CRAIG NICHOLLS has reduced his vices to a bare minimum.

The man who was famous for prodigious ingestion of dope, a diet seemingly consisting of junk food and the kind of stage behaviour with the Vines which earns you a reputation as mad, bad and dangerous to know, now has one weakness. He chain-smokes these long, thin cigarettes - called, with stunning inappropriateness, Vogue - holding them delicately between his middle fingers.

"[The slimness] is why I smoke them," Nicholls says semi-facetiously. "I'm trying to cut down and I thought I'd give up regular ones for these and stop later."

Non-stop smoking aside, in an upstairs room at the Enmore offices of their management company (where eight pointy ARIA awards line a mantelpiece and various manager-of-the-year awards dot the walls) Nicholls, guitarist Ryan Griffiths and drummer Hamish Rosser are about as relaxed as anyone could reasonably hope to be a few hours before their first official home-town show in several years. (They played a "secret" warm-up show under an alias a month ago.)

The band, which in 2002 went from playing tiny Sydney pubs to being on the cover of American Rolling Stone as the face of "new rock" only to virtually implode one album later, looked dead and buried this time last year.

As Rosser says: "Even friends of mine thought we had broken up and I had to keep reassuring them there is another Vines album coming."

That album, their third, called Vision Valley, emerged in April after Nicholls was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (a mild form of autism), which was exacerbated by the pressures of touring and media calls. The band's management decided the only way to handle this was to keep everything smaller and more manageable. There would be hardly any interviews, few shows and much lower expectations.

"We did go to a lot of effort to let people know not to expect gigs from us, because massive amounts of touring were not good for us," Rosser explains.

But now, having just returned from a quick visit to Britain, where they played a small gig in London then a set at the massive Reading Festival in Leeds, the Vines have three shows this week at the relatively small Annandale Hotel, beginning last night.

"If we didn't want to do it, we wouldn't do it," says Nicholls, who seems relaxed and chatty behind his veil of lank hair. "In a way we are starting again, step by step. Now we're very conscious of making small steps, keeping the shows wider apart, and we get really excited about each show, which is better than being real chaotic, for me to scream and throw things around to make it exciting for myself."

So was he expecting an audience of people wondering when they would see "the mad bit"?

"It's happening right now but I'm trying to control myself," Nicholls says, grinning and provoking laughter from his bandmates. "But I'm not really a weirdo. I'd like to think that."

The Vines play at the Annandale Hotel tomorrow and on Friday.