Amid the stale scene of nu-metal, alt-rock and pop punk, the music world screamed out for a saviour. They got The Strokes, and then the most exhilarating time in music snce grunge bled from the sound-starved loins of Seatle. By Toby Creswell

Hey, just wanted to share excitement - went to the Reading Festival on the weekend (the leeds leg of it), which was bloody ace. But oh my God, the Vines!!! Fucking hell, I was blown away - they were amazing and the whole place just went off! Everybody was moshing like a motherfucker, even oldies like me! It was pretty incredible - like the Nirvana show at the first Big Day Out. Have you seen them yet? You should if you ain't. Another special moment was thousands of Northern folks (and me) all singing, "Hey Jude" while waiting for the Strokes, but I'll stop now... viva la Vines! - Neillie Connors, JUICE, via email, August 9, 2002.

The Reading Festival has become one of the most important annual events in the world of rock & roll. For one long weekend in August, up to 550,000 music fans flock to Reading and now its spin-off leg, Leeds, to witness the best big-scale showcase of new sounds and headlining stars. In the early '90s the event may have been in decline, but suddenly the Seatle sound moved in to reignite a stagnating scene; since, the Reading Festival has been the prime arena for staging the best live performances. It was here in 1992 that Nirvana performed an incendiary set. This was the high point of grunge: Kurt Cobain, a suicide waiting to happen, and behind him a legion of rock believers who were to make grunge the pre-eminent sound of that decade. 

Ten years on, Reading is once again at the front of a burgeoning movement. In the intervening of raves and dance music events, rock & roll appeared to be on its last legs. However, Reading 2002 was the place to be, pulsing with the avatars of the new rock - the Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the White Stripes, the Moldy Peaches, the Von Blondies, the Datsuns, the (International) Noise Conspiracy, the D4 and a slew of new, young contenders. Britpop stars, electronica superheros and metal heads still had their place in the sun; but the action this year was with new garage-rock bands playing grunged-up, carefree pop music, having the times of their lives.

And they are. Consider the Datsuns from New Zealand. Virtually unheard of outside the Shaky Isles a year ago and playing the small pub Vic on The Park in Sydney's inner west six months ago, the '70s garage-rock four-piece are now sifting through record deals worth $A3 million.

It's common knowledge that the popular music business is in the doldrums. The blockbuster albums on which multinational record companies depend are few and far between. The stars of grunge music are no longer selling records; nu-metal's aggressive charge is faltering, tiring. The depression is not only financial. Aside from rap, there hasn't been a popular music movement since the brief Britpop explosion during the '90s, when Supergrass told us it was "Alright", Pulp advised us to shag and booze like "Common People" and Oasis took on Blur for the throne.

Unlike movements before it, this new wave of garage-rock bands is small and mobile; the groups don’t require massive production to whip up a storm in a club — the opposite, in fact. The groups have built a grassroots following through hitting the live circuit and hitting it often. Although their albums aren’t shifting huge numbers (the Strokes have sold less than two million copies of Is This It and the Vines have shifted just over 500,000 copies of Highly Evolved, worldwide) there’s a sense of excitement building again.

There’s no doubt that new rock has opened up record company chequebooks, eager to capture the Next Big Thing. As one label managing director recently remarked, “One of these bands is going to make a Nevermind.”

A frontrunner for this is the Vines. The band from Oatley, south of Sydney, has caused a massive international stir - and it’s not just with high international chart placings. On a good night the Vines can be incandescent, transcendental. On a bad night they are woeful. Sometimes they can be both at the same time. Take the group’s August 19 performance on David Letterman’s Late Show: the group descended into Stooges-style sludge and singer Craig Nicholls injured himself on the mike stand, completing a blistering version of “Get Free” with blood all over his face. “Troubled teens!” Letterman quipped with a bemused grin as he threw to the commercial break.

This succinctly summed up the appeal of the Vines and their peers. They are still unpredictable; Nicholls is still ruled by his whims. For at least the past 10 years, rock music has been presided over by careerists. Last year’s outlaw, Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst went from a tattoo parlous toa vice presidency of a multinational company; the records he made on the way through were largely incidental. It showed. Everything was branded and formulaic; the live performances were just rote spectacles with all the soul of a Jerry Bruckheimer film. The Vines, the Strokes, the White Stripes and their new-rock classmates, retain a sense of live, unpredictable energy that won’t, and can’t be harnessed. Unlike the overblown nu-metal scene, less is far more: the Vines’ two hit singles add up to less than five minutes of purely inspiring music.

Then there’s chemical X, charisma. Craig Nicholls clearly has it: he’s young, good looking, tousled and troubled. He has a reputation for consuming excessive amounts of marijuana and for being vague and enigmatic. The NME famously announced that its readers should see the Vines this year - before Nicholls became the next Cobain. Let’s face it, if the Vines’ material didn’t stand up, their frontman would be tagged as a prize wanker. Like many, Andy Slater, who sealed up the American deal for the band, was floored when he met Nicholls.

“I was at the studio with another new band on the label and this kid walked in, and he had this immediate presence. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular - just wandering around the studio, kind of looking at the air,” Slater recalls. “Sometimes artists are tapped in to some other dimension that enables them to articulate things we want to say but sometimes can’t. He felt like someone who was tapped in.”

On September 19, 2000, as the sun set over the CBD and its workers filed through Belmore Park in Sydney, the Vines performed first on the bill for free Olympic shows. Oddly matched with Golden Rough and Hoolahan, the Vines’ thunderous, noisy, sprawling rock show unfolding on the high stage was a little incongruous with the neat astro-turf scattered with curious onlookers and oblivious passers-by. Nicholls, whose waifish build was accentuated by his closely cropped Sid Vicious do, had the chaotic grace and shambolic style of a rock star waiting to happen - even if their sound, and songs, were in need of plenty of polish.

“They were incredibly scrappy and totally obsessed with the music,” remembers Andy Kelly, the band’s Sydney-based co-manager, of his first time with the Vines. “Within 30 seconds, I turned to Andy [Cassell, management partner] and said, ‘Do you see the same thing I see?’ Craig was just lost in his world onstage, playing this amazing music. We couldn’t believe this person that no-one knew anything about could have so much talent and charisma.”

The legend of the Vines is already very familiar: flipping burgers in McDonald’s, obsessing about Nirvana, Nicholls spending his formative years pulling bongs to daytime television. Clearly there’s some truth to the image of the singer as a reclusive, shy and spaced twentysomething, yet despite the angsty edge to his music Nicholls doesn’t appear to be dangerous - to himself or anyone else. Intense, but not especially self-destructive, his background of a stable, loving family doesn’t lend itself to the dysfunctional anthems that erupted out of Seattle a decade ago. This makes up a lot of the appeal of the movement: music fans have had enough psychobabble, we want rock & roll to be fun again.

Just an enigma out front wouldn’t be enough, though. The difference between the Vines and a hyped-up, highly exposed rock machine like Andrew WK lies in the Beatles-esque quality of the songs crafted on Highly Evolved. Classicism as well as charisma.

“I was floored,” remarks Slater. “It had all the energy and spirit of rock & roll rebellion, yet all the melodic sense that a gifted singer-songwriter would bring to a record. For a while now, you get a feeling listening to the radio that we are coming to the end of one era in rock and the beginning of another one. No-one knows just what shape the new one would take, but this music sounded like what should be on the radio.”

“Craig was very protective of his turf,” reveals Rob Schnapf, producer of Highly Evolved. “I worked hard at trying to show him that I was there to help, that I cared as much about his music as he did. He’s totally obsessed by the music. People talk a lot about how he seems to lose himself in the music onstage - it’s no act. I’d be at the console watching him just going out of his mind some days, bouncing off the walls. He was so intense about what he was doing.”

“I’m just passionate about what we do,” says Nicholls. “People often think I’m freaking out when we’re playing, but there’s a joy in turning yourself over to the music and letting it lift you. It’s almost a sacred thing to us.

“There’s an intensity to our music that may sound like negativity sometimes, but mostly I see the music as optimistic,” he continues. “I’m certainly an optimistic person; I don’t see any point in being alive if you're not. Music helps you feel that way. It has certainly lifted me. Before music, there wasn’t much in the world for me to do. It gave me a reason to go outdoors.”

Mote telling is his view about the Beatles and the music of that era, and the overwhelming sense of importance. “There was something very artistic, worthwhile about what I heard in those records,” he explains. “It felt real, like someone expressing his life passion, not just making music to get on the radio.”

Now that the Vines have hit the airwaves themselves, Nicholls is under intense pressure. All spotlights are facing his way, and the music media are calling for action. They want a rock star that will behave like one is expected to - even if it means treading the rocky terrain of Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain. The band’s management is well aware of the psychological cost this entails.

“I don’t think he’s trying to project an image,” Kelly says. “On the contrary, he often finds it difficult to understand why people are interested in him or why people, especially in England, are trying to make him into something he’s not. The only thing he’s interested in is writing and recording music. Back home he pretty much stayed in his room and worked on his music; that was his whole life. Our job at the moment is to take a bit of the heat off the band and go home. They need to go home and be normal.”

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