New Pet Sounds – Rolling Stone

SOURCE: Rolling Stone 627, by Dino Scatena.

Daniel Johns is married, healthier than ever and living in London. And he has a new band, THE DISSOCIATIVES, with his old friend Paul Mac. What about Silverchair? Don’t make them laugh.
Daniel Johns is all fidgety, hyper, he won’t shut up. He’s bored out of his brain. “Paaauuuul,” he whines in the most annoying tone he can muster. “What are you doing right now?’ He starts giggling uncontrollably. Paul Mac, Johns’ collaborator in their new band, the Dissociatives, is down the other end of the mini film studio, sitting motionless on a block-mounted car seat. He’s got his hands up near his face, making like an angry bear, Mac doesn’t answer Johns. “Right now, Paul. What are you doing right now?” repeats the singer as quickly as he can. “What are you thinking right now?”
“Thinking of all the ways I’m going to torture you later,” Mac finally replies, still holding his pose.
“And what about now?” says Johns, laughing again.
Mac bursts out laughing too. “I went to the conservatorium to end up doing this, I’ll have you know,” Mac mock-moans.

It’s the middle of February and Johns and Mac have spent the past three days in this black-walled room in Sydney, filming - or rather, photographing - the video clip to their second single, “Young Man, Old Man”. The process of creating the Dissociatives’ videos is painfully slow, even more than usual.
At the end of the week Johns heads back to England, to his wife, Natalie Imbruglia, and their home on the River Thames in Windsor. Johns has stayed on in Australia since returning just prior to the couple’s wedding last New Year’s Eve. Now it’s time to go home, to his new home. “Time zones are good,” Johns jokes. “I do like them. They’re a good accessory.”

Johns laughs a lot these days. He has good reason to. Life, he will tell you, is just perfect. He says he’d like to press the pause button and stay in the now forever. “There’s no pressure to do anything but enjoy it,” he offers. “That’s it. That’s the only thing I feel pressured to do. And when you wake up in the morning and go, ‘Enjoy it,’ then whatever happens happens. If you enjoy it, it doesn’t matter.”
Yes, Daniel Johns is relishing this new life, this second chance. In fact, both he and Paul Mac are so goddamn cheery, it wouldn’t be a surprise if they spontaneously began to whistle a happy tune.

While in Sydney, Daniel Johns chooses t o stay at the Hotel Mac, the back room at his collaborator’s pad in a bohemian part of town near the university. Mac has lived here since he came back down from the Blue Mountains a couple of years ago, slotting back into a city life. He shares the house with a local DJ, Seymour Butz - Johnny - who is credited on the Dissociatives’ album sleeve as the outfit’s “Conceptual Wing”. Naturally, the house looks like musicians inhabit it. Whenever they’re in the same city, Johns and Mac love to hang out. They amuse each other no end. “I think the music adds an extra dimension to the friendship, more than the other way around,” says Johns. “It’s something to do when there’s nothing on television [laughs]. And you feel inspired, so you just do it. It’s cool; you don’t get that with people very often.” Mac agrees. He says he had a similar connection with Andy Rantzen back in their Itch-E & Scratch-E days. “It’s like a conversation done to music,” he says.

The friendship between Johns and Mac isn’t a new one, either. Mac, a Sydney dance scene legend who states his age as “in the late-thirties”, first met Johns, now 24, when the Silverchair front man was still a kid. That was 1996 when Mac was enlisted to remix the Silverchair track “Freak”. There was an instant musical connection. “A melody thing going on,” describes Mac, who went on to assist with the next two Silverchair albums.

The pair jammed regularly but it would be 2000 before anything of their own was put on record. Their collaborative debut effort, the five-track I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rock EP was, by Johns’ own review, merely “a bunch of spur-of-the-moment jams chopped at the six-minute mark”. Yet it steeled their resolve that, given a bit more focus, something great might be within reach.

Whatever happened next would need to be an altogether more concerted affair. The Dissociatives, Johns and Mac knew from the outset, would share little in common with the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Rock EP. Or anything else either musician had ever done. A spoken manifesto developed: they would create beautiful, uplifting pop songs, with as many musical twists as possible. Something grand, in the spirit of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds or the Beatles’ White album, and something with no regard for genre or continuity. And something “really deliberately schizophrenic and eclectic”, recalls Johns.

“We just went, ‘OK, let’s make the album that we’ve both wanted to make, but just haven’t been allowed to do.’ As in we haven’t allowed ourselves to go to that place. Let’s just make that album. And if no one buys it, the record company didn’t even know it was happening so we won’t be disappointing as many people as we normally do,” he laughs. All that needed be done was to get under way. A plan was batched: wind up the Silverchair tour in England in June 2003 - Mac would be in Europe then. Set up in the Imbruglia-Johns London residence and have two weeks to write and record the album. Easy.

“We were recording it at home,” says Mac. “No one was paying for it - I paid for my ticket to fly to London - there was no budget or anything, we were just doing it.”
So in July 2003, Paul Mac and his laptop landed in Windsor. The better part of a year on, sitting in the lounge room of Mac’s house on the other side of the world, the duo rhapsodises about what happened next. It’s as if Mac and Johns had simultaneously awoken from the same blissful dream.

Indeed, the setting itself sounds like a scene lifted from a children’s book. The Spanish-styled villa, which Imbruglia bought four years ago, is set on a little strip of land - White Lilies Island (yes, like the title of her album) - that sits in the middle of the Thames. “It’s really inspirational,” says Johns. “It’s normal, but you’re living in this beautiful old mansion, which is still kind of super-weird [laughs]. It’s like you’re a prince, but no one knows who you are and no one cares.”
Sitting in the backyard, as Johns and Mac did regularly during their two weeks together, you can see across the water to Windsor Castle. In the mornings, squirrels frolic in the garden. In the evening, you can lie back on the lawn and watch the swans fly past on their way home while the distant sounds of London murmur all around you.

When Mac lands in London to start work on the album they’ve waited years to make, everything is great. Well, except for one minor hitch. “I was like, ‘OK, Paul, everything’s cool. But there might just be a problem with guitars, because I don’t want to play it. I hate it. I never want to play it again,’” laughs Johns . “It was coming off the back of playing guitar two hours a night on tour, and guitar solos. It was like I just didn’t want to see it again. I’d just made love to it too many times. Boring guitar.”

Mac talked him around, got Johns back into playing simple chords to focus on the essence of a melody rather than the histrionics around it. Johns says his bandmate has had a fundamental impact on the way he approaches his own music. “Right from when I started jamming with Paul, I started learning so much,” he reveals. “One of the reasons why we kept writing together, even when we didn’t have a plan, was because we were both learning so much. It was fun; you were with your friend and you were making music, making you laugh. You were smiling. I think we were getting ready to be the Dissociatives all that time, subconsciously hooking it up.”

OK, so Johns was playing guitar again. Now they had just two weeks to make an album. “No stoner-fucking-around,” they promised each other. “Let’s really focus.” The tight deadline brought its own discipline, says Mac. But it wasn’t needed. “We were just into it,” says Johns. “We’d wake up, walk down the stairs and start.”
“I’d go outside for a cigarette,” adds Mac, “and Dan would bring out a guitar and it would be like, ‘Fuck, what’s that riff? That’s beautiful.”’

“Yeah, they were the best moments, just sitting outside, relaxing and playing guitar,” continues Johns. “Paul would say, ‘I like that!’ And we would go inside and record and then head back outside and go, ‘And we can do that and that and that.’ That would just keep happening all day. I think we were just feeding off having something to think about that was interesting.”

MAC: “One song a day, that was the rule. And that was it.”
JOHNS:[Slapping his hand on the coffee table] “Paul brings discipline, much discipline to the table. And things happen!” [Laughs]
MAC: “I’m very professional.” [Laughs]
JOHNS: “Yes, you’re very professional.” [Laughs]
A mini-studio was set up around a piano in the villa’s basement. Recording straight into Mac’s laptop meant they could only record one instrument at a time. Each part was played live, usually in just a single take, and mistakes were left where they fell. How each song sounded on each day is basically what would end up on the final cut.

Where to start? That was easy; Johns and Mac already had a track on ice, the tune that would eventually be called [Laughs] “Aaangry Megaphone Man”. They’d jammed it up one night when Mac was helping out with the demos for Silverchair’s 2001 album, Diorama. It’s the only song to emerge from the Dissociatives that sounds anything like Johns’ old band.

From there, off they went. “We were doing a song a day, complete, and thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s really good,’” says Johns.
“Doing that every day for two weeks, we just got quicker and better,” says Mac.
JOHNS: “We’d have a song written and recorded and completed and then have another track written and half recorded by the time we went to bed. So you’re constantly thinking about the last thing you did before you went to bed. So I think you have dreams about it and subconsciously something happens and you wake up the next morning and generally it’s even better.”
Mission accomplished. The bulk of the music for the Dissociatives’ debut album safely stored on his laptop, Paul Mac headed home to bolster the set with some electronic effects and sound scapes. Daniel Johns had another mission on his mind. So, two days later, he landed in New York City.

Another day in the black room in Sydney, on what feels like the slowest video shoot of all time. Johns is dressed like an old hillbilly, decked out in overalls and white beard. “It’s obviously young Daniel playing old Daniel,” notes Johns when he first catches his look on a monitor. “I think it’s cool.”
It’s Johns’ turn in the car seat. “Stay still,” director James Hackett repeatedly tells him. “Still as oxygen,” say Johns, but he keeps on talking anyway. He reckons he resembles Kenny Rogers in his wild days. “Kenny Rogers done to Charles Manson,” offers Mac. “Done to the Lion in The Wizard of Oz,” continues Johns. [Laughs]
The clip for “Young Man, Old Man” picks up where the video to the Dissociatives’ debut single, “Somewhere Down the Barrel”, left off. James Hackett’s ingenious style of animation requires painstaking preparation and attention to detail. It takes the young Sydney director four months in postproduction to make the clips come to life.

Hackett’s caricatures are made up of hundreds of digital photos of Johns’ and Mac’s bodies. He snaps them from every angle in different poses. As he shoots, an assistant ticks off a list on a clipboard. “Old Dan legs.” Tick. “Old Dan neck.” Tick. Only the facial expressions are actually filmed.

Johns keeps talking. “Imagine being a model - it would suck!” he screams. “So, am I done?” he inquires for about the 10th time. “NO,” replies everyone on the set. Johns is relentless: “Haven’t we already done this foot?” But the Dissociatives are feeling a little weathered today, having stayed up late with friends at Hotel Mac. They watched the Live Forever: Rise and Fall of Britpop DVD while downing various flavoured vodkas and providing running commentary to the action on the screen. “I’d forgotten about the drinking,” says Johns. “That’s probably because of the 57 joints,” Mac reminds him.
“I’m so in character, I can’t break out of it,” Johns says when he’s finally allowed to get up.

Johns might be made up like an old man, but he looks nothing like one. A youthful and muscular bare chest sticks through the overalls, revealing piercings through each nipple. And if he had those arms he’s got now when he was a kid, Johns would never have been bullied by anyone. It’s extraordinary that this is the same young man who, less than two years ago, was virtually crippled from the effects of his reactive arthritis. Yes, Daniel Johns is healthy again, sickeningly so. Not that he’ll ever forget the horror of his illness.

There’s also good news from the record company today. The first single, “Somewhere Down the Barrel”, has just been delivered to radio. Everyone is in a rush to throw it on air; several of the country’s largest radio networks immediately added it to high rotation. Every music television show is also keen to show Hackett’s accompanying short film. Rage, for one, says it will open the program with it on Friday night. Mac looks blown away. “Wow So I‘ll have to stop walking down the street next week Now all we have to do is wait for the backlash,” he grins.

“It’s weird that although Dan is the younger one,” Mac adds the next day, “he’s got more experience when it comes to the machinations of how it works. For me, I had some success with ‘Just the Thing’ [off his 2001 solo debut, 3000 Feet High] and started to get used to this world pf playlists, getting added and all that shit. But this time around it’s like, ‘Fuck!’”

The Dissociatives’ self-titled album, Mac will tell you straight out, is simply the best music he’s ever been involved in making. “It’s like, in some ways, everything I’ve worked on in my life has led to this point; all my skills are being tested and pushed. And fuck, that’s fun. It’s nice to have that situation. This project feels like the culmination of something.”

As for Johns, well, he’s a genius, Mac offers warmly. “From the start, Daniel has always treated me as an equal, although to me he was a superstar,” he reveals. “So that was a good start to the friendship.” That genius also likes to call Mac “Uncle Paul”, just to be annoying.

Late one evening last year, less than a week after returning to Sydney from London, “Uncle Paul” got a call from Johns, off his face, somewhere in New York City. He’d just been on a solo all night pub crawl. And he had some news. “I got a drunken phone call,” says Mac. “He’s like, ‘Man, it’s finished , all the lyrics of the album.’ And I was like, ‘Get fucked!’”

In that one night of sitting at bars, walking the streets of New York, lying across nightclub lounges, all the words of the Dissociatives’ debut album spilled out of Johns. “The first few nights [in New York], I didn’t get around to it; I couldn’t do it, I didn’t feel like I was in the right headspace to give it everything,” he says. “Because I was totally drained from doing all the music with Paul. I just wanted to have a rest and feel inspired.

“And then, one night, I was just by myself in a hotel and decided to go have some drinks. And just sat and started having drinks and I pulled out my notebook and was just sitting in a bar, just writing lyrics.

“I just wrote them in an entire night,” he continues. “All the record, except the second verse in ‘Aaangry Megaphone Man’. Because I felt I was so close to the end of the album that I just had to be in a different frame of mind to tie it off, otherwise it was just going to float into space.

“It was a pretty cool night. I was pretty excited. And it was like, ‘I’ve got to call Paul,’” he laughs. The splurge of lyrics, says Johns, fell out as one streaming, albeit fragmented narrative. Whereas the imagery from line to line is crisp and free-flowing, when you step back a bigger picture soon takes shape.

Obviously, and naturally, the experience of his recent debilitation weighed heavy on Johns’ subconscious. “Welcome to Planet Pod,” was the first line he committed to paper that night in New York. A reference to all those lonely hours spent in his oxygen capsule during the depths of his illness, perhaps? It’s easy to point to dozens of possible references throughout.

However, keeping with the spirit of the music, Johns’ had no intention of making this tale a downer. After all, he and everyone else knew it had a happy ending. “You’ll get a chance, another chance, one more sun,” is the optimistic refrain repeated over and over later in the same set of lyrics (on the opener, “We’re Much Preferred Customers”). At other point, such as on the desperate love song “Forever and a Day”, it feels like Johns is laying his heart bare, with no artifice whatsoever. (The vocal on the that track, he says with a chuckle, is an effort to do his best Justin Timberlake.) The imagery conjured by the lyrics is often surreal, too. In the case of a track called “Horror With Eyeballs”, says John, the words appear surreal simply because it’s “so real”. (“All of that time I was dead/Limbless in bed, sedated experiment,” he sings joyously on the recording.) “With that track in particular, it’s hard to say what the intention is without sounding like a wanker,” says Johns.

Johns didn’t feel compelled to put all his feelings into words. Two of the 10 tracks on The Dissociatives are instrumentals. One is called “Lifting the Veil From the Braille”. Like most of the songs around it, it’s an epic recording that overflows with melody. It sounds so un-Silverchair. Up front, in place of a lead vocal, is the sound of Daniel Johns whistling a happy tune. “I discovered I could whistle,” says Johns. “So that was cool.”

After three more weeks at Johns’ house in Newcastle for vocals and mixing, their work was complete. Late last year Johns and Mac pulled together a backing band made up of friends - Kim Moyes and Julian Hamilton of Sydney band Prop, and James Hazelwood - to see if the music could be performed live. It could. According to Johns, what ultimately makes stage one of the Dissociatives so special is that both he and his old friend came to it at equally joyous points in their lives; “It was, like, 100 per cent joy from both angles,” he says. “I think that’s why it sounds like it sounds, because it’s not just one person’s joy going into it.” Make no mistake ’Chair fans, this isn’t a one-off: the Dissociatives are here to stay. After the tour, Mac will finish work on the follow-up to 3000 Feet High, while Johns has already got a bunch of songs he’s written, possibly for a solo project. But they promise we‘ll be hearing a lot more from the Dissociatives. “It’s like a nest,” says Johns. “Fly off and gather worms. Maybe if you’re a seagull, peck at plankton. Then come back to the nest.” They both break into laughter again. “See, I think that describes our working relationship,” says Mac. “He’s like the poetic, whimsical one. Then I’ve got to find a way: ‘Right, what rhymes with nest? What chord would the ocean be?’”
And they keep laughing…