Ep 20: silverchair and Murmur - show notes

Show notes, links, music and other stuff for Ep 20: silverchair, Ammonia, Jebediah, Something For Kate and murmur records.

The title of this episode is a lyric from Anthem For the Year 2000 by silverchair.

Silverchair

Here’s the original demo of Tomorrow that won them the Nomad competition.

Grainy footage of The Innocent Criminals being announced as winners on Nomad.

I talked about Nathan Cavaleri, as a bit of an example of how silverchair could have gone. Cringe at this clip of Hey Hey It’s Saturday.

The Tomorrow EP was in an album case and was deliberately aimed away from being a pop single.

The trick was repeated in a way with Neon Ballroom, where the packaging screamed ‘mature serious statement album’.

Wearing an Ammonia T-Shirt on SNL

Silverchair as the Recovery house band

The silverchair story is covered in a lot of places. No other band from the 90s has had this much book coverage.

Craig Mathieson’s The Sell-In talks about the industry side. He also wrote a book called Hi Fi Days, which featured long profiles of three bands – silverchair, Spiderbait and You Am I. It was released in 1997 so it doesn’t have much historical perspective. But a fascinating slice of the times.

Jeff Apter has written two books about silverchair. One is a more straight bio called Tomorrow Never Knows – The silverchair story, which was published in 2006. This was before their break up. He wrote a book focussed on Daniel called The Book of Daniel: From silverchair to DREAMS in 2018.

Michael Gudinski tells his side of the silverchair story in Gudinski: The Godfather of Australian Rock ‘n’ Roll, written by Stuart Coupe.

Ben and Chris wrote their book Love & Pain in 2023, and released as I was finishing this episode. I watched the Australian Story TV series in fascination. But I didn’t put any of it in the podcast, really. Just Ace isn’t supposed to be the inside story. I’ll leave that to the three gents in the band to tell their side.

Here’s that Mad Magazine cover

Ammonia

They were the second big hope for Murmur, and Drugs was a minor radio hit in the US.

The film clip was supposedly the cheapest ever to be added to MTV rotation at the time. It is a fery good snapshot of how Australian music fans looked in the mid 90s.

Jebediah

Jebediah are on of my favourites.

Here’s another clip of how everyone looked in the 90s in Australia.

Kevin is mentioned in this lovely pop punk song by The Crustaceans. An absurb fantasy of being a guitar played by Kevin Mitchell.

Something For Kate

Paul and Kevin reunited just a couple of years ago for this. I like how Paul Dempsey’s home seems to be overtaken by guitars. I also like how Weather With You is such a two guitar song, but still Paul just plays them both. I love Kevin, but Paul is such an incredible musician. Paul will take this one, Kev. You just relax.

The Johns and Susan

The original Murmur team was John O’Donnell and Susan Robertson. Both went on to do lots of work in the music industry post Murmur. Susan did a lot of work directly with fans and is much loved by the silverchair community to this day. John O’Donnell went on to be the GM of EMI Australia and other big music roles.

Even I remember reading about John Watson in the 90s. He was instrumental in signing the band, and then he switched to be their manager. I didn’t really quite know what that meant, and it lead me into finding out about all these different roles behind every band you know. John would go on to found the music company Eleven with the silverchair gents.

There’s no public photos of Susan – but she definitely played a key role. I don’t know her personally. The two Johns, they are to this day two of the most respected members of the music industry. They are still working together today, as the co-managers of Cold Chisel.

Music heard