It’s 6.30 (April 30th, 2003) at Manchester’s Apollo theatre and there is already a crowd of black-clad, dirtyhaired teens waiting to try and catch a glimpse of Craig before tonight’s show. The Vines tour manager Andy Kelly shows us through the empty auditorium to the backstage area, he tells us that Patrick’s throat is very sore and asks that we keep the interview brief.

The crimson walls and gilded carvings of the theatre are a stark contrast to the somewhat damp and cramped backstage area where we are introduced to the tall, rather shy, yet classically handsome figure that is Patrick Matthews. Wearing light brown jeans and a well-worn red sweatshirt Patrick speaks softly throughout the interview with a gentle Australian accent, his throat is clearly painful, yet he is still charming and co-operative.

We sit down together at a table with a garishly patterned wipe-clean tablecloth in the noisy canteen and set the tape recorder running... 

CS: So how’s the tour going?

PM: Well this is the third last show of six weeks, and we did a whole U.S. tour with The Music...

CS: Oh yeah, they’re from Leeds...

PM: Is that where you’re from?

CS: Yeah.

PM: They’re back in England, they said they might come down tonight but they’re a very busy, they'll also be jetlagged.

CS: So you enjoyed touring with them?

PM: Yeah, I love watching them play. Robert Harvey is so cool.

CS: Who’s supporting you this tour?

PM: Two Australian bands, one called Rocket Science and one called You Am I. I think if you’re a big music fan you might have heard of them?

CS: Erm, well I am a big music fan but...no!

PM: They’re an incredible band. I mean, they’re kinda getting into more ‘mature’ years now, but they’ve had their two number one records in Australia, and they were like, our idols back in the day.

CS: And now they’re supporting you!

PM: Yeah, it’s kinda strange. We actually supported them in our first big tour around Australia. They played venues this size, they were a big band.

CS: Do you get much chance to see other bands live?

PM: Well no. Currently our press guy in London wants us to go see Kings of Leon.

CS: Oh yeah, aren’t they from some religious belt of America? All sons of preachers?!

PM: There are brothers involved! Three brothers and a cousin! I just know they have great haircuts!

CS: What about at festivals and stuff, do you get out and about there?

PM: Oh yeah, but I don’t’ see everything. Like at The Big Day Out I saw nearly everything I wanted to.

CS: What about at Glastonbury? I saw you guys there last year, it was the first time I'd seen the band, and I think it was the first introduction to the band for a lot of people. It got fantastic reviews. What was it like?

PM: It was pretty good. In terms of seeing other bands I didn’t do much of that. We had a late afternoon slot, and then I saw a few people like The Charlies and The White Stripes and then I was pretty much out of my head till the end of the night! (Laughs)

CS: Are you playing there this year as well?

PM: No, I’m almost certain we'll still be recording. I can’t imagine we'll be done recording in under two months, we started May 19th 2002.

CS: When’s the new album due out?

PM: January. I mean, you could be optimistic, but to be realistic...January!

CS: How is it sounding? Is it very different to Highly Evolved?

PM: We'll play maybe five or six of the songs live, tonight maybe, but our live sound is very different to the songs on Highly Evolved, so it’s hard to say. It’s like, a recording for me is about ideas, but you’ve got to encourage Craig to sing and work out parts and structure in the vocals. But we're using the same producer, I imagine it will sound similar.

CS: What about instruments? Will you be using anything new? Strings or that kind of thing?

PM: Well I personally have been listening to a lot of The White Stripes recently, I mean, we’ve got a bass but just that whole dramatic drums, that’s what I’ve really been into as an idea. Craig’s really into multi-tracking and I guess I’m not. I’m into making it sound more like a Beatles record with all the parts separate and all done really well.

CS: That would make things easier live.

PM: Hopefully, yeah. I think you can over do things, I mean something like Autumn Shade, it is almost impossible to make it sound anything like the record. In the guitar solo with the vocals backing it up there are like, four vocal tracks in there and you just can’t do that live.

CS: What do you think of the NME?

PM: You can’t say ‘I have the greatest respect for the NME' because it doesn't really deserve respect. It manages to annoy a lot of people because it’s like, all of a sudden a band that you really like they start slagging off. Like The Music, I mean they’re not slagging off The Music but they’re not particularly supportive of a band which I reckon is one of the best bands in the world. What they do, the function they perform, is to get people excited about new music. It’s like, magazines like MOJO write rubbish about bands I’ve never even heard of, it’s for the older readership, and Q is only if you sell hundreds of thousands of copies that you can get in there.

CS: Does it not bother you that one week they can be saying that a particular band is the most amazing thing, and then a few weeks down the line they'll turn on them and start slagging them off? I mean, at the moment you seem to be high in their list of cool bands.

PM: I think they give the individual writers a fair bit of leeway, there’s somewhat of a lack of a ‘party line.’ A junior writer might say ‘this is a really great band’ cause they want to say something that people will read, and then a senior writer will come in and do the slagging off. The first things that get written, people will just give it a once over, but then if a band, for example Kings of Leon, where a lot has been heard about them, if I read a review now, I’d be interested to see what it said. At the start you just take it all with a grain of salt when you first read about a band.

CS: Craig gets pretty much all the attention from the press, good and bad, and you seem to get off without any of that. How does that feel?

PM: I get off but then I don’t get any adulation either!

CS: Does that not piss you off sometimes?

PM: I don’t really care that I don’t get worshipped or anything. The only thing that annoys me is that Craig writes the songs, but he didn’t write everything on the cd, but how are you going to say that in a review? It’s like in a review you think ‘did they mention me?’ That’s all you can hope for!

CS: Yeah but I guess it must be annoying because the live sound wouldn’t work without you, Hamish and Ryan.

PM: Well it’s a band and it always has been, but it doesn’t really bother me too much, especially because on stage I’m not really courting anyone’s eyesight. I’m not really doing anything so it’s not that important! As long as like, people realise it is a band.

CS: I was wondering, how many guitars does Craig go through on tour?

PM: Probably two get smashed for good every night, but sometimes they can be put back together. The headstock breaks on most strats and the tuning pegs fall out then they’re really broken, and sometimes the body will crack right the way down the middle. But the neck has a steel pole in it so they never break there, they'll break in the joint between the neck and the body and they can always fix them.

CS: I remember at Glastonbury Craig threw the remains of his guitar into the crowd, then when he was off stage some roadie went in and got them back out! Do you recycle them?

PM: Tony, our guitar tech, has a bag full of necks and he has six sets of pick-ups that don’t break. And a body will be stuck back together only very rarely.

CS: It must wind up being pretty expensive!

PM: Oh, we don’t have to buy them, Fender gives them to us. We’ve just bought two white guitars, I don’t know if you might see them tonight.

(Patrick’s coughing become noticeably erratic here, I’m beginning to feel bad for making him talk...)

CS: So how are you feeling about tonight’s gig?

PM: I’m a bit worried. For some singers it’s a close thing, their voice will just go, but that has never ever happened to me. I just get a sore throat and can’t sing anything. This is a big show, so it’s a bit scary. I think if we chose our set list, it’s just certain songs that I can’t do.

CS: Are you going to be playing many new songs?

PM: We could always play Amnesia, but I'll have to have a go at singing that one. I mean it’s not much without the harmonies. (Here Patrick starts trying the harmonies quietly before happily announcing) Yeah, maybe I could do it!

CS: Which songs do you most enjoy performing live?

PM: Amnesia is a good one, but I like all of them live. There were ones that I didn’t used to like playing, like 1969, so I pretty much just said to Craig ‘we won't be playing that song.’ There’s some I get sick of playing, like Ms Jackson, but the crowd likes it.

CS: How long do you think you'll be able to tour Highly Evolved without getting sick of it? Does that happen with your own songs?

PM: You end up never thinking about the songs at all until you play them so you only think about them for three minutes a day. I used to sit around and think about the bass line in this song and the harmonies in that song. So for three minutes a day you don’t really get sick of them anymore, especially live. The song Highly Evolved, it’s like, something’s gone wrong with it. It used to be that people would jump up and down to it but now there’s hardly any reaction at all!

CS: Really?!

PM: Yeah! People jump around at the start, for the first verse, then you'll see it die down. Maybe the chorus is just too half time (here Patrick starts nodding his head to an imagined Highly Evolved).

And so, via some clumsy jumps, the conversation moves over to our mutual love of The White Stripes and then the interview comes to a conclusion.

Later during the show, Patrick’s voice holds up. I paid close attention during Highly Evolved, and am happy to say he was wrong--Manchester was moshing with a vengeance from start to finish.

At the end of the night we leave by the stage door, the black-clad, dirty-haired teens are still there, crowded behind a barrier next to the tour bus. A voice shouts out asking if Craig is coming out. It seems a shame that no matter how much adoration comes The Vines way, most of it skims past Patrick and on to his cover-star band mate. But tonight I realised sometimes it pays to watch the quiet ones.