The Aussie Invasion Tour' arrives Saturday – but the jury's out on whether long-term success is in the offing

Garage-rock darlings the Vines and Jet, who perform here Saturday night at SOMA as part of the "Aussie Invasion Tour," would love to follow in the footsteps of INXS, AC/DC, Midnight Oil and the handful of other Australian rock bands who achieved international success.

So would Neon and the Living End, who are on the same Saturday bill at the all-ages SOMA, but have yet to score even one hit record credit in this country.

Yet, if past history and the law of averages have anything to do with it, all four of these "invading" bands could very well have the fleeting impact of Silverchair, Divinyls or Men At Work. Time will tell.

Australia is full of talented and not-so-talented groups and solo artists who have never made it beyond their homeland or, at best, New Zealand.

"Some bands would go over to London (in the 1980s), like the Triffids and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. But there were a lot of Australian bands I knew about in the 1990s who people never heard of overseas," Vines bassist, keyboardist and backing vocalist Patrick Matthews said last week, en route from Detroit to a Chicago tour stop.

"Magic Dirt and Jebediah made great albums that I really liked," he continued. "But no one here heard them. Making it overseas wasn't one of our goals; we just wanted to make a record. We had a lot of luck that other Australian bands didn't have. Put it down to our managers saying that it could be done, and planning. Jet's album started off really badly, and they just kept at it, touring, because it's a good record and they're a good band."

Besides talent and tenacity – and the all-important U.S. and European record deals – luck and pluck can make the difference for an act from Down Under seeking to make commercial inroads abroad.

INXS, likely the most internationally popular Australian band ever, made its U.S. concert debut in early 1983 at San Diego's now-defunct Spirit club. The group soon become international stars, filling arenas and stadiums, scoring a slew of hit singles, and selling millions of albums.

Meanwhile, such gifted Australian rockers as Billy Thorpe and New Zealand's Max Merrit & the Meteors (both of whom members of INXS cited as key inspirations), are barely more than footnotes here.

And for every group that was embraced abroad, such as the Easybeats, Little River Band and the Church, many more were not. This holds true whether it's such recent or current Australian rock acts as Powderfinger, Superjesus or Christine Anu, or past favorites like Yothu Yindi, the Saints, Jo Jo Zep & the Falcons, Skyhooks, John Farnham, Ayers Rock, Daddy Cool, Cold Chisel, Mental As Anything or the aptly named Dingoes.

"There are countless numbers of bands that seemed to be big in Australia that I don't think even tried to go overseas," INXS guitarist Tim Farriss told the San Diego Union in 1991.

INXS's late singer Michael Hutchence agreed.

"Most of the Australian bands that had promise only toured abroad once or twice," said Hutchence, who died in 1997. "We've worked really hard, and we owe a lot of our success to our ability to go out and tour. You don't have to tour, but you do if you want to become a reality in America's mind. There are a lot of great Australian bands out there that do one (foreign) tour, go home and say 'Yeah, we did that.' "

The members of the Vines and Jet are mostly in their 20s, just as the members of INXS and AC/DC were when they first toured the States.

But the Vines and Jet face an uphill battle to earn sustained popularity with their derivative brand of retro-rock, which owes a large debt to Nirvana and the Rolling Stones (the Vines), Iggy Pop and AC/DC (Jet), and the Beatles and Kinks (both groups).

"The bands that made us want to write songs are the Beatles, Kinks and Nirvana, just in terms of writing songs in the style we do," Matthews acknowledged.

"People say we're derivative, but no one can ever say what it is (we're derivative of). I definitely see that everything we do is about what came before us. But rock 'n' roll is like that – it has the blues, the Beatles and English folk music in it."

The Vines' second album for Captiol Records, "Winning Days," is most notable for sounding nearly identical to their international debut, the multimillion-selling "Highly Evolved."

The group – which also features manic lead singer and guitarist Craig Nicholls, lead guitarist Ryan Griffiths and drummer Hamish Rosser – could eventually learn how to build on its influences, rather than just mimic them. That's assuming, of course, the Vines don't wilt or implode first.

With a ferocity not seen since such feuding musical brothers as Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis and Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks before them, Nicholls and Matthews often appear at war with each other.

Capitol Records pulled the plug on the group's 2002 U.S. tour after the Vines' singer and bassist traded punches on stage during a concert in Boston.

Nicholls, who is fond of smashing up the band's dressing rooms on tour, got the Vines booted from the set of "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno." In a now infamous incident, he drunkenly destroyed Rosser's drum kit during rehearsals for his group's quickly aborted Leno performance. ("It was violent drum smashing," Matthews says now.)

Nichols also brought a Vines' performance on British TV to a quick halt, when he reportedly executed a karate-styled scissors kick on his bass-playing bandmate.

"It doesn't have much to do with creativity; it's more Craig being out of his head and being on tour for a long time," said Matthews, who put three years of medical school studies on hold when he joined the Sydney-based Vines.

But why fight in the first place?

"I don't know about the karate kick thing," said Matthews, who in a 2002 interview admitted he wanted to "punch" Nicholls "in the head."

"The whole thing with the (Boston) fight on stage is, I guess, Craig was just swinging his guitar around too much – not at me – and I was like (telling him): 'Be a bit more careful.' He's kind of idiosyncratic and gets frustrated."

Asked how the two might peacefully resolve their differences, Matthews sighed.

"I don't know," he said. "We just started this tour and we're getting along fine. We'll see how things go. But when you're just fighting because you want to go home, it's not creative."