The Lock-Up — Silverchair "Tomorrow" Music Video, Newcastle

In 1994, three fifteen-year-olds from Newcastle, New South Wales, filmed the music video for "Tomorrow" inside The Lock-Up at 90 Hunter Street — a sandstone building that had served as a police lock-up since the 1860s. Daniel Johns, Ben Gillies, and Chris Joannou performed in the old cell block, its raw stone walls and iron bars lending a claustrophobic intensity that matched the song's grunge fury. They were school kids playing in a prison, and they looked like they belonged there.

"Tomorrow" had won a national band competition run by Triple J and SBS, which came with a recording deal and the video shoot. The song won Triple J's Hottest 100 in 1994 and went on to chart internationally — reaching the top five in the US Billboard Modern Rock chart, an extraordinary result for a group of Australian teenagers who were still attending classes at Newcastle's Hunter Valley Grammar School between promotional appearances.

Silverchair's debut album Frogstomp, released in 1995 when the band members were still fifteen and sixteen, debuted at number one on the ARIA Albums Chart and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide. The album was recorded in nine days. Newcastle's working-class character and its distance from Sydney's music industry gave the band an outsider energy — they weren't part of any scene, they were just teenagers from a steel city who happened to write a song that sounded like the biggest band in the world.

The Lock-Up building was decommissioned as a police facility and is now The Lock-Up Cultural Centre, a contemporary art gallery and social enterprise space. The historic sandstone cells where Silverchair filmed remain intact, and the venue is open to the public. The building retains its imposing Victorian character — heavy stone walls, narrow corridors, iron fixtures — and carries a weight that goes beyond the music video. It held prisoners from the 1860s through to the 1990s, and its conversion to an arts space is one of Newcastle's better reinventions. For Silverchair fans, standing in the cell block where "Tomorrow" was filmed is a reminder of how young they were, and how unlikely the whole thing was.