Their debut album is one of the most talked-about records of 2002. But the Vines' Craig Nicholls has the world wondering if he's a rock casualty waiting to happen. So whose leg is being pulled?

FEBRUARY 2002, THE ANNANDALE Hotel, Sydney. Craig Nicholls is waiting with the rest of the Vines to go onstage for their 8.30pm support slot to the Scientists. He looks relaxed and happy, a regular 24-year-old guy chatting with his mates. He doesn't seem nervous, twitchy, hyper, or vaguely bothered that he's about to play a show. If you'd been asked to decide which of these four would soon be lionised as "the new Kurt Cobain" and, in so many words, "a rock suicide waiting to happen", you'd have shaken your head and replied, "Er, none of them". 

Six months later in the Marriott Hotel in Maida Vale, north west London, Nicholls is still chirpy, but this time, eccentric with it. Even though he's right-handed, he shakes with his left - not, it seems, as a slight to the person he's meeting, but as a little amusement for himself. When a waitress brings him a Coke, his face lights up and he flashes her a double thumbs-up, like a small child taken to McDonalds for the first time. He fidgets constantly, at one point setting light to the book of matches lying in the ashtray before stubbing his cigarette out on the table.

He's just spent the past week meeting the British press, all of whom were keen to discover how much truth there was in an NME cover story that portrayed Nicholls as a potential rock casualty on a par with Kurt Cobain and [Manic Street Preacher] Richey Edwards. They came away bemused. "If someone told you he was 15, you'd believe them," says Steve Jelbert, rock critic for the broadsheet newspaper The Independent. "I don't think he's ever grown up." John Mulvey, writer for The Times and former NME Assistant Editor, agrees. "He's incredibly childlike. I don't think he's used to dealing with people, let alone hordes of journalists."

How much of this is an act designed to garner column inches around the release of the Vines' excellent debut album, Highly Evolved (which debuted in the UK at #3, Australia at #5 and #11 in the USA), and how much is a reflection of his true personality, is the crux to understanding the strangest frontman to emerge for quite some time. Nicholls pushes the slacker angle. He spent years doing nothing because he felt inspired by nothing. He worked at McDonalds because he was talked into it by bandmate, bassist Patrick Matthews. Apart from that, he smoked a huge quantity of dope and stayed at home listening to music, writing the occasional classic of his own.

"A lot of people I knew were travelling, but I liked staying at home a lot and being lazy," he drawls, in an accent closer to Austrian than his native Australian. "This [touring, interviews, etc] is totally not what my life has been about. It's been all about laziness. I didn't have any real interest in starting a band, it just happened and then I just found songwriting. It was the thing that turned me on the most."

Nicholls' newfound love for music was so intense that he actually tried his hardest to be inside it. At one point, he even ended up in hospital.

"I went to hospital because I thought I had tinnitus," he relates. "I used to play music really loud and I'd put my head right in the middle of it. I went to a gig, I can't remember who it was, and I had ringing in my ears for days afterwards, so I was really worried. It was fine, though. I used to go and put my head right in the speakers. A lot of young people do that."

Onstage, Nicholls has a similar desire to be taken over entirely by the earbleeding howl of music. At the Annandale, he restricted himself to replicating the sound of Kurt Cobain being strangled by the Pixies' Black Francis, but as soon as he hit the UK, the act became more animated. One show at London's Astoria theatre, as first support to Doves, saw Nicholls run through the songs in a variety of voices, substitut- ing weird yelps and shrieks for choruses and singing some words in bizarre exaggerated accents.

"It's a bit of a freak out for me, really overpowering," Nicholls says of playing live. "The music takes over you and you're on the ground or screaming into the mic. But it's a fun thing. It's a release ... from nothing, really. Just the pure fun of screaming. I like the sound of it, too. 

"The worst thing about all this touring and all the plane and bus trips is that I can't scream on a plane. On a stage, it's acceptable."

This is the first truly revealing thing that Nicholls has to say. As the conversation unfolds, it appears that rather than being a troubled depressive on the brink of self-harm, he's actually an acutely intelligent person with an unusually playful way of interacting with the world. Everything in his world is simple. He tried writing songs, he found he was good at it. He thought he'd tackle a few different styles (Nirvana, the Beatles, early Stone Roses), he discovered they were all extremely easy. Nothing seems a trial. So to keep himself constantly amused, he has his own version of fun. He screams, he fidgets, he cracks jokes - only to find that he's taken entirely at face value.

"No one really gets my sense of humour. I make jokes and people take them totally seriously. I said something about this band standing against planes and killing animals, as a joke, and it was printed as if I was being serious."

He proves his point with a pretty good wisecrack.

"I swear if I'm asked one more time about suicide, I'm going to kill myself." 

Ha ha ha.

"Yeah," he says pointedly. "Just make sure you keep in the ha has.".

The S-word is the big issue about Nicholls, of course. The line pushed by some quarters is that you'd better see the Vines while you have the chance, because who knows what will happen. On their last British tour, some fans turned up simply to catch a piece of rock history before it was too late. "Maybe he'll commit suicide," said one fan at a show in Sheffield. You can almost detect a glimmer of hope between the lines. The singer himself remains understandably nonplussed.

"How could I write and record and play songs and travel and be in a band, if I was about to kill myself?"

Does he know anyone that's killed themselves?

"No. Suicide is an extremely serious thing. I don't think it should be taken so lightly."

NICHOLLS IS A VICTIM OF ROCK'S long standing tradition of celebrating madness, of course. Genius is always perceived as coming hand in hand with mental instability. It's almost a prerequisite of a truly great talent. 

"I guess there's this whole kind of mystique surrounding people, an interest in what they do even if it's not music," Nicholls muses. "People like Brian Wilson were seriously artistic, and wasn't like the people he was mixing with. I'm focusing all my energy into the songs. Bands are a sacred thing and artists are a valuable thing, and should progress. I want to be creative, that's more real for me."

In the midst of all this hysteria, the songs are his safety net, his haven of sanity. Every line of inquiry eventually leads onto the same topic: he wants to get on with writing the second and third albums as soon as possible. All the songs are mapped out in his head; he simply needs to take some time off from freaking out onstage or climbing into yet another plane to be taken to yet another journalist who wants to know when he's going to kill himself. He needs to get on.

"The second album is going to be really extreme," he smiles. "Each track is going to be really different. It'll be thin with just one guitar track and one drum track. Then the next track will have five guitar tracks, electronica, cut up beats, a lot of vocal effects, some of it will sound airy, some of it will sound thick."

He even claims - although this could merely be the notorious Nicholls sense of humour getting up to its old tricks again that the third album will be entirely electronic.

"I really like the Chemical Brothers," he enthuses. "We're not one of those rock bands that says techno is shit. Electronica is the future. I want to do a really mellow acoustic album and a really extreme album. We've got five albums in us, I think."

One thing's for sure. With a talent this wilful, unpredictable and gloriously capricious, Nicholls will probably soon tire of the straightforward grunge-lite of such songs as "Get Free" and "Highly Evolved". He says that he used to have a recurring dream where he was flying and that many of his more introspective, mellow songs are an attempt to recreate the freedom he felt during those dreams. He even declares that "it's one of my ambitions to be able to fly," with a glint in his eye. And if at- taining that freedom means the end of the Vines, then so be it.

"I don't think I'll be doing this in 10 years time. I want to get into painting and visual art."

He seems certain, collected, sincere. And then he remembers himself.

"At 34, I'll be lucky if I'm alive breathing air on this planet." 

Hold tight.

THE VINES FOR BEGINNERS

Who Sydney-born red-blooded rock foursome, based in Los Angeles and huge in England, where they have replaced the Strokes as the band every- one obsesses about.

Sound Three-chord garage rock with Nirvana flavour crystals.

Resident Cracked Genius Craig Nicholls, lead singer and songwriter, noted for threatening suicide and ending interviews by locking himself in the bathroom for three hours. "He's mental," bassist Patrick Matthews concedes. "But there'd be no band if he was like everybody else." Nicholls' take on himself: "I want to be an artist, not a rock star."

Heard It Through the Grapevine The band formed circa 1995 over the grill at a suburban McDonald's, where Matthews and Nicholls flipped burgers; they would discuss their latest musical obsessions, which included the Beatles, the Kinks, Pavement and Beck.

What's Next The band has about 30 more songs in the can. "We could go to the studio tomorrow and make another two albums," says Craig Nicholls.

Land-Speed Record In 94 seconds, their single "Highly Evolved" pounds through three verses, three choruses and a guitar break. "We didn't realise it was so short until people made a big deal about it," says Matthews. "Get Free", their single, is the mightiest two minutes and six seconds of rock you'll hear this year.

Highly Evolved "I consider everyone highly evolved," says Nicholls. "I was looking at my hand - I wasn't on LSD - and I was thinking about how my hands push these buttons and make these sounds. And the words highly evolved came into my head."