Great Australian Albums
Silverchair – Diorama

This just doesn’t fit; Diorama, the rainbow-coloured confection of stage-musical odes and chromatic vocals, as a ‘Great Australian album’? Diorama? That prog-grunge confusion of musical ideas, where archaism and arcana were deployed to obtain distance from drop-D beginnings? Johns hangs himself on his own words here when he utters a did-he-really-just-say-that? sentence: “I think it alludes to complexity that doesn’t exist.” You tell ‘em, wunderkind.

We get in this doco the by now well-rehearsed narrative of Johns’ depression and anorexia around the time of this record’s gestation – there’s enough pop-psychology dribbling here to fill the oil tankers floating off the Newcastle coast. And consequently we get the logical confusion of genuine human backstory and the musical outcome, as if this tortured time for Johns automatically conferred depth and brilliance on *this album. Every half-hack documentarian and journalist can find anxiety and stress in the background of artist production, so the emphasis on this here is a telling avoidance of the multi-coloured elephant in the room: *Diorama’s woeful songwriting; the point, that is to say, that it’s the articulation of ‘troubles’ in musical form which is important.

The doco treads water for fifty minutes, establishing its themes early – depression, studio, overcoming – and then looks to nearby hangers-on for confirmation of this biography: the adequately obedient supporting cast known as Ben Gillies and Chris Joannou chip in glib remembrances; the band’s manager, John Watson, comes closest to actually saying something.

Diorama is a muddle of desired messages and agoraphobic mania. This documentary says as much. Perhaps Diorama was a successful therapeutic exercise – undoubtedly a positive thing for the one person (Johns) doing the working-through. This doesn’t make Diorama a classic Australian album. The series may be a strange beast (are they ‘great’ because of influence, sales or critical acclaim?), but even on its on terms, Diorama seems an unlikely and wrongheaded candidate.

by Ben Gook