Daniel Paul Johns was born in Newcastle (Merewether)* on Sunday, April 22nd 1979**. His parents are Julie and Greg Johns; they run are a fruit store in their hometown. They have two more children: Daniel’s brother Heath and his sister Chelsea - both younger.


* NSW (New South Wales), Australia (east coast), roughly 120km north of Sydney ** Daniel is a Taurus


Daniel started with music in a school band where he played the trumpet and the violin. With the age of 11 Daniel and Ben Gillies formed a band called Short Elvis, which was basically a rap group as neither of them knew how to play any instrument. Surfing was also one of their hobbies or just even playing a little bit of soccer in the park. School was never very important to Mr. Johns; his favourite subjects were literature and arts. So he preferred playing arcade games such as Cruising USA, Grand Prix Star, and Indy 500.


Back in 1991 Daniel began to learn the guitar. His first guitar was a “Rock Axe” which he bought for $80. For a few years he had additional classical guitar lessons, but after that he learnt playing the guitar on his own. He was inspired by bands like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and one of his favourite bands Black Sabbath.


Then, Ben, Chris and Daniel started a band called “The innocent criminals”. Daniel was singer and guitarist, Ben took over the drum part and Chris had to play the bass. They played lots of cover versions of their favourite bands.

After some time Daniel and Ben began to write his own songs and nearly everyone knows what happened next. In 1994 “The innocent criminals” won the Nomad pick me competition with a 6 minute long demo called “tomorrow”. In favour of this they made their first video, signed a contract with “murmur” (division of Sony music Australia) and got their new name: Silverchair.


Gillies, Joannou and Johns recorded the first Silverchair album called “frogstomp”. Some of Daniel’s lyrics were influenced by TV documentations; for example the song “pure massacre” was written after a docu about the Bosnia conflict. As time passed by, Daniel became vegetarian, later even a vegan. In 1996 he learnt to play another instrument, the drums.

On the second album “freak show” his lyrics were more personal. He wrote about the whole “rock star” stuff – Daniel never wanted to be a “star” for the public - and his deeper emotional feelings.

In 1997 he wasn’t able to attend the ARIA awards, because he had an asthma attack and had to recover. In the same year Daniel passed high school, though he didn’t really know how he made it. 1998 was a really dark year for Daniel. He suffered quite a lot, becoming very withdrawn. He rented a house and stayed alone with his dog sweep at home for a while, took an extended break after a long year of touring and supplanted emotions.

During this period of Daniel’s life he wrote a good many poems, drew some pictures – and formed his emotions and thoughts into his lyrics for the upcoming “neon ballroom” album. Daniel isolated himself and was only listening to his own creations. And, as bad as it had to get, he developed many phobias, including a fear of crowds, leaving home and most food. Daniel thought certain shapes of food were like razors going down his throat and at restaurants he was always suspicious, thinking perhaps his food was poisoned and finally concluding – as worse as it had to get - into a serious type of “anorexia”.

Later on, Daniel said it was the hardest time in his life so far, but there were always people around him who helped Daniel to overcome his depressions. Daniel processed his suffering of anorexia into what we all know now as “Ana’s song (open fire)” – which was recorded as the neon ballroom sessions were actually nearly finished, but Daniel wanted this song for the upcoming album and so they did additional 6 weeks of recording. Thank God!


Daniel was always into animal rights and very concerned about nature, it was no surprise that he became an active member of the Animal Liberation organisation. He also wrote a very intense song about animal liberation for neon ballroom named spawn again.

After another time out in the year 2000, Silverchair were back with their recent album “diorama” in 2001. Daniel said: “Our other albums have all been pretty black”, explaining when asked to summarize the new album, “this time around I wanted to try painting with lots of colours”. But again, life was hard with Daniel: a viral infection caused reactive arthritis in Daniel’s joints, especially in legs and hip. The sickness was wrecking Daniel’s body, even unable to hold his guitar or to stand up for more than a few minutes in his darkest hour, there was no way to play the diorama tour for Daniel.

Cancelling a few concerts gave Daniel the chance to relax and to fight against his arthritis. After a long time of struggling - with forward and backward turns - he felt better and was able to finally start the “across the night” tour and a few festival gigs. Now it seems that Daniel has found his personal luck accompanied by Natalie Imbruglia. They became engaged and are geared up for marriage. Well, love can move mountains… ;) No matter how, after having finished the across the night tour, Daniel will continue his personal way, with the speed he wants and the time he wants to spend for producing some milestones in music history – probably with Silverchair but definitely with Paul Mac, as they are already recording new stuff for their project “I can’t believe it’s not rock!” for an upcoming release in 2004.

So that’s for sure, Daniel’s life was, is and will be unforeseen. May his burdens be left behind… Thank God you left Las Vegas, Daniel.