Vines' singer a strange young thing

By STEVE JELBERT

There's no doubting it: Craig Nicholls, leader and songwriter of Australia's rapidly rising pop-punk crew the Vines, is an odd man. Twenty-four, but looking about a decade younger, he's a mass of nervous twitches, and drawls in the strangulated accent familiar to anyone who's heard his first hit, the recent 1 1/2-minute thrash of Highly Evolved.

Already it seems that the Vines have generated enough rock'n'roll stories to fill a career 10 times longer, yet as their debut album, also called Highly Evolved, hits the shops, Nicholls blithely contradicts every widely circulated story about its genesis, as if talking about another band entirely.

"It took four months over a six-month period. We had a few gaps in there," he explains. "It was our first time in a real studio. We had fun with it, worked hard and got along well with Rob, the producer. The environment we were in was really cool.

"I believed in what we were doing, and we'd prepared well for it. We were there just to do a job, so that's why we persisted with it. It was fun. Hard work, but fun. We ended up re-recording only a couple [he pronounces the word "copple"] of tracks."

Well, he's right about the environment. Sunset Sound and the Sound Factory in Los Angeles have had many greats walk through their doors. The delay presumably had more to do with the departure of David Oliffe, the original drummer, who reportedly had a nervous breakdown and has recently re-emerged to describe the producer, Rob Schnapf - well-regarded for his work with the Foo Fighters and Beck - in the most unflattering terms, while promising his own rapid return to the fold.

That would be highly unlikely. The record was completed by the session ace Lenny Waronker, familiar from his work with REM, Beck and Bic Runga.

So far, Nicholls and the rest of the Vines have effortlessly left a trail of chaos in their wake. Yet the journey of this middle-class suburban Sydney slacker from a part-time job at McDonald's to hobnobbing with the rock aristocracy seems oddly inevitable.

Initially picked up by an experienced Australian management firm, which planned to record the band then place them with a major label, the Vines soon overshot their budget before Capitol/EMI claimed them as their priority signing for 2002. Already they've become something of a sensation on American "alternative" radio.

Things are going just as well here. They've had two hits, total length: 3 1/2 minutes. Their fascinating psychodrama of a live show - in which the unpredictable Nicholls resorts to gurning, as if struggling to get the words out, when not berating bandmates and crew - has failed to deter their teenage core audience.

Despite a hysterical feature in Britain's NME, which suggested potential fans should catch the band as soon as possible in case Nicholls followed in the footsteps of his inspiration, Kurt Cobain, he's more detached than disturbed, apparently in a world of his own and rather likeable for a twentysomething teenager.

Luckily, the Vines' bassist, the long-suffering Patrick Matthews, deferred his medical studies to stick with the band, so unless he cracks and takes out his frustrations on his erstwhile leader (apparently not unlikely), Nicholls is in good hands. Nonetheless, it's hard to balance Nicholls' repeated belief that "there's something sacred about being in a band" with reports of his erratic behaviour. No one ever shares a room with this man on tour.

Thankfully, Highly Evolved is an excellent album. Miraculously so, in view of Nicholls' taste in music, which is apparently at odds with the fragility of his finest songs, such as the rambling ode to weed Mary Jane (he's a prodigious smoker, by all accounts), and the beautiful Country Yard, a strangely Australian phrase used to describe the view from his window.

"I was singing about the country and my backyard at the same time," he explains, before going into a long ramble about the exact technicalities of the arrangement.

Aussie he may be, but the outdoor life has never appealed. He's spent most of his time indoors in classic teenage fashion, to his parents' dismay.

"That's exaggerated. There's some truth to it. I go out sometimes, but not a lot," he concedes. "Usually it's just hanging out, listening to albums, stuff like that. I go through different moods. Sometimes I'm tired, sometimes hyperactive ... "

The words tail off. He'd never even flown until last year, an experience he dislikes, though it is rapidly becoming a regular feature of his life.

Geographical isolation from musical trends may explain Nicholls' impressively random tastes. "It was just bands I heard through friends or on music television. [He may mean MTV, who knows?] The bands that affected me were the ones I got into, but I'd always have to hear the music first," he says, unconsciously revealing himself to be free of fashion's influence. "We listened to bands like Pavement, STP [Stone Temple Pilots], Dandy Warhols."

His naivety shows in other ways. Talking of the recording-process, he says, "I thought there'd be, like, 100 tracks. For extra, extra harmonies and harmonised lead guitars and feedback tracks, techno stuff. But Rob understood that the songs didn't need that. I was getting a little too ambitious. Sometimes less is more."

When I mention that Neil Young (an obvious touchstone for his slower tunes) often left the tape running to capture run-throughs before dismissing his bemused musicians, who might have fancied a second attempt, he seems genuinely amazed that anyone would even consider such an approach.

But you can't catch him out too easily. Suggest that rock loves to mythologise madness, and he won't rise to the bait.

"I guess it's this whole kind of mystique, an interest in what people do, even if it's not music. People like Brian Wilson were seriously artistic, and perhaps he wasn't like the people he was mixing with," he posits, using his two favourite words, "artistic" and, appropriately, "music", for the umpteenth time. "I want to be creative. That's more real for me."

He's certainly as unworldly as Wilson. When he declares, "I don't think I'll be doing this in 10 years - I want to get back into painting, visual art", it's more a passing fancy than a statement of intent. (Unsurprisingly he was previously at art school, the traditional home of the wastrel.) Yet the statement, "What I'm serious about is giving back to music, because I respect those who've made it and are making it now," is strangely reassuring.

Then again, if you emerge from a life without struggle in the planet's whitest suburbia, you have to generate your own troubles. He's so effortlessly unengaged and juvenile for a man in his mid-twenties, it's a relief that his daydreaming has resulted in such excellent melodies. Reality does not beckon. Fame does.

- INDEPENDENT

* Highly Evolved is out now.