With all the Nirvana news making headlines this week, from long-lost Kurt Cobain demos to suicide t-shirts to Marilyn Manson claiming he coined the term “grunge” in a review of Bleach, there was bound to be someone stepping up to give us a good old-fashioned cover of one of their time-honored classics.
Enter an unlikely candidate: Daniel Johns, the 35-year-old former singer/guitarist of ’90s grunge teens Silverchair. Johns gives “Smells Like Teen Spirit” a pretty different feel in the video below, recorded earlier this week, incorporating a piano and a harp to the delight of the crowd at Triple J’s Beat The Drum Festival in the musician’s native Australia.
After gaining widespread fame in the ’90s after the release of 1995 debut LP Frogstomp when they were just teenagers, Silverchair went on “indefinite hiatus” back in 2011. But not before releasing a pretty stellar — and widely unnoticed — 2007 single in “Straight Lines” (off the Young Modern album). He didn’t get enough credit for that tune.
Now a solo artist, watch Johns cover “Smells Like Teen spirit” below. His new record, Aerial Love, is out January 29 (we could only find that Spanish link, sorry).