Part 1

They've played just one official headline show in their home country, but Sydney band The Vines are currently one of the biggest bands on the planet. Across the world, their album Highly Evolved is being heralded as the debut of the year. But if you believe the band, they have no idea how all this happened. It sure beats working nine to five at McDonalds, though... Here we have the first of our two part feature on the boys who still call Australia home, but prefer to fart around the old dart...

"Is it a job?" we asked bassist Patrick Matthews when we met up with The Vines in May. "NO!" he declared boldly, for the record. "It's a mission!" So what's your mission statement, then? "Um… I don't know!"

For The Vines to say they've, at the very least, been "surprised" about the events over the last year of their lives would have to be one of the great understatements in recent rock'n'roll history.

In February they were a relatively unknown group doing support slots to a handful of people and a final first-ever headline gig in Sydney before heading overseas - in truth, a fantastically shambolic group of twenty-somethings laying their first fledgling shows as a four-piece. Last week, they performed at the MTV Music Video Awards in New York, and are currently leading an internet poll over The Hives as to which live band blew the place apart on the night.

Backtrack to a Manhattan afternoon in May, and we're sitting in New York's infamous (in truth dank and grotty with decades worth of cigarettes and stale beer ground into the floorboards) Mercury Lounge, unofficial birthplace of The Strokes, with one-quarter of The Vines. The group who, as the NME predicted in January, may well be the "most exciting band on the planet in 2002."

We've been warned beforehand that interviewing the two original members of the band together – lead singer Craig Nicholls and bassist Patrick Matthews - means the latter probably won't get a word in edgeways. So we decide to start with Patrick, currently worse for wear after a late night out boozing in SoHo which culminated in him vainly attempting to explain The Vines to their English tour manager.

"It made me more drunk, 'cos I was going 'Look, you don't understand!'" he laughs, re-enacting the whole sorry saga by blindly banging his fist on the bench between us. "'You don't understand! See, the first thing is The Beatles, you've got to understand about The Beatles!' And I was hitting the table, and telling him how good The Beatles were…" Craig will later tell us it's not so much the music of the Fab Four - but their general ethos of being ambitious - that The Vines like to adhere to.

So what's happened here? Just how did we come to be sitting in a club in downtown New York with The Vines on the eve of yet another sold-out show, when just four months ago they played their first ever headline gig as a four-piece (with new drummer Hamish Rosser and second guitarist Ryan Griffiths) in a mid-sized pub in Sydney? Don't ask Patrick. He doesn't know.

It's a "fluke", he guesses, buoyed by the ever-excited UK music press and the fact that they recorded their upcoming debut album Highly Evolved in Los Angeles last year (where original drummer David Olliffe left the band) after their demos were sent to Beck producer Rob Schnapf, on the strength of which they were signed to America's Capitol Records by president Andy Slater before anyone in Australia had heard of them.

"You Am I never broke in England," he offers as another avenue of explanation. "And everyone's been telling us it's because, like, they came over to England with a big Australian fan base and that wrecked it, because their shows there were just full of Australians."

He's not saying it to be disparaging, just pointing out the problems the English press see with any band that ventures into a British capitol full of Antipodeans. If anything, The Vines continuous struggle with homesickness has them desperate to get back here (conscious of the track Homesick on their album, we've smuggled a packet of Caramelo Koalas through customs - Patrick is grateful but "what we really need is vegemite…"). So unintentionally, they've somehow managed to do the whole thing backwards, and those at home have been forced to live vicariously through the overseas music press (who quickly picked the band up on the strength of UK-only single release Factory last November), watching from afar as The Vines juggernaut spins beyond their control.

But the band are crossing their fingers for a permanent return home by the end of the year, and want to record their second album in Sydney mid next year.

Back in NYC as the support band starts their sound-check, we move to The Vines tour bus, just above street level where the occasional group of honest-to-goodness real life New York homies walk past and whoop it up at our bemused faces trying to avoid eye contact from the windows.

On the wall above Patrick is a poster of Iron Maiden that current or former occupants have redecorated so all members are forevermore standing - faces etched in permanent snarls - bedecked in daggy texta y-fronts. Later, we'll sit and watch Morrissey and Clash videos, and Hamish will emerge sleepy-eyed from one of the bunks to confirm excitedly that he's heard The Strokes are coming tonight (bassist Nikolai Fraiture does, for the record, materialise at the end of the gig).

It's strange surrounds for a band who would still be playing toilet venues in Sydney had they not signed to Capitol late last year - and for the past four months The Vines have been having a very strange time indeed.

Sitting here, it's hard to remember that at the moment the world has gone crazy over 90 seconds of music – the frantic single Highly Evolved being their only official worldwide release up until this point. But a few nights ago they sold out a gig in Toronto anyway, while 200 people waited outside hoping to score a ticket.

The week before they played the Coachella Festival (their first) in Los Angeles with Oasis and The Strokes. And during March and April Vinesmania doubled their original amount of 'introductory' shows in Britain to eight, selling out every single one. In the four months after our interview, they'll go on to do two more tours of Britain and America, book in their first series of headline shows in Australia (the first two Sydney and Melbourne gigs selling out within 24 hours of going on sale), reach the Top 15 globally with their debut album, nab their second cover for NME in two months, grace the front cover of American Rolling Stone (the first Australian band to do so since Men At Work in 1983), play the Glastonbury and Reading Festivals and destroy the entire stage of The Late Show With David Letterman.

To say the situation is stark-raving bonkers is an understatement. To say Craig is still trying to get his head around it is another thing entirely.

"I feel…" he stumbles, having wandered onto the bus clutching a large plastic cup of Coke and trying to sum up life since they left the comfortable obscurity of the Australian suburbs. "Nervous, excited, scared, overjoyed, tired, energetic… and… happy and suicidal." Saying you hope it's not the latter only brings nervous laughter from both of them.

"We've been surprised," Craig continues, unconvincingly enough for us to think he always knew they'd come to something. "I mean, we were really happy with what we were doing and we still think we can go even further. What everyone else was saying [before then] never really mattered to us, we liked playing in a band and writing music… it wasn't about being famous, we wanted artistic satisfaction first." 

And maybe just a bit of fame and fortune? They already appear to have the trappings on a plate, whether they like it or not. Take for example, the whopping big tour-bus; two separate lounges, sound and TV system and sleeping quarters in between… "Oh yeah," laughs Craig rolling his eyes. "Make sure you put that in. They'll probably kick our arses when they hear that shit!" or London's Evening Standard papers declaring The Vines have 'snotty sex appeal' "Snot's not sexy!" he guffaws. "Well, we always wanted to be sex symbols, so we feel pretty good about it. We always thought that we were quite sexy…no, we're going to have to cut this shit right now!" (for the record, we did ask and no – Craig doesn't use anything on his hair. The Scarecrow-effect just is. "I don't pay attention to how I look," he frowns. "I just make art.")

"Someone asked me before… 'Someone said you're the saviours of rock music, what do you think of that?'" Craig cringes. "And it's like; people, if they want, they can buy the album and make up their own mind. Because it could be the greatest thing in the world to someone, it could be the biggest piece of crap to someone else. So… it's all… objective." 

"Subjective," corrects Patrick.

"Subjective, thank you," he concludes, mind wandering. "It's all obsessive. Compulsive." 

Inside The Mercury Lounge three hours later, there's an almost unbearable air of anticipation as that very same subjectiveness is put to the test. The Vines arrive unannounced and launch into the edgy seizures of Outtathaway! but the crowd don't move - Craig's microphone has mysteriously been turned off at the mixing desk. Mid-way through the track the voice suddenly comes careering through the speakers, forcing the front row to take a step back and the people around us to emit an audible gasp of "ahh!", instantaneously getting it. It's a virtual rock'n'roll tsunami, hurtling above the heads of uber cool New Yorkers.

Onstage, the threat of Craig violently self-combusting is never far away. The epileptic facial expressions, demonic screams and flailing limbs are in a constant battle for possession; the gig ending with him balancing on the kick drum and playing his guitar above and behind his head before scissor-kicking off awkwardly and booting the guitar across the floor.

The whole thing is exhausting, cementing Craig's earlier claim that "it takes you over, mentally and physically". Patrick will later tell us that Craig often seems like he's in a trance, while the others members of the band tune in and out. 

"I think singing really transports him to another place," he says. "But I remember [You Am I bassist] Andy Kent said once that when he was playing he was thinking about whether he was going to catch a bus home or get a taxi. I'm like that." 

'Do you own the songs or do the songs own you?', we'd asked that afternoon. "Both, or I can't tell anymore," Craig had answered, screwing up his face. "Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they're our songs, and the songs are us… this is what we do as people, we play in a band and we're consciously trying to make head music. And sometimes, the faces I pull, [it's] just because that's what it's like to get a certain note – I want to apologise if it's pretty ugly sometimes…" he'd trailed off, laughing self consciously. "It's mental." 

After the gig Craig is nowhere to be seen, having apparently bid a hasty exit back to the bus. He's neither one for drinking or the traditional after-gig trawling of nightspots with the other band members, managers, girlfriends, road crew and extra hangers on; "I usually come back to the bus and listen to a CD and watch tv," he tells us. "We're over here to let people know about the album, it's just a 'thing' we're doing. It's just part of the game that we have to play before we can get back in the studio."

Rewind to a few hours earlier, and that's exactly the point he's pushing. He'll tell us over and over that "it's all about head music" and that touring part is "fun" but the band "would prefer just to make albums." Every question, be it about which Beatle they like the best (Patrick empathises with Paul "a lot", Craig goes for John, and says "I think we have a similar relationship to Lennon and McCartney - we hate each others guts", but currently vetoes the idea of marrying a Japanese conceptual artist and moving to New York), life in LA where they currently reside, or whether they're getting complementary food from McDonalds – where Craig and Patrick famously met while working a decade ago - for all the free endorsement ("It doesn't matter," shrugs Craig. "We don't want to encourage the use of McDonalds.") is steered carefully back to what Craig likes to talk about best. 

Ask him any question and he often doesn't answer specifically but indirectly, using songs, riffs and lyrics as stepping-stones. Make no mistake – for The Vines everything, simply, is about the Music.

Take, for example, the fact that the next album is already written. Their New York set-list reads exactly the same as the one they played at their last gig in Sydney, but they have been playing new songs live recently including Fuck The World and years-old Drown The Baptists (which appeared on the Factory single). They had 40 songs available when it came to recording Highly Evolved.

"We have all the songs ready to go," Craig smiles wistfully. "We're really ambitious to make the second album a lot better."

'Better than this one?' we wonder out loud, thinking of the blissful harmonies on Autumn Shade and violent riffs of 1969 and being quite surprised he doesn't seem to acknowledge the perfection in any of it.

"Yeah, yeah, that's the way it goes, you know," he berates us, like a father laying down the facts of life. "The goal, for us, when we were kicking around in Australia, and I wasn't [doing anything] except writing songs and watching TV… we wanted to make an album, and we've done that now. So we're playing, it's fun, but we don't want to be playing these songs every night for years on end."

How those songs sound is not as simple as 'Nirvana Reincarnate' as every music hack worth their weight in clichés is appraising. Unless you've been living off the remote coast of Greenland for the past few months (thought goodness knows, they've probably heard of The Vines even there), you'll already know Highly Evolved encapsulates elements of grunge, but that's added to by the massive burning pyre of pyschedelia, blissful stoned harmonies, garage, punk, retro and raw rock'n'roll burning in the background.

It is, as Sydney street-press Drum Media put it, the kind of music that could well see "The Doors bumped as the futures bucket-bong soundtrack."

"Well, you know… I never took any drugs," Craig begins cautiously, when asked about the perfect space-rock of Mary Jane and the fact Patrick told nme.com earlier in the year that In The Jungle may have "a bit of acid in the lyrics." Immediately, his band mate splutters "HA!" and Craig is forced to backtrack (and given the wide-spread coverage afforded his obsessive pot smoking since, it seems almost a miracle he doesn't smoke – anything – during our entire conversation).

"Yeah. Well, I feel that, you know… like, the laws have got to change!" he starts again, laughing. "I cannot tell a lie, I've listened to music stoned before and it hasn't killed me, it's been enjoyable."

"But music's nothing if you have to be on drugs," concludes Patrick. "Like techno, it sounds fucking great if you're having fun at a rave or whatever. It's nothing if you can't listen to it straight, really."

Part 2

We continue our feature on the home grown boys made good...

...So back to the schizophrenic 'sounds like' list. Patrick thinks this conglomerate is to do with the "isolation" growing up in Sydney has afforded them, whereas bands from London or New York usually have music at their fingertips.

The Vines never played many gigs because Sydney's unfortunate wave of 'Pokie fever' in the mid 1990's was closing everything down, just as the band were attempting to start something up.

So instead they recorded at home and played friends parties, coming to the attention of their three-man management team, Winterman and Goldstein, when they were interviewed on a Sydney community radio station.

One of the directorate, as luck would have it, was listening in his car and happened to hear the band play a track called In The Jungle. He was interested enough to try and find out who they were – after all, the fact that he thought they sounded like Aussie punk band The Lime Spiders was apparently more exciting to him than anything.

This last fact is almost understandable if you're familiar with The Vines' original bleedingly raw demos, which were handed out at You Am I support gigs last May – but these in turn have caused 'traditional' fans dismay at the switch from that to the polished product Highly Evolved has become. Craig is unapologetic.

"Things change, you know?" he reasons, nonplussed. "There were some songs that were 'the demo's really good, we've got to get that', so we did that lot of songs and those songs turned out completely different – you've got to realise that. I mean this is all we had at the time; we just had a four track recorder and we wanted it to sound really crystal clear and everything to be 'up' there. We don't have anything against highly produced music as long as it's good music and it's been written by the people who are playing it."

So in the end, all this just might be a fluke (managers having the radio on, demos on the right tables at the right times and guitars being back in fashion just when they release their debut album), but you don't get on the front cover of NME twice or have Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield describe you as "absolutely fucking amazing" by doing nothing.

They know it and they're thankful for it – Craig says with all honesty...

"There are bands in the world that I wish had more attention, whether it's here or England or back in Australia. But it's a good… it's definitely not 'Why are people saying this' and 'Why are they paying attention to us'. It wasn't about being a big band and making lots of money and being famous, it was about being a good band, good albums and everything else after that - we can't control it." 

Some have even ventured to say he is set to become one of the most important songwriters of his generation, a Lennon, Dylan or Cobain. Songwriters who tended to systematically ride the highs and lows of rock'n'roll's fickle fringes, mentally and physically. So keeping in mind the lyrics to Highly Evolved – "I'm feeling happy/ So highly evolved/ My mind's a riddle/ That will never be solved" and John Lennon's quote "I'm either a genius or I'm mad", where does Craig stand?

"I am most definitely both… yes," he confirms, laughing wildly. "Well no, I'm probably more mad. I'm just a madman. I'd like to be a genius someday, though." 

Patrick laughs. He's been partial to the workings of Craig Nicholls' mind for nearly ten years now, and doesn't look entirely convinced this is going to happen any time soon.

"I'll put it in my diary," he smirks, shaking his head.

Trivia That May Come In Handy

• The Vines played their first gig in 1994. Patrick: "An 18th birthday at Hurstville RSL Memorial Bowling Club. We only played about three songs." 

• Their first official release was Factory, which went out as a limited edition UK-only single release last November through Rex Records. 

• The name comes from a band Craig's Dad was a member of in the 60's, called The Vynes. 

• Ryan is Craig's best friend from school and was recently described by NME as being "the one that looks like River Phoenix". 

• The video-clip for Get Free was directed by Roman 'son of Francis Ford' Coppola and Patrick did most of his own stunts. 

• Hamish saw The Vines ad for a drummer in The Drum Media, which read in part "Think Nirvana, The Kinks, Stone Roses. Awesome opportunity, smelly tour bus...". At the time, he was on annual leave from his regular gig as sticksman for an American Kinks cover-band. 

• London's Evening Standard newspaper recently described the band as having the same kind of "snotty sex appeal" as The Strokes. Craig: "Snot's not sexy! Well, we always wanted to be sex symbols, so we feel pretty good about it. We always thought that we were quite sexy...no, we're going to have to cut this shit right now!" 

• You Am I's Rusty Hopkinson was one of the first to release The Vines material, with a limited edition 7" vinyl of Hot Leather and Sunchild going out through his label Illustrious Artists last year. Available from www.illustriousartists.com, they're much cheaper than the US$81 someone recently paid on eBay... 

• Patrick is two years off being referred to as Dr Matthews, having been part-way through a medical degree before the band were signed.

• Craig once spent six months at an art school and is responsible, amongst other things, for the artwork on the Highly Evolved LP, the bands logo and the bird that appears on the cover of the Highly Evolved single. He recently told a web- site that he'd be "maybe painting, or drawing... or skateboarding" if he wasn't making music. So we gave him some paper. He drew us a cup of coke.