The 43-year-old Aussie music legend sat down with The Project co-host to talk about his latest solo album FutureNever, as well as an exhibition in Melbourne dedicated to Johns called ‘Past, Present & FutureNever’.In a promo clip of the interview, talk soon turned to Johns’ horror car crash in the Hunter Region in March, which saw him plead guilty to high-range drink-driving before admitting himself to rehab.Bickmore, 41, asked Johns what he remembered from the crash, to which he responded: “Everything. Everything. I remember every detail.”Johns paused before asking, “Is it cool if I take a break for just one sec?” as he walked out of the room.In the lead up to that, Johns described what led him to get behind the wheel that night, which led to his grey SUV moving to the wrong side of the road and crashing into an oncoming van. Thankfully, there were no casualties.Describing his head space, Johns said he was “entrenched” in creating FutureNever – his second studio album which shot to number one on the ARIA chart in April – to a point where it became “self-destructive”. “With FutureNever, I was looking at it as if it was my swan song. So, if it was the last thing people were ever going to hear, it needed to be a masterpiece in my head. And I’m not sure a masterpiece exists,” he began.“And it’s not by design, but a lot of my favourite artists have in some way or another been self-destructive. And I’m not trying to mimic that, I’m not trying to mirror that. I want to be the antithesis of that. I want to be productive. “It’s hard for me to find how to be creative without being self-destructive. It’s hard for me to find that.”Johns said he had a “full-on nervous breakdown” and was “barely even aware of what I was trying to do”.“I was trying to escape, like it was the equivalent of running into the forest,” he said of getting in the car.“Everything was too much. I was in a really quiet environment, a really peaceful environment, and I didn’t realise that all the noise was in my head. So there was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.”Johns avoided jail for the incident at his sentencing in June after pleading guilty, but was ordered to complete 10 months of an intensive corrections community sentence and was banned from driving for seven months.The rocker, who founded Silverchair when he was just 12, has long been open about his personal struggles, which began in the ’90s when he revealed he suffered from anorexia and anxiety. In a social media post after his car crash, Johns wrote he had been “self-medicating with alcohol” to deal with his mental health.“My drinking had become a bigger problem than I even realised, and how I have used it to help numb a range of deeper psychological issues that I’ve been living with since childhood,” he wrote on Instagram.“Some of those issues you know, and a lot cut much deeper. Alcohol is not medicine. I should have never treated it like it was. I feel like a complete f**k up and I’m sorry. “I take full responsibility for my actions on the evening of March 23rd, I am deeply remorseful and I am working every day to make amends.”Daniel Johns’ full interview will air Wednesday night on Channel 10’s The Project at 6.30pm.
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