hall at the MTV Music Awards – in between touring they continued their secondary education in Newcastle. At the ARIA Music Awards of 1995, the band won five awards out of nine nominations. To collect their awards on the night they sent Josh Shirley, the young son of the album's producer.
In a January 1996 murder case, the defendant counsel for Brian Bassett, 16, and Nicholaus McDonald, 18, claimed that the pair listened to "Israel's Son", from Frogstomp, which contributed to the murder of Bassett's parents and a younger brother. McDonald's lawyer cited the lyrics "'Hate is what I feel for you/I want you to know that I want you dead'" which were "almost a script. They're relevant to everything that happened". The band's manager, Watson, issued a statement that they did not condone nor intend any such acts of violence, "The band is appalled by this horrific crime, and they hope that justice will prevail". Prosecutors rejected the defence case and convinced the jury that the murder was committed to "steal money and belongings and run off to California."
1992-1996
