After teasing hints for a week, Daniel Johns has gifted Silverchair ‘Freak’s with the ultimate merch bundle for the single’s 25th anniversary.
Available to pre-order this week only, the bundle contains a limited quantity, single-pressing hand-signed silver copy of Johns’ upcoming album FutureNever, featuring a cover image of teenage Johns illuminated by the ‘Freak’ lamps by artist Matt Ryan Tobin.
It also contains the hand-written lyrics to ‘Freak’ on A3 paper made from recycled 1997 itineraries, magazines, newspapers and comics by Dodgy Paper.
There’s also a ‘Nobody knows I’m Daniel Johns’ t-shirt – an ode to Johns’ ‘Nobody knows I’m a lesbian’ tee circa-1997 – and a t-shirt emblazoned with lyrics from ‘Freak’ as well as a sweater and beanie.
The bundle is only available for purchase until Sunday 16th January via Sound Merch.
Fans who pre-order the bundle will receive a chance to win one of the two vintage Roswell Rhoads Jackson guitars featured in the ‘Freak’ music video that Johns himself still owns.
Johns revealed some of the guitar’s history last week.
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“Quite confident we predicted the actual future,” he said.
“They only made 126 of these things because they are completely impractical, prohibitively expensive, hard to understand, exotic in an interplanetary way but they do sound great… kind of like me.”
‘Freak’ was originally released on January 13th, 1997, the lead single from Freak Show, the follow-up album to their break-out debut Frogstomp.
Johns said this particular song was special because, “We played ‘Freak’ in every silverchair live show and importantly it was the first song I ‘reclaimed’ when I performed it with my friend What So Not at St Jerome’s Laneway Festival and Splendour in the Grass in 2019.”
The Silverchair nostalgia continued over the weekend, with the band’s Saturday Night Live performance replayed in the US.
Johns shared a ‘highlight reel’ for fans on social media:
“Couple of things I remember,” he wrote alongside the clip.
“New York City feeling a really long way from Newcastle that night.
Will Ferrell being very tall and reminding me of our friend @chadsmithofficial.
@davidalangrier being a lovely kind man who made 3 Australian kids feel super comfortable even though we were all nervous AF.
The TV debut of my green PRS before I covered it in stickers and thrashed it around the world.
I was excited because we got to play Pure Massacre and not just Tomorrow.”
Reminiscing on the ‘special times’ with bandmates Chris Joannou and Ben Gillies, Johns said, “It was crazy that 12 months earlier we couldn’t get 10 people to watch us play and here we were on one of the most legendary TV shows in American history.”
