DANIEL Johns has a new toy. The slim mixing board, bubbling with knobs and sliders, sits on a stand at hip-height, and he can't keep his hands off it.
A quick twist of something on top, a tug of something on the side and he's infused the big statements that make up the song Preach ("Now I dance to my own beat . . . 'cos I fall at my own feet") with an electronic hiss before they trail off into distorted wobbles.
There is a swarm of sound in the tiny inner-Sydney rehearsal room - two synthesisers, a small drum kit, three back-up singers, a man-sized harp and the odd clink of knocked-over Super Dry empties - but it's hard to take your eyes, and ears, off Johns.
The back-up singers certainly can't. Perched on stools in a corner, they watch him as if hypnotised, their bodies springing upwards when he raises his right hand, then winding down as the music softens and he deflates.
They're rehearsing for the former Silverchair frontman's first live performance of music from his debut solo album, Talk, at the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) Awards. As the song dissolves in a series of harmonies, it's clear things are coming together. Still, Johns has some notes.
He pinpoints a line and tells the singers to hit it harder. "Just that guy," he says. "The rest is spot-on." He takes a swig of beer and they sing the song again. It's been two days of rehearsal for the band, a full day for the singers and half a day for Johns.
"I can picture myself sitting down and chatting as mates, yeah, but the idea of being in Silverchair . . . I can't even picture it any more. It feels like that was a period of time that was amazing, but not one I want to revisit or relive."
When the song ends, he declares the day done. "We don't want to overrehearse it," he says, slapping hands with all in the room. "We want to let some moments happen on the night."
Standing at his flash new toy like a conductor, eyes rimmed with smudged make-up, his maroon singlet scooping low enough at the neck to reveal a scorpion tattoo skittering up his chest, Daniel Johns is in his element: confident kook, beloved rock star. And yet, when we sit to chat in a close-by studio, the door closed on the clinking bottles of post-rehearsal revelry, his mood shifts from elation to apprehension.
"It was never intended to be this big," he says of his solo venture, shifting in his chair. It began as a series of noisy experiments at home that he had no intention of releasing to the public. "I never thought I'd be in a rehearsal room, I guarantee you that."
Stage fright still kicks in - and hard: "The live situation is really exciting and filling me with dread at the same time. I overthink everything. I'm riddled with anxiety all the time."
Some of that anxiety has been plaguing him since the first time we chatted, about a week earlier, on a balcony atop Universal Music's Kings Cross HQ in Sydney. After that conversation, "I went home spewing," he says, with a soft laugh. "I went, 'Oh f - - -, I hope I didn't offend.' The stuff I said about Newcastle . . . about Silverchair . . . Could I have phrased that better?"
It was that afternoon that he answered the question many Australians have been asking since Silverchair's last record was released eight years ago: where has Daniel Johns been? "Hiding," he'd said. "After Silverchair came to an end, I needed four years to just . . . disappear."
HOW does the country's most famous rock star just . . . vanish? For Johns, it was a matter of "staying on the lowdown". There were trips to Sydney and LA to work with different musicians, but mostly he was in his oceanside Merewether home - a 1970s palace he describes as "something you see in Boogie Nights" - with the blinds closed, literally.
"I just wanted to not be in the industry and not be famous and not have anything to do with it. I felt like I was losing who I was. I was becoming the lead singer of Silverchair more than I wanted to be."
He tooled around making lyric-less music, noisy soundscapes just for fun. And he watched movies almost constantly - Apple TV has become "quite an important fixture in my life". He remembers the day he learnt about online supermarket deliveries: "It was like, 'Man, I don't have to leave! It's going to be genius - I'll just sit at home with the puppy dog!' "
The blinds stayed mostly closed, though he did check the surf through binoculars every morning (he hasn't gotten on a board since his teens, but says he still thinks about surfing all the time). And he regularly walked that puppy - Gia, a shar-pei-whippet cross that Johns proudly describes as a "really weird girl".
"It wasn't like I was sitting in my dressing gown, shaking, with a cigarette," he says, "but I wasn't in a very social stage. Those first four years of hiding were more about just shutting everything out."
There was a lot to shut out. By the time he was 30, Johns had been fronting Australia's biggest rock band for longer than he hadn't been. Silverchair broke big when he, drummer Ben Gillies and bass guitarist Chris Joannou were just 14 and 15 and their song Tomorrow went from a rough, angsty demo sent to an SBS-backed band competition to an international smash hit - No. 1 on the ARIA charts and the US rock charts. The album that followed, 1995's Frogstomp, sold 2.5 million copies worldwide.
Overseas success dipped more with each new record - Freak Show (1997), Neon Ballroom (2000), Diorama (2002) - but the band only swelled in stature back home. Australians watched them grow from teens fond of mooning girls from tour-bus windows into young rock royalty, scooping up ARIA awards by the sackful as their sound matured with them.
By the time Silverchair's last album, Young Modern, was released in 2007, fronted by three men in fine suits and finer facial hair, the tag the press had originally bestowed - "Nirvana in Pyjamas" - was long dead.
Johns was always the star. He was beautiful to look at - whether in straggly-haired surfer kid mode or, in later years, as the sharp jawed glam-rocker - and a tabloid dream: an eating disorder in his teens, a high-profile marriage to the singer, songwriter and actor Natalie Imbruglia in his 20s. But musician Paul Mac, with whom Johns released an album in 2004 as the band The Dissociatives, says it's more than that.
For Mac, Johns' allure is that he has always been unpredictable, that he pushed Silverchair away from predictable rock and towards reinvention as everyone watched on confused, and delighted "Everybody was like, 'What's he going to do? Where's he going next?' " says Mac. "And that's what a star does."
By the time Silverchair began working on its sixth album, what Johns wanted to do next was being compromised by the format of the band that had made him. He wanted synths, distortion. When he tried to work the elements in, "it ended up being a camel, a horse designed by committee; it was turning into this wishy-washy, semi-electric, semi-rock thing. It wasn't what it was in my head, so I had to make a really hard decision."
He called his management, Gillies and Joannou, and told them it was better to end it now, after a strong record. They were uncomfortable conversations. "I think they would have preferred to keep going, but I also think they understood," says Johns. "We were all on different trajectories."
In the statement the band released in May 2011, the move was termed an "indefinite hiatus" but Johns' seems more definite these days. The trio text each other occasionally - Joannou runs The Edwards, a restaurant and bar in Newcastle, Gillies is working on various music projects in Melbourne, where his wife, Jackie, is a psychic and reality-TV "Real Housewife" - but Johns can't imagine being on stage with them.
"I can picture myself sitting down and chatting as mates, yeah, but the idea of being in Silverchair . . . I can't even picture it any more. It feels like that was a period of time that was amazing, but not one I want to revisit or relive.
"It was hard: Silverchair was all I knew my entire adult life, all of my adolescence and some of my childhood. After making those calls, the next morning I felt like -" he lets out a long, happy sigh, " 'The world is my oyster again. I can do whatever the f - - - I want.' And that's when I went into four years of hiding out."
ON APRAS night, Johns takes full flight - he's still flicking knobs and twisting dials, but he stalks the stage as well, crouching under awash of blue light for a dramatic tableau, then towering over the microphone and flinging open his oversized blazer to reveal his naked, inked torso. If the crowd doesn't exactly go wild, it's still one helluva declarative homecoming.
His is also the first number of the night but, afterwards, Johns doesn't take his designated seat next to friend and fellow musician Peter Garrett. And girlfriend Estelita Huijer, a fashion designer and blogger, leaves quickly to join Johns with his band somewhere else. Why did he leave so quickly?
"I was really nervous. I think I just gave out 48 hours of energy in three minutes. That was as much as I could give, I couldn't exchange pleasantries after that."
Johns, now 36, is re-entering the industry gradually. There's no national tour planned to promote Talk, just two shows (May 28 and 29) at the Sydney Opera House for the Vivid Live music festival. He released a four-song EP, Aerial Love, ahead of the album, because he likes the idea of "slowly drip-feeding" his new sound into the public consciousness. He also says it might be "my management being sympathetic to my anxiety - 'Let's not chuck him in the deep end.' "
Opinion is divided. His wrung-out, one-man-and-a piano cover of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit at a Triple J event in January had some critics hyperventilating in their search for superlatives, while another called it "execrable". Reaction was similar to the Aerial Love EP's titular single, on which Johns, once the owner of the world's most famous teenage growl, barely raises his voice above a whisper. "This is so different from what made Daniel Johns Daniel Johns," wrote one iTunes commenter. "I mean, at least he's still gorgeous, right?" posted a glass-half-full type on YouTube.
The song was released as a "palate-cleanser", says Johns, and it is a very accurate reflection of the electronic, R&B flavours that follow on the album. Talk, for which he worked with a grab-bag of sought-after writers and producers (among them collaborators of Lorde and Eminem) is full of synth-heavy, sexed-up '80s-style pop. The first single, Cool On Fire, is blissful dance-floor bait, while the catchiest track, Dissolve, could have come from Erasure or Pet Shop Boys. "The whole concept of being an artist is to be divisive," says Johns, reflecting on the reactions to his new music. "The amount of people who go, 'That's not Daniel Johns' . . . it's like, what the f - - - is Daniel Johns? I don't even know. I'm just exploring music."
OTHER challenges in re-entering the music world have little to do with music at all, but are familiar to the man who still recalls, bitterly, being "papped" riding his bike to Newcastle High by a photographer who'd paid classmates to reveal his morning route.
In the lead-up to the release of Aerial Love, the first look many people had had of Daniel Johns in years was through photographs of the star entering a Newcastle court in February for sentencing on a drink-driving charge, and voyeuristic pictures of him with Huijer, hanging out in the sun on their balcony.
Johns says he knows how to handle the tabloid media now: mostly by not caring, and simply not saying anything quotable. Ex-wife Imbruglia, whom he married in a secret 2004 Port Douglas wedding that one paparazzi helicopter still managed to disturb, and whom he divorced in 2008, is one of few subjects on which the almost insistently generous interviewee clamps up.
He is equally protective of Huijer: "She's a lot smarter than I was when I was her age, but I don't think anything can really get you prepared for [media intrusion]."
In his teens, Johns dealt with more than just harassment from the "paps". People on the street would call him a "faggot" or "freak"; at school, kids threatened to bash him for hitting on their girlfriends (he hadn't). "My life just didn't make sense. You go from that adoration touring America for six weeks, take two days off to recover from jet lag, then go back to school and have every second or third person want to fight you. The amount of head-f - - - ing going on was too much for a kid."
The toll it took was most bleakly captured in Ana's Song, the 1999 Silverchair ballad that laid out Johns' struggle with anorexia in his late teens. He can't watch music videos from that period, in which his weight dipped, according to some reports, below 50 kilograms. "If someone comes up to me and asks me to sign a photo from that era, it's like . . . 'Oh man, I can, but I'd really prefer to sign something more recent.' "
He looks healthy today, toned even, though he says he rarely exercises and has been a regular smoker since his 20s (as he prepares to do more live singing, he's switched mostly to a silver vaporisor that rarely leaves his fidgety hands). Years out of the spotlight have helped - he can get about Newcastle mostly unhassled, if not unrecognised. He may have to stop for a quick Instagram photo, but he doesn't mind. Mostly, people just do a double-take and move along.
It was a Wednesday night one recent winter, and Johns, still on sabbatical from the world, was at the mirror swiping on lipstick and adjusting his "North Shore mum" wig: grey bob, blond streaks. He and Huijer had purchased matching khaki onesies and were playing "dressups". They went to an inner-Sydney pub to meet a mate for drinks, not knowing it was rugby league's State of Origin night.
The place was packed, but "no one knew who we were", Johns says giddily. He was suddenly in a crowd, hiding in plain sight, and he loved it. "If you dress really hectic, no one would ever assume that it's you under there. You can get away with anything." With Huijer, he says, "Fun is our number-one priority."
Johns' love of dressing up is written all over his latest look: a publicity image for Talk shows the once grungy-looking skater kid sporting a black lace veil over thickly made-up eyes. Free of the constraints of Silverchair - "It would have looked really weird if I was wearing a veil and lipstick and the other guys were back there in wife-beaters and KingGees" - he says he's finally able to embrace his eccentricities.
The look is unlikely to temper rumours about his sexuality, which have been "relentless", he says, since he dropped the grunge look and became friends with openly gay artists such as Mac. Oft-repeated reports had him getting "cosy with a brown-haired bloke" in a Kings Cross nightclub after splitting with a girlfriend. He's keen to finally address the whispers.
"As soon as you have a man who has no problem with maybe even alluding to androgyny and who's known for having gay friends, the media jumps on it and says, 'He's gay,' or 'He's bisexual,' " says Johns. "I'm embarrassed for them. It's 2015 and I have heaps of gay friends and I don't care about being flamboyant. If I was bisexual, I'd say I was bisexual. If I was gay, I'd say I was gay. I wouldn't be ashamed of it. I'd celebrate it. I'd headline Mardi Gras and milk that puppy!"
ONE thing Johns does identify as, openly, is weird. "I was about 14 when I realised I didn't have the same personality type as the people I grew up with. I wanted to be a really amazing artist - I wasn't like, humble, you know? I don't really have a logical comprehension of other people, I don't understand how other people are. I knew I was never going to be normal: white picket fence, get married, have three babies."
What did he want? To be a musician, always, he says. And at home? "I just wanted to nurture animals and have a miniature pig and miniature horse and a little cow and a couple of puppy dogs. That was way more interesting."
(When we last speak, he is looking into the miniature horses, but waiting to work out whether animal cruelty is an issue before buying one. "They're so cute, they're like the size of a labrador," he says excitedly. "And so handsome with their mane and stuff - like Ziggy Stardust.")
Friends are quick to say what's obvious if you spend any time with Johns: he's as sweet-natured a guy as you're likely to meet, a "beautiful soul", as one puts it, the kind of rock star who asks you if it's OK to take a break mid-interview to "do a wee".
And yes, he's also "pretty mad and pretty kooky", agrees Julian Hamilton, one half of the Presets and a long-time mate and collaborator. "I don't know whether that's because he became a star at 14 or whether that's because he's had management really hands-on, looking after him for a lot of his life, or whether it's just because he is a little mad and kooky," says Hamilton. "I've got friends who aren't rock stars who are crazy and wonderful and beautiful. I don't know if Dan would be any different if he wasn't playing the guitar."
Johns himself knows that something different, something special, happened when the weird blond kid from Merewether became a sudden superstar.
"There's a theory someone told me that the age you become famous is the age you're mostly going to stay forever," he says, then adds with a giggle: "Which is kind of offensive! But there's a grain of truth to it. I'm always going to have that moment where I felt like, 'It's not going to be normal ever again.' Which is not a bad thing. There are heaps of good things that come with it. Now I can write whatever music I want, record wherever I want, pretty much work with whoever I want . . . I'd take that above being able to go to Bondi Beach any day."
