It all started, as most things do these days, with a meme. Silverchair’s Daniel Johns teased something “really special” earlier this week by using a hilarious meme consisting of a Freak Show-era Johns sitting cross-legged on a soccer ball, super-imposed on a backdrop of the Andes with the lyrics, “Sitting on a ball/In the middle of the Andes”, taken from ‘Freak’.
That obviously piqued fans interest with many getting involved in the meme ‘war’, shared gleefully on Johns’ Instagram stories. That’s now led to the musician revealing more details relating to the ‘Freak’ video.
“I’ve had hundreds of questions about whether I still have this guitar after all the Freak talk this week,” he wrote on Instagram earlier today, accompanied by two pictures of the sublime instrument. “I actually have 2, both completely unmodified.
It’s an all aluminium (aluminum for the Americans) Jackson Custom Shop Roswell Rhoads. The story is that the Jackson Marketing Director at the time Charles Perrino had a dream that he was abducted by aliens and they asked him to design a guitar for them. He made this.”
After recalling that David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson – THE Mulder and Scully – came to see Silverchair during this time when the pair were filming The X-Files, Johns continued by detailing the production of the ‘Freak’ video.
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“The minute I saw this guitar in ‘96 I was captivated. It looked like something from the future,” he said. I used it in the Freak video because the Director Gerry (from the legendary band Devo) wanted something evocative of the year 2020 (lol). It trips me out that the video was intended to depict a dystopian reality where rich people would harvest the sweat of teenagers to reclaim their youth…only to take it too far and start to look like aliens.”
“Quite confident we predicted the actual future,” he added. “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.”
But don’t worry if you’d rather see some good old memes rather than hear tales of old guitars. “Let me know if you’d like to see more pics of my guitar collection with stories like these or if you’d rather more memes,” Johns concluded.
Daniel Johns is just a few months out from the release of his eagerly-awaited new album. FutureNever, his second solo studio album, is set for release on April 1st.
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