Interview with Silverchair drummer Ben 1999
New album out, you've been doing gigs and press across Europe, tired yet?
No this year has been OK so far. We had most of '98 off because Daniel wrote most of this album so we were pretty much just doing the recording and rehearsing, very restful

When did you guys get your hair cut off you all look very clean cut
Two and a half years now, one night we played a gig in Melbourne Australia and it was with Tool and we'd done a good gig but I kept getting my hair caught in my sticks because when you play drums the sticks get really jagged from hitting the hi-hats and so I was ripping my hair out all through and after the gig I had quite a few drinks and I was really psyched after the gig, because I love Tool, they're one of my favourite bands, so I was just like fuck this - I'm getting rid of my hair and it took Daniel and I five hours to do it because we did it with a pair of nail scissors and a blunt razor

How old were you when Silverchair formed?
Twelve, maybe Daniel was thirteen so it's like six or seven years now we've grown up together

How old are you now?
I'm nineteen

There was loads of hype about you not touring because of school
Well yeah a while ago we were just trying to spread our time out evenly. We finished school to the end, once you get to like year eight grade you can pick what subjects you want to do yourself so it was cool

What did you do?
Music obviously, gotta do English and maths, I did marine studies, sport and recreation and we did like a business course and some sound engineering just scratching the surface of that kind of stuff that was all pretty interesting

Was it a weird contrast after big gigs?
No it was cool, I think it kept us level headed, if we'd have left school at 15 and just gone on the road I think we would have lost track of reality by now and it would have all gone wrong

What's your favourite song?
"Point of view" because I really enjoyed playing the drums on it

What sort of music have you been listening to lately?
I've actually been listening to a lot of dancey stuff but not like headache dance, like more the beats stuff, kinda like the Prodigy but with no guitars, Crystal Method, Chemical Brothers, Junkie XL also the usual Led Zeppelin, quite a bit of Jeff Buckley lately, some soundtracks I just got the Shawshank Redemption soundtrack, we heard that song on MTV the Jay Z song and it inspired me to go get the Annie soundtrack too which is fantastic

So is it odd being back in England after like a two or three year gap?
It's really odd being back here we haven't been here for ages and we were kinda worried the fans might have forgotten so we're testing the water by playing like a one thousand capacity venue. It's really odd we're really big in Australia and America now but we've had to work really hard here to maintain a base but I guess it's good

The gig's sold out
Well that's good and means maybe we'll get to play somewhere bigger again next time

What did you think you'd end up doing when you were like really little?
I never thought about it, I was thinking of a trade like a carpenter or something so I probably would've gone into that, so I'm really glad that didn't become a worry

Why d'you pick drums as your instrument?
In primary school when I was a wee lad I saw the school band and thought the drummer was cool, so I decided I wanted to play, went home and was like "mum", at first she was like "oh why drums?, noise" but it was cool eventually and they let me play in the living room which was really good and I made a bloody racket I gotta say ......so thanks mum!