🟥 This article is translated from French.

The very young Australians of The Vines are taking up the torch of a saturated and bubbling pop left abandoned since Nirvana. If their first album, Highly Evolved, with its electrified barbed wire, is a total pleasure to listen to, it's even worse live on stage.

Too bad for the plane neighbors: The Vines' album Highly Evolved is meant to be played loud. An oxygen mask for depressurization, a life jacket in case of a crash, a magical refreshment made up of ingredients for expending energy and minerals for recovery. The fifth track, "Homesick," starts off like Mercury Rev and evolves into choruses reminiscent of what Lennon and Macca could have hummed if they were born in the late '70s. As luck would have it, we're arriving at Liverpool's Lennon Airport. Around the university concert hall, you can smell the summer, that faint aroma of delicately roasted skin, and at the sight of the T-shirts where The Vines are already replacing the threadbare leathers of the indie-kids with their Strokes look.

To be sure of getting his ticket and seeing the four Australians, the young working-class guy who works in a factory in the suburbs near Everton was the first to the HMV record store in the city center. Same effort for the late teenager of forty brooms who left his mother and the children in Wales.

On stage, sweat streams down Craig Nicholls' cheekbones: the singer, full of youthful motivation, is not even afraid of playing wrong notes any more. He rarely takes his nose off the instruments and stares at a devoted audience who is excited by one or two songs that they immediately adopted as the anthems of their summer. Because the Vines discography is limited to three singles, including two incredibly addictive killers (Highly Evolved and Get Free) that shot into the English Top 40 upon release. The thunderous album Highly Evolved, produced by Rob Schnapf, who was also responsible for Beck's Mellow Gold, will be released in the middle of July. But it nothing like those wet squibs that the industry generally throws out in the summer, to ride the low tide.

Launched in pursuit of the limousines of the garage revival— the American Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and White Stripes or the Swedes Hives— The Vines are speeding on stage. The group combines the dry power of the drum and bass with lofty guitar melodies, enhanced by a cyclothymic vocal timbre. The refined rock of The Vines versus the degenerated and reactionary rock of Oasis.  What fascinates here is the way they tear apart and blow away the catalog of references, from Nirvana to My Bloody Valentine, from Supergrass to Pixies. In any case, the buzz around this handful of singles (including the already unobtainable Factory) has already set fire to the UK music scene with a tour which will conclude with an appearance at the equally sold-out Glastonbury Festival.

Backstage, Craig Nicholls, a less well-groomed and more crazy Leonardo DiCaprio, strolls with a swaying step, accompanied by his inseparable ghetto-blaster, where songs of Suede, Supergrass or Radiohead jostle. Wrongly described in the British press as a suicidal prodigy capable of succumbing to uncontrollable anxiety attacks, he displays on the contrary, when he is summoned to reveal what is hidden under his eternal hairstyle teenager, an implacable maturity and an immeasurable ambition to endure. Pete Yorn, their supporting act, gave them a lesson. “A pipe, with apple-flavored tobacco,” will be enough for their daily exhilaration, says the American artist as a veteran of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Nicholls agrees and advocates ethics above all. "I don't just want to represent the cliché of the rock singer. Above all, I'm trying not to fall into the trap of drugs. I want to live beyond 30, keeping my focus on music, for which I feel a obsessive desire. I think that one day I will change my means of artistic expression, maybe return to painting for example, because I don't want to stay the same. But for now, I want to spend hours, if necessary, in the studios, be interested in new technologies. If the artist becomes a mere merchant who passes on his junk, I call it sacrilege. I respect music too much to behave that way."

The next day, we found the young zebulon in Leeds, in what Radio One voted "the venue of the year", the Cockpit. Craig is beaming. This son of an obscure musician from the 60s grew up among rock icons and bad seeds, working a small job in a Sydney fast food joint to pay for records and guitar strings. Happy to be there, although a bit worn out from the energy of the previous night, he is learning patience with the delayed release of the album. "Since Highly Evolved was finished, the wait has been long and the exciting discovery of the Los Angeles studio is already far away. It was the first time we left Sydney, everything was new, the colors, Hollywood... But now we're going to be able to really appreciate ourselves, because everyone will be able to listen to the album, and that's exciting." 

The Leeds Cockpit is packed. A beardless ephebe, a creature from Hollywood films à la Matt Damon, Nicholls pushes his voice to its last rasp, whispering in his velvet beard his jewels of verses, the most disheveled and bewitching this side of pop savagery since Nirvana. Then warning of a storm: he drops the neck of his guitar downwards, lets Ryan Griffiths take control of the electric proceedings to abuse his membrane. He shakes his mop of hair, unable to keep still, jumps from the power of the chorus to the exploration of intimacy, from vocal performance to the derailing of his thoughts. His voice seems constantly disrupted by a severe sore throat. His frail physique contrasts with the appearance of lumberjack-surfers Hamish Rosser and Patrick Matthews, worthy of the roles of complexed teenagers in the antipodean series Hartley, Hearts on the Edge. 

In the middle of the show, the group tackles the hit of Outkast Ms Jackson, a successful and well-executed attempt, accompanied by the audience on the "ouh" which punctuates the chorus. The end of the concert is more chaotic: Mark, one of the band's managers, reports to his colleague Andy that the damage on stage amounts to a few hundred pounds. Besides their manager, The Vines like to be surrounded by: childhood friends but also family. Thus, two young and pretty female loafer, fully tattooed and dressed as metal-gothic vamps, get invited from show to show, sacrificing their meager benefits to pay for gasoline. With such a cast, the group would have enough to recreate Ozzy Osbourne's real TV series. With Nicholls in a role equivalent to Ozzy, the series, which could be called "Aussie Osbourne", could even make people forget the neverending Australian soap opera Neighbors in the UK. Apparently, with this garbage, the English found a little blonde, Kylie Minogue. For her, the winemaking process worked well.