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NeonDevil

znalazłam to w fejsbukowej grupie fanów, artykul jest z 2008 roku:

Daniel Johns' journey out of darkness

Claire Havery
From: Sunday Herald Sun
July 06, 200812:00AM

After enduring dark years of depression, and a short-lived marriage, Silverchair's Daniel Johns is finally having fun. Claire Harvey reports.

SOME days, Daniel Johns just doesn't feel like being himself.

Easily fixed. He'll just become someone else.

It might be Sir Whilliam Hathaway, a 19th century English dandy/statesman who likes to be addressed as Whil, entirely a figment of Johns' imagination.

Dressed in three-piece suit, he steps out to fetch the groceries, swinging a cane.

Or he'll spend an evening making prank calls, pretending to be an encyclopedia salesman, or maybe a government official.

One evening, while working with his Silverchair bandmates in a Sydney recording studio, he decides to become a radio DJ.

Adopting a throaty, throbby baritone, Johns dials a random number.

"Hi, are there any Silverchair fans in the house?" he asks the lady who answered. She calls for her daughters to come to the phone.

"You're live on air," he tells the girls, still pretending to be the DJ.

"I've got Daniel Johns here in the studio with me, and he wants to talk to you."

Johns slips into his regular voice. "Hi, it's Daniel."

The girls don't believe it for a second. As if the nation's most notoriously private songwriting artiste would deign to be on commercial radio, ringing fans at random.

"No, I really am Daniel Johns," he insists.

As a room full of bandmates and friends at a Sydney recording studio try to muffle their laughter, he's forced to sing a few Silverchair lyrics and put bassist Chris Joannou on the line to affirm his identity.

The girls hang up. "Weirdo!"

Daniel Johns is Australia's most complicated, confounding, fascinating rock star; the working-class Newcastle boy whose rich and exuberant eccentricity is, for the first time, flourishing in the full light of the fame that nearly killed him.

Acclaimed international producers describe him as an unschooled musical genius on the level of Mozart or Beethoven.

When he's not drafting poems or scribbling caricatures, he's alone at home with his dog creating compositions involving 80-piece orchestras, so complex they baffle musicians as diverse as David Helfgott and Paul Mac.

With affection, friends say Johns is an alien - or perhaps an iPhone, sleek and inexplicable.

Daniel Johns doesn't read music or write his compositions on paper. He claims to be underwhelmed by his own abilities.

He can't re-string his own guitar, because since the age of 14 there has always been a technician to do it for him.

For several years, Johns' mind was trapped by mental, then physical illness so dark that he could experience the world only at an emotional distance; Dr Phil and Neighbours, a thousand-dollar tab at the local video store, anorexic, depressed, agoraphobic and paranoid.

Interviews made his hands shake.

Now, he's muscular and tattooed, spending his evenings doing tequila shots with minor celebrities at cocaine-dusted nightclubs, flicking the finger at paparazzi, opening his hotel room to revellers, joking about his own drug use.

What a relief. At 29, Daniel Johns is indulging in the teenage hedonism he missed the first time around.

His friends are as thrilled as proud parents. At last, Johns is able to be a normal, out-of-control rock 'n' roll star. Our little boy's all grown up.

He's come a long way from 1995, when Silverchair's first album Frogstomp became a teenage phenomenon.

Back then, Johns and his schoolfriends Joannou and Ben Gillies were all braces and pimples and enthusiasm, having just won an SBS/Triple J music competition with their single Tomorrow, a grungy track influenced by their parents' Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix records.

In rapid succession came the first big exciting trip to Sydney; a name change for the band; international celebrity and a No.1 album.

It was the end of anything approaching normality and, for Johns, the beginning of suffering.

His innate gifts did nothing to prepare him for the weirdness of fame - and it's only now the storm is passing that he is discovering his own path.

THE pressure of becoming world-famous at 15 plunged Johns into clinical depression. Runaways made pilgrimages to Newcastle to see him, camping on his lawn.

Defence lawyers for an American boy who murdered his parents claimed he was inspired to kill by one of Johns' songs.

Two women he had never met accused him of stalking them.

The only thing that saved Johns from suicide was the fear of hurting his family; parents Greg and Julie, who owned a fruit stall, and younger siblings Heath and Chelsea.

When, at the age of 18, Johns became a recluse in his parents' Newcastle home, emaciated and withdrawn, Silverchair's manager John Watson asked the band's English producer Nick Launay to go and stay with Johns for a week to try to help.

"We hung out and talked about life for a week, and certain things fell into place mentally," Launay says.

"I was reassuring him, saying 'you've just got to be bold and not care so much about everything that's said about you'."

Even in the midst of the misery, Johns could pull it together in public. He and concert pianist David Helfgott became friends in 1999, when Helfgott played piano on the Neon Ballroom album.

Helfgott recalls Johns giving him endless hugs as they sat together on the piano-stool - a rare physical connection for the touchy-feely Helfgott, who tries to hug everyone he meets but is often rebuffed.

"Working with him was not only nice, it was terrific," Helfgott says now.

"I relished it. Daniel listened to me. He's so gentle; I was almost overwhelmed by his kindness and sweetness."

Johns understood Helfgott as few others can, says Gillian Helfgott, whose husband has schizo-affective disorder.

"They've both been on very demanding mental struggles, but that's what shapes them," she says.

It was only after a miserable tour for Neon Ballroom that Johns made the conscious decision to move beyond depression, weaning himself off anti-depressants and forcing himself to eat.

One morning, after weeks at home alone, he decided all the songs he'd written for the upcoming fourth album, Diorama, were "all horrible", dark and depressing.

He erased them all and started again with a more upbeat lyrical tone and elaborate, ambitious arrangements.

A new romance also helped - in 1999, Johns met Natalie Imbruglia, on whom he had developed a huge crush when she was starring in Neighbours and he was a housebound TV addict.

With Imbruglia, Johns moved to LA for intensive antibiotic treatment and joint rehabilitation for his arthritis, and as he recovered, he threw himself into the romance, with an elaborate 300-rose proposal and glitzy 2003 wedding.

Powderfinger's Darren Middleton says there are "three sides to the man - the songwriter, the performer and the larrikin".

Johns might be affable and funny offstage, but he's an intensely driven performer and, as a songwriter, "uninhibited, an artist's artist".

"He was always doing something musically creative (during the bands' joint 2007 tour); after the shows, late at night, whenever the urge struck. He strikes me as the sort of artist who will never be satisfied, or feel that he's reached the peak," Middleton says.

Silverchair's future was, at least in Johns' mind, uncertain for years.

Although the three men always remained personally close, Johns was unsure if Gillies and Joannou would - or could - move with him beyond the band's initial sound.

But Johns ditched plans for a solo album and reunited the band to make Young Modern, a Bollywood-via-Bowie extravaganza.

Johns was, if anything, more determined and decisive than he had been at 15, and now Launay found himself feeling obliged to persuade Johns to strip back some of the layers of complexity.

"It wasn't easy, because I'm his friend. I really adore him, and to be the schoolteacher is not something I like doing. I'd much prefer to be the other kid in the class having fun," Launay says.

Johns brought in another producer, Englishman David Bottrill, to mix the album, which debuted at No.1 on the Australian charts and brought the band's total record sales to more than $6 million worldwide.

The new hard-headedness was matched with financial savvy. Although Johns, Gillies and Joannou have been millionaires since the age of 16, the band was bankrupt.

Johns' ambitions for Young Modern would send them $700,000 into debt - so they decided to play three big-ticket festival gigs in 2006 purely to raise money.

It worked; Young Modern's double-platinum status put them safely back in the black.

"It was the greatest act of rock 'n' roll pragmatism in the history of Australian music," says Jeff Apter, a former Rolling Stone journalist who immersed himself in Silverchair's world for his band biography A New Tomorrow.

A MAJOR ambition remains to regain real commercial success in the US, to prove, as Apter says, Silverchair has transcended the 'Nirvana in Pyjamas' years.

And Johns is enjoying a teenage renaissance of sorts.

On Valentine's Day he launched himself into the social scene, doing shots with starlet Mimi Macpherson at Kings Cross bar The Piano Room.

It was only six weeks since he'd announced his split with Imbruglia, and although friends said he was unhappy about Imbruglia's decision to break up, he didn't display any of his old inclinations to seclusion.

"He's pretty wild - but he's always generous," says an acquaintance who's been partying with Johns and his new girlfriend, model Louise Van de Vorst.

"He puts his credit card on the bar, invites everyone back to the Sheraton for parties. I just hope he's not overdoing it, I hope his real friends are keeping an eye on him."

The fact Johns is out socialising "is probably a great sign and I think a lot of people who are hurling accusations at him quite often are probably coming from a slightly hypocritical stance," says friend Robbie Buck, a Triple J breakfast host.

"He's (already) up there with the most important musicians of the last 30 years of popular music."

Music writer Glenn A Baker says: "Thank God somebody's being a bit wild.

"It's a remarkable evolution; he's being a rockstar, and if anyone's entitled to, it's him."

A little debauchery is a good antidote to the adversity that has shaped Johns, says US record producer Van Dyke Parks.

"Anyone can take the helm on a calm sea," he says.

"It was a rough sea. He took charge of life and delivered, and I've been amazed and very touched. I can't say enough about him."

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