Craig Nicholls doesn't seem to notice the gooey-eyed 17-year-old sitting next to him taking off her corduroy jacket. In fact, he doesn't even flinch when she starts lifting up her vest. But she's spent her entire holiday allowance and flown over 800 miles - all the way from Switzerland to here, Nottingham, England - to see her 24-year-old wonky rock-boy hero. By the look in her eyes, she isn't about to back down at the final hurdle. So plucking up courage, up comes her cream-and-red vest and there, just to the left of her pierced navel is a tattoo. It's Craig's name. Etched in a wobbly trademark jade-green ink. 'Look!' she gleams proudly. 'Remember when you signed my stomach back in Europe? Well, I had it made permanent!' Craig blinks and looks up warily. Showing of nicotine-stained incisors and a bitten bottom lip, he just about manages half a smile. 'Yeah, um, great.' In comes The Vines' tour manager asking for laminate passes. And the girl is ejected politely into the corridor.

It's 8.30 on a Wednesday night in October and raindrops the size of daisy-cutters have been carpetbombing Rock City's corrugated-iron roof for over four hours. Inside, Craig is hunched over, his face lost under a teepee of tousled mousy-brown hair, waiting for the call to stage. Eyes red and swollen from lack of sleep, puffy hands from sucking wearily on the endless cigarettes, he's nervous and bored. While he rolls his eyes like lotto balls, Craig's head bobs loosely back and forth on a pale, bruised body that's visibly hurting on this, the final week of The Vines' three-week European tour.

Out in the corridor, there's a riot going on. The Libertines - England's angle-faced contribution to the new rock revolution, all long, shabby hair and beer-stained biker jackets - have fallen off-stage and into the open arms of the band's heavily stocked rider. For lead singers Pete Doherty and Carl Barat, it's vodka and lager shandies a-go-go. And for the schoolyard full of swooning teenage girls in tow? Trips to the cubicles in pairs. Beer bottles are clinked, joints are sparked and the air soon becomes a fuggy haze of hormones and hash. Rock and roll, just one louder.

But at the eye of it all, Craig sinks deeper into his sofa. While groupies flutter around him, pat his hair, ask for autographs on newly bought bootleg posters and slur starstruck praises, he just sits and shuffles his raven-black Etnies trainers, looking for answers from the cigarette stubs smouldering on the floor. Still, he doesn't make a fuss, flip out - as he did just before appearing live on David Letterman in the States earlier this year - or start crunching cookies wildly into his hair. He's polite, unconfrontational and hardly says a word. He sips Red Bull, keeps his thoughts close to his chest and waits for when the 2,000 or so frothing capacity crowd demand that he drive his black Fender Stratocaster through the drumkit.

Craig decides he's hungry. Looks are exchanged and something is mumbled to the tour manager, Mark, about a burger. Enter through the mêlée - two vinegar-soaked sack-loads of Nottingham's finest deep-fried fish and chips. Lots of salt. Plenty of mayonnaise. For the moment at least, the fog clouding Craig's sky-blue eyes clears. He wolfs them down, breathing heavily, almost gagging on the grease like it was his last meal. In under two minutes, the empty bag is tossed into the bin and Craig wipes his dripping chin on his forearm. But something else has caught his attention.

From a boom-box screwed down next to the steadily emptying fridge comes the grating feedback of the White Stripes' 'Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground'. Craig's ears prick up and he starts tapping his hand over biro-scrawled denim jeans. He tilts his head back slowly, shuts his eyes and his long mane sweeps the back of his grey t-shirt. His muscles seem to tense. Almost as if Jack White's six-string assault is charging from speaker to table to floor and into his veins. It's the most animated he's been all day.

Craig has officially tuned out. When you first witness him zoning into the great wireless in the sky, it's a little uncomfortable. 'I love the White Stripes. They're so creative,' he says genuinely. 'Creative', along with 'artist' and 'serious', are Craig's favourite and most used words. But it's genuine adoration. Like his connection to music is so fierce he has to unplug the rest of the planet.

Little wonder then that Craig's favourite place is in his head. 'I never had my own car and a lot of my friends lived on the other side of town. I used to go skateboarding a lot out in my road. I became almost happy to do my own thing. Listening to music became an obsession for me. Like another world. I found it so relaxing. You could just put on a song and drift away into Nowheresville in your head.' 

Craig's Nowheresville was formed back in his messy bedroom in a leafy branch of suburbia just short of Sydney. As a teenager he spent hours staring out of his window, thinking about guitars, writing bands' names on his arm in biro and daydreaming about being a rock star. Not necessarily the troubled, reluctant rock star signing his name onto the pot-bellies of wide-eyed groupies and driving his guitar through a stage monitor, but certainly a creative force of some description. Someone just like Jack White. Or as his record collection showed back then, someone just like Kurt Cobain, Steve Malkmus, Eddie Vedder or John Lennon.

It was at school that Craig's passion for music and his second love - art - were fuelled (though the fact that Craig's parents called the police on their own son suggests that he was a long way from being a shirt-tucked-in kind of pupil). 'I always knew I could draw, and then at art school I took it on further to painting,' he explains, before going on to talk incoherently about The Vines album cover he inked up. 'But I was a below-average musician in my class. Not even very good on the guitar. But I could sing. I had a feeling I could do that better than anyone else. Although the thought of having to the play the guitar and sing at the same time - that seemed impossible.'

Craig dropped out of school before tenth grade. And after a brief, unflourishing stint at art school he found himself wearing a crimson-and-white McDonald's pinny. 'I flipped sesame buns and picked gherkins out of kids' Happy Meals for quite a long time. I did it purely for the money. I never got any gold stars or employee of the month or anything.' He confesses later. 'I feel like I did my time of hard labour. And I'm glad it's over now.'

It was underneath the golden arches that Craig first met Patrick Matthews - now the band's philosophical, square-jawed bass player. Patrick had been at medical college: being a doctor is something he keeps on the back burner, often hinting that he might like to give all this up and 'start waking up in the same place for at least a week'. After a while the two reluctant potato-peelers got talking about a mutual interest - bands like Pavement, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, The Beatles, The Velvet Underground. Before long, they began meeting up after work, exchanging hairnets for plectrums and making a racket in their parents' living rooms.

'My father taught me the twelve-bar blues - the first thing I ever learnt on the guitar,' explains Craig. 'And then he showed me the basic chords. He was an influence to me in the beginning, yeah I guess. But I taught myself really.' In fact, Craig snatched his own band's name from his father's outfit, The Vynes - a rockabilly, Elvis-loving covers band. 'I took the name just because it was there,' Craig insists. 'It wasn't some great nod of respect and reference to my dad's band. He agreed I could use it as I took music more seriously than he did. And it was more out of laziness than anything. It just kind of happened.'

Back in Nottingham ten minutes before the gig, huddled in a shivering ball of anxiety, sucking the life out of a green Perspex bong with 'Chills' marked on the side, you get the feeling that Craig might like to escape back to staring up at his bedroom ceiling. With his records, his daydreaming and his own uncomplicated planet to explore. While others around him are having the time of their lives, Craig looks like he'd rather be anywhere else but about to go on stage and entertain. 'Sometimes it can feel like every night is a party. And I do like going out, sometimes with everyone. But I find it hard touring. I find it really hard. Songwriting and recording tracks are more of a strain mentally. But touring and travelling around so much is draining physically.'

It looks it. When Craig performs he literally throws himself into the music. And into Hamish Rosser's drum kit. His pale body is covered in cuts and bruises from past stage battles with cymbals, hi-hats and mic chords. Above his right eyes is a graze the shape of Africa where he knocked himself out on the microphone in Manchester two nights ago. But he wanted this. He wanted to be Kurt Cobain and Michael Hutchence. He wanted to be a rock star. He wanted to escape, didn't he? 'I wanted the release you can get from becoming a rock star. I mean, it's better that I shout and scream up there on stage than it is to do it to someone in the street, right?' he mumbles in a Australian accent that's morphed from too much time in LA. 'I often get disorientated up there. Half the time I don't even know where I am. I like it like that. Although it can get tiring now that people expect it of me.'

There's a knock on the door. A young boy with a black headset strapped across his head walks in. 'You ready to rock? You're on.' The stage lights go out. A thousand voices erupt from the darkness that ripples like an oil slick. Just to the left of the stage, behind the black Marshall amps and the tangled electrical wires, the cherry of a cigarette shakes nervously between Craig's grubby fingers.

Three years ago, Andy Kelly, of music management company Winterman and Goldstein, was slumped in his car stuck in Sydney's fender-tight traffic. Bored stiff, he tuned into one of the city's handful of independent radio stations. What he heard was a raucous four-piece garage rock band whose singer spent most of the song screeching into his microphone at a lughole-damaging decibel level. They called themselves The Vines. 'I was like, "Wow! The Vines? Who are they?" I had never heard of them, which is weird because I thought I knew every wannabe rock band on the Sydney circuit. I knew who was gigging, which drummer had a heroin addiction and who was about to break up. But I had never heard of The Vines.' 

Before The Vines had finished their three-minute shoutathon, Andy had hit speed dial and was frothing down his co-manager's ear about getting in contact with the band. Getting back to the office he spent the next two weeks flipping through his Rolodex of local contacts. It seemed no one else had heard of The Vines either. Through sheer perseverance, Andy found Craig Nicholls' home address. So he wrote the front man a note asking whether they had any more songs. A week later he got a response. The Vines had a gig. So, along with around 20 or so other people who had nothing else better to do that night, Andy went to see if his instincts were correct. Halfway through the gig he turned to his co-manager, saying, 'Do you see the same thing I see?'

'We couldn't believe that this one person could have so much charisma. Up on stage, Craig was the most prolific person I had ever seen. We saw them after the show and asked them so send us in some more music.' 

Craig sent it in. And kept going. 'Every week we'd get another five or so songs recorded on this shitty, little tape player. Craig's songwriting ability seemed unstoppable. We bought them an eight-track and started putting together a demo CD to send out to record companies and whatnot. Usually you'd pick the best five our six songs but we ended up with 21. There wasn't a weak track on there.'

Early in 2000 one of these CDs happened to land on the cluttered desk of Rob Schnapf, a Los Angeles record producer whose past handiwork has been on the likes of Beck's Mellow Gold and Foo Fighters' eponymous debut. It knocked him for six. Soon he had worn out the demos he'd been sent so he bombarded The Vines' management, hungry for more. One of his emails simply spelled out the band's name repeatedly: "THE VINES THE VINES THE VINES THE VINES..."

'It was never about Nirvana,' Schnapf says from his LA home. 'What I heard was the primal snootiness of the early Kinks. That twinned with the melodies of The Beatles. At the time, everything else I had been getting through the mail had been that nu metal shit. All Limp Bizkit and Korn stuff, which does nothing for me. This is the kind of music I like - good songs and that primal feeling.'

By summer 2001, Craig and The Vines had boarded a plane to begin work with Schnapf in the studio. The sessions were booked in for a preliminary six weeks. They ended up taking six months.

'There were lots of problems. To do with internal band stuff. Their original drummer, David Oliffe, wasn't happy with how his sound was coming out and he didn't like spending so much time away from Oz. So he left. Also, I had never had any dialogue with Craig before he came over to start recording. So it took him a while to adjust. And for him to start believing I was on his side.'

'He was very protective of his territory,' Schnapf says. 'I worked hard at trying to show him that I was there to make things, better, 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 on stage. It's not act. He's for real. The sessions were insane. I'd be at the console looking through the glass watching him just going out of his mind some days. I mean, full-on, writing-around-on-the-floor-type stuff. Bouncing off the walls. When he was doing his vocals, we almost had to staple pillows to the wall to protect the mic. And I'm just sitting at the dials thinking, "What the fuck?" He was very intense.'

About three weeks into the sessions at Sunset Sounds Factor, Andy Slater, president of Capitol Records, bumped into Craig in a narrow corridor. He was so intrigued, he made it is his duty that day to listen in on The Vines recording.

'I was at the studio, this kid walked in and he had this immediate presence,' he told the Los Angeles Times. 'He wasn't looking at anything in particular, just wandering around the studio kinda looking at the air. Sometimes artists are tapped into 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.' 

A few months later, Slater signed them to Capitol. Together with Andy Kelly and The Vines' management, Capitol decided to showcase the group in the UK. By the end of the year, they were being punted by the media as 'the best band since Nirvana.'

Some Craig Nicholls rumours laid to rest. Sort of.

That you should be on 24-hour suicide watch.

'Well I guess I have thought about that kind of thing too. Sometimes, I feel out of control and head downwards. I mean I won't pretend that I'm always happy, but then at the same times I would be lying to say I'm unhappy all the time. Being on stage playing my music makes me happy. Sleeping and watching TV makes me happy. Feeling open-minded and not let your thoughts dragging you down. Keep perspective on the things around you. I like it that people think I'm a little odd. I don't want to start the day at nine and then go to bed by five. There's clarity in lots of different things. Clarity in chaos, I guess. Not feeling sick makes me happy. I feel sick quite a lot. Skateboarding makes me happy. I'm getting some time off so it'll be nice to do more of that. It's like being in the band a bit. I mean, you can do creative stunts or you can cruise straight down the street.' 

That you had a fling with Kelly Osbourne.

'Err...I don't know. Not really. I can't say anything about it. I feel really strange talking about it. I have met Kelly Osbourne and we hung out together a little. But we were just friends, sort of. I mean I think she's a good person. It's maybe a bit different for her. I just think she's kind of sweet. So no! Definitely not.'

That you're addicted to weed.

'Smoking that stuff just helps me think and relax. I need to calm down sometimes as I know I can be a little immature. If I get too strung out, it helps. I started as a teenager. And just got into it because of friends or whatever. But of course I never inhaled. And I can't be held responsible for any illegal activity. I didn't do it.'

That you're addicted to a prescriptive drug of some sort.

'I thought I wanted to take Valium for a bit. But I really didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. Although I need something stronger to calm me down and level everything out. I'm not taking anything at the moment, but I'm definitely looking at it. Prescriptive drugs, that is. Not getting addicted.'

That you made 'Highly Evolved' 95 seconds long because that's how long it takes to cook a burger in McDonald's.

'No! I don't think I did that. I've forgotten how long it takes to cook a burger. I mean, everybody seems to have this obsession with me and fast food. I mean, I like it, don't get me wrong. But I only eat because I'm on tour the whole time - it's quick. And I can't cook to save my life. Truly.'

That you get hurt when people think you're a little odd.

'I'm quiet, I guess. I don't really care what people say about me. I'm glad I'm odd because I'd rather be a bit different. I used to have a problem with authority, people telling me what to do. Just like most young people, trying to figure everything out. I don't have a problem with authority - I think sometimes it has a problem with me. I mean I don't know... maybe because people think I freak out all the time. I mean I always have people coming up to me and asking if I'm on drugs, but I'm not really. And some people believe the way I act is really selfish but I don't think that's the case at all. I suppose people will think that if they're jealous or whatever and I'm the frontman. But I see myself as more of a recording artist anyway, rather than some kind of troublemaking rock and roll star.' 

'I am for REEEEEEEEAAALLL!' A drunken, howling caterwaul. That's what is ejected from Craig Nicholls' fish batter-lined belly when he belts out the cover-version of OutKast's 'Ms Jackson' - the second-to-last track of The Vines' chaotic, sweat-drenched set. The venue is packed to capacity with pierced-up rockers standing shoulder to shoulder with twentysomething Nirvana fans and skinny, choker-wearing teenage riot girls. All - apart from the venue's overweight bouncers who are loitering by nervous-looking, middle-class boys in black Ozzfest hoodies - are transfixed.

Craig is somewhere else. Buy The Vines LP and you'll only get the faintest whiff of the anarchic exhibition you get when witnessing the spluttering hobgoblin that is Craig Nicholls live. Eyes screwed shut, mouth open, almost swallowing his microphone, he only acknowledges the crowd with occasional, incoherent muttering and when he must swerve as water bottles missile towards his head with frenzied enthusiasm.

The Vines' Jekyll-and-Hyde 'polarphonic' rock - a combination of guitar squall noise and downtime, bucolic melodies - is a recipe that's cooked them up incredible success, with chart-topping album sales and pen-waving fans at every port. Well, almost. Despite their Stateside success story (some sceptics putting this down to the fact the album went on sale for a cut-price $6), The Vines are only now being accepted back in their native Australia. But it's the very fact they're Australian, or more specifically not from New York City, that's helped stoke the frothing Vines hyperbole over the past year. When Rolling Stone slapped them all over the front for their relaunch issue back in September, they were only too pleased to punt around proudly the fact that The Vines were the first Aussie band on the cover for over 20 years. The fact is, since The Strokes opened the floodgates for young NYC garage bands with wing-mirrored cheek bones and scruffy pink ties, the pretty-boy rock scene has reached saturation point. Five good-looking latchkey kids making a pop-rock racket with guitars in a basement off Madison Avenue - however good they sound - just isn't good enough anymore. British bands are cursed by a similar over-exposure. Severe as it may be, some spotty English boys smoking weed and making sea-chanty-sounding records in a Hull bedsit just isn't as glamorous as a band from the other side of the world doing exactly the same thing. After all, the Swedish self-believing gang of five who are The Hives didn't get to where they are because of their songs. They have silly accents and even sillier costumes. Coming from Australia, The Vines' profile benefits from the boomerang-shaped lift. And as it is, foreign is interesting. The rock revolution is over. Long live The Vines.

Forty minutes, two cans of Coke, a Red Bull, three cigarettes and two joints later and the demolition starts. And the crowd get what they came for. As Craig screeches through the final track, 'Amnesia', a hazy melodic symphony due to be recorded for LP number two in January - his slow, considered scuttling of the stage begins. Hamish, Patrick and guitarist Ryan Griffiths, who have seen it all before, know where to stand. The chrome mic goes into the bass drum first. Then the Fender Stratocaster slams into the hi-hat. It isn't long before Craig piles in. The oil slick fizzes and roars. Patrick just about manages a wry smile. 

Tony, too, is smiling. The Vines guitar tech - all watermelon-sized head and camo trousers - has seen the smash'n'dash routine too many times to recall. Placed by his well-worn set of chrome screwdrivers, spare strings and a fuzzy dog-eared koala bear is a large blue Perspex box: a guitar graveyard full of broken bodies, snapped necks, pick-ups and bridges by the sack load. While on the road, living on an endless supply of cold coffee and service station sausage rolls, Tony tries to glue together the bones of bygone guitars. 'He goes through about one a night,' he mutters dryly, in-between tuning up one of the rehabilitated. The Vines have so far this year played 60 gigs. You do the maths.

One whiskey and coke mixer sunk and the after-gig drinks are already getting to Craig. The Social bar, just off Nottingham's central square - where a crumbly Woolworths slumps next to a two-a-penny Poundstretcher stores - is bubbling with mid-week revellers. Students mostly. And it doesn't take five minutes before Craig's spotted. Over in the far corner, a long-haired group of pint-spilling boys are pointing and chattering excitedly. Before too long, one of the latchkey kids musters the courage, clears his throat and brings over a chewed biro and beermat. But Craig has already bolted, the cuff of his brown corduroy jacket disappearing out of the door and into the crisp midnight air.

Out in the street is no safer. Huddled underneath a bolted-down shop entrance, Craig wraps his arms across his body and kicks a crisp packet around with his feet. 'It's him. It's definitely him! Look!' A group of alcopopped kids are beckoning the rest of their drunken scrum out from a kebab shop close by. Clutching bags of chips, Burberry caps and mobiles, soon Craig is encircled by a frenzied crowd - drunk on Bacardi and the prospect of a star-spangled story to tell their mates back in school tomorrow. 'This is making my head spin,' says Craig, ducking into himself. 'Dance! Dance for us!' One of the boys wants his Reebok Classics signed. Craig pulls out a sharpie from his back pocket and scrawls his name over the boy's trainers. Turning away, he pills his jacket tight across his chest, quickly sniffing the black marker before capping it and stuffing it back in his jeans. He steps out from the orange glow of the street lamp, walks down the cobbled path and disappears into the shadows. Unfulfilled requests from fans falling around him like dead leaves. Eyes half shut. Hands in pockets. Desperately trying to tune into the sounds inside his head.