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Matthews is a pretty lucky dude, to state the obvious. Not only was he a member of The Vines for their first two records - their golden period, most would say - but he’s also part of Youth Group during their most exciting and successful time: now.

He’d known the guys in Youth Group for a while through their management and Ivy League Records and after the incident in Sydney in 2004 where Vines frontman Craig Nicholls allegedly kicked a photographer, and Matthews allegedly walked off stage, he found himself in the right place at the right time.

“I’d been to heaps of Youth Group shows - I was actually a pretty big fan,” he says. “[Then] The Vines had that incident at the Annandale Hotel, and the very next day the band - apart from Craig - and the crew were having a farewell dinner, because they were all going back home, and Andy Kelly - our manager - said that Youth Group’s bass player had left and I expressed interest in playing - the very next day!

“It wasn’t like I was feeling I needed to do something else,” he continues. “I guess I was very interested because I thought Youth Group were so good - plus also I’d got a bit sick of being in The Vines because all we were doing was touring and never songwriting. It was all just touring and incidents one after the other. It wasn’t a very creative time.”

With Casino Twilight Dogs being the first major recording with Youth Group for Matthews (his first time on tape with the band was the song ‘Someone Else’s Dream’ last year), what has he found different between recording with The Vines and Youth Group?

“In both bands I never really had anyone saying what I could and couldn’t do,” he admits. “The main difference in the songwriting was with Craig. Once he’d written a song, that was it - the structure stayed the same. He’d work on it for a little bit at the start of the song, but once it got set, that’s where they stayed. With Youth Group there was the opportunity to work around the stuff - sometimes the recording process is part and parcel with the songwriting process - structuring and organising.“Things go a lot quicker with Youth Group, because Toby [Martin, vocalist and guitarist]’s a full-take person - he’ll just sing three or four full takes, and then pull a vocal from that. Craig sings one line at a time - sometimes one word at a time. That was the way he did it for himself when he was doing demos at home - one line at a time - and he’d get things really, really perfect that way. I think it’s a legitimate way of recording, it just takes forever. Both Vines records took four months and six months, and Youth Group took about five weeks in total.”

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