The Vines get high and evolve to album number two.

Everything is as it should be with The Vines : There's a bong and a bowl on the coffee table, probably half the reason Craig Nicholls is looking so chilled and happy. The other Vines - bassist Pat Matthews, guitarist Ryan Griffiths and drummer Hamish Rosser - are in the studio in the next room.

Paul Mac walks past and shouts, "Fucked up remix - don't forget!" Nicholls laughs and goes, "I won't, man."

For the past week, The Vines have been here in Sydney's Velvet Studios. Nicholls, as anyone who has ever listened to him will know, is happiest when he and his band are in a studio, creating.

So Nicholls is happy, even though it's only a month since he and the other guys finally got back home - battered, bruised and buggered - from 18 months of travel and conquering the world. "Getting to work on new songs is the best thing," says Nicholls.

For the record, if Nicholls is to be believed, The Vines have never come anywhere close to breaking up. Not since the early days anyway, long before they were scooped out of obscurity to record their debut album, Highly Evolved, in Los Angeles back in the middle of 2001.

"I think maybe a few years [we might of], before we even had a manager," says Nicholls. "Like when we were in a rehearsal studio and one of us would get angry at another for not being as good as Eddie Van Halen and think, 'We need to get Eddie Van Halen and we're not going to get him."

While we're getting things down for the record, let it be said that Craig Nicholls - sitting here happy in Velvet Studios - is nowhere near as crazy as he usually makes out. Sorry, correction : As Crazy as everyone else makes him out. Could do with some sun, though...

No question he's wacky, zany and eccentric. Some have called it brilliant - you can see that in the way he rolls his eyes back into his head while on stage. But crazy? As in, mentally unbalanced, as some have suggested? No way.

Nicholls knows what he's doing. And he simply does what he wants to do. Like if the mood takes him, he might chose to trash the set of America's most watched live TV chat show ( The Tonight Show with Jay Leno ) during rehearsals. ( Effect : Band loses spot on show. ) Or perhaps pick a fight with bassist Pat Matthews while on stage in Boston. ( Effect : World press enthusiastically declare : "Vines to break up!" )

Obviously, Nicholls does what he does because he can - he's a rock star. You're not. And good rock stars don't care what anyone else thinks. Nicholls certainly doesn't.

"Like, I don't really read stuff, I guess, or listen. So it's all right. The people saying that about me, I might think they are mentally ill, to put it nicely. Which other people have put it to me in not such a nice way.

"But if that kind of thing is going to affect us as a band then I think we'd be in some trouble. But it don't matter because it's always been this thing where we've been friends and we really love music and it was about that. We were inspired and we listened to other bands and had very varied kind of styles of music that we listened to. And that came through.

"So we really enjoy what we do. So people can say anything. It would be nice if, like that thing : If they didn't have something nice to say then they wouldn't say it. But that's not the real world."

Okay, then what really happened those last weeks of the American tour at the end of last year? Going by the reports coming back here - true or false - things were looking pretty unhinged.

"Man, that is really blurry, that time," says Nicholls, doing his scratching and swaying Stevie Wonder moves. "That was the end of the year. I don't know what to say. Because I don't know what people were saying about it. So all I'll say is that as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing heavy, at all.

"That [his and Pat's brawl] didn't happen. Maybe it's come close. Maybe it's like, I don't know - of course, if you're playing in a rock band, it's like, it's going - not that, but just the whole thing of moving around and stuff.

"But, you know, what can we say? We play music together but at the root of it all we all hate each other's guts. That's the truth. We really don't get along. Sometimes we have to get people to talk for us because I'm not talking to Pat. No, I'm joking.

"I know that we were...tired and probably stressed. Things get blown out of proportion. So it's kind of like "What, that happened?' I mean, even within people that you know, your friends or family, stories get told and things change. So, like I said, we hate each other. We probably won't finish this second album because we'll end up killing each other. No, we'll get through it, we'll get through it."

Back to Nicholls's real world, here today at Velvet Studios. With one day left to this week-long session, the band are about to cut down the fourth of four new songs. They're called Fuck the World, Drown the Baptists, Amnesia and Evil Town.

Fuck the world, Mr Nicholls?

"Well, it has that [aspect]," he grins. "Then there's this other side of it where it's kind of like an environmental song. At the same time, it has that. It's kind of like a whole lot of ideas and kind of feelings into the one thing. It's good when you get different sides of it.

"I sing 'Fuck the World'. But then I say 'Don't Fuck the World'. You know, mixed emotions. Like the world is falling down. And then there's the other side where we have to save the world, or we have to, kind of, not kill it."

Okay, so save the world but drown the Baptists. "It's kind of meant to have a bit of a sense of humour to it. It's not too serious. I mean, I don't want to drown anybody. I don't think people should drown Baptists.

"It's just kind of funny how if you get baptised, you get put into water. So it's just like, see how they like it, check it out. I don't want to start any trouble. It's just a bit of a poem."

Producer Wayne Connolly (You Am I, Died Pretty, Knievel) is looking after these sessions and no one's quite sure where the songs will end up. They could be demos, or if they sound good enough, perhaps even set the foundations of album two. What makes these sessions particularly interesting is that it's the first time this line-up of The Vines - which has hundreds of live shows of experience behind it now - has been in a studio together aside from recording the B-side track, Ms Jackson. Griffiths and Rosser joined the band after Highly Evolved was in the can.

Even before the actual release of the debut album last April, Nicholls and Matthews were telling everyone that they basically already had its follow-up ready to go. All they had to do was find some time to record it.

A year or so on, Nicholls says that "original blueprint still stands, give or take a couple of new songs we've got. Which I didn't think we were going to use at the time because we had a lot of songs to chose from when we were doing the first one and we had some really good ones left over. But there are a couple of new ones. I guess...the lyrics are better.

"And I think that some of these newer songs...not that the older ones...you know, they're good. I've got all these other new songs as well but it's a matter of, like, fitting everything into the album, choosing the right stuff and getting the right mix. I think the lyrics are better. And I think we can get it to sound better, so..."

This early in the piece, Nicholls thinks The Vines will eventually head back to sunny Los Angeles with Rob Schnapf ( Highly Evolved's producer ) when the time comes to record the bulk of the much antipicated new record.

"We have thought about it, yeah, and maybe we'll record with Rob," says Nicholls. "We really got along with him and he really understood us, like, as a band. And what we're doing and, you know, the songs. He said we were an album band and that's what I always thought we were. Because we have a lot of different things - all the songs, they make up the band.

"But we're recording with Wayne right now so we may, out of these four songs, get one that we think, 'Oh yeah, this is great'. And we use that. So it's cool. We've recorded with Wayne before, a little while ago, and it's good, I guess, we get a bit of an opportunity to choose and take a bit of time and stuff like that, so it's not really all that rushed.

"Because we feel it, we've wanted to make the album for a long time. Because I was going to say we make a double album for the first one and that was too much. I'm glad that we didn't. Maybe it would have been okay but we've got new songs since then which I've been writing."

By the time you read this, The Vines will be back on tour through North America for 24 dates with The Music. They then move on to the UK for another eight shows. So at this stage, it looks like the band could start work proper on a new album in Los Angeles as early as next month.

The Vines' Great Spacks

[Late - 2001]

With the sessions for Highly Evolved in Los Angeles blowing out from a predicted two months into six, nerves get frayed and things get a little crazy. David Olliffe, The Vines' original drummer and co-writer of several songs, clashes with producer Rob Schnapf and decides to head home to Sydney for a break, which becomes a permanent departure.

[June - 2002]

Appearing in the first of what would become a regular cover stories in London's NME, singer Craig Nicholls freaks out during the interview when asked what school he went to and reportedly locks himself in a toilet for three hours.

[September 2002]

While being interviewed by Richard Kingsmill on Triple J, Nicholls cracks a wobbly when asked about bad reviews from recent shows in Melbourne. The furious singer trounces out of the ABC studios, swearing at the top of his voice, pushing over every bit of office furniture that stands in his way.

[December 2002]

The Vines get kicked off high-rating US chat show The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, after Nicholls starts destroying the set during the band's afternoon rehearsals. "Yeah, The Vines were supposed to be here tonight," Leno tells his national US audience. "What happened? They got in a fight. They were, like, loaded at 6:00pm." Two nights later during a gig in Boston, a broken bass string reportedly leads to Nicholls attacking bassist Pat Matthews. They start brawling and fall off the stage, into the audience.

[January 2002]

During an interview with London's NME, Nicholls destroys a female reporter's tape-recorder when she asks how close The Vines came to breaking up. That night he does the soundcheck for the band's Brisbane show with the shattered machine hanging off his guitar. If that doesn't say rock star, what does?