After a year of touring their mega-selling 2002 debut, Highly Evolved, Aussie psych-grungers The Vines became highly unravelled. Tales of erratic performances, onstage fisticuffs and trashed Leno sets (during the rehearsal, no less) abounded. NME went so far as to imply that you'd better catch The Vines before frontman Craig Nicholls took his Kurt Cobain idolatry to its logical extreme.

But hey, it was nothing a couple of months in upstate New York couldn't fix. The retreat has resulted in The Vines' relatively idyllic second album, Winning Days, which, despite bangin', book-end tracks "Ride" and "Fuck the World," provides a more magical, mysterious tour of Nicholls' psyche. And while Nicholls still dresses the part of the petulant rock star -- messy hair, ripped jeans, inside-out Minutemen shirt -- in conversation, he possesses a dry, droll wit. Which is to say, the following responses were filtered through a haze of spliff smoke that nearly triggered the hotel's emergency sprinkler system.

It seems like just yesterday that we were reading about your post-tour burnout, and now you're already back on the promo circuit. Do you get homesick?

I just get sick in general, sick in the head, it doesn't matter if I'm home or somewhere else. I'm sort of lost. I'm not just saying that. I wish I was centred.

So you haven't found your happy place?

Well... I enjoy killing people. I don't understand the problem with that. If I want to kill someone, that should be completely natural. Who is someone else to judge if I should go to prison? No... I never killed no one, I've got no stories. I don't kill people, I kill cereals. I just go into supermarkets with a walking stick and knock 'em off the shelf and run them into the ground.

Marilyn Manson has said that if Hitler were alive today, he'd be in a band -- that being a mass murderer and being a rock star feed the same ego-driven urge.

I'm not going to touch that one with a 100,000-metre pole! I really don't want to put out any negativity. I've already done too much of that, I think.

Alright, let's talk positives: I hear you recorded Highly Evolved under the heavy influence of The Kids in the Hall.

Oh yeah... we wouldn't start mixing everyday until I finished watching the back-to-back episodes they played each day in the afternoon. Maybe it gave us a reason to live. I'm not just saying this shit: I really like the TV shows -- The Tom Green Show, The Kids in the Hall...

What about Mr. Show, or The Office?

I've seen them, but I do not have the connection I would like to have with them. I do have that connection with The Kinks and Bill Hicks. In my head, he's the greatest.

Is a song like "Fuck the World" the sound of you slipping into Bill Hicks mode?

Maybe... I definitely knew about him before I wrote that song He had a lot of really intelligent perceptions but it came out aggressive because he felt hopeless, and maybe that's the same thing [with the song]. He wanted to help, but he found it really hard and just couldn't take it and screaming was a good outlet. He thought we're too good for this -- we could be living a better life. I remember him say there's so many different ways to view the world -- why choose the way you learn on TV? Just because it's in print or on the news doesn't mean it's real. They just want you to spend, they just want you to buy a car... or maybe I'm just bitter because I can't drive.