From His Room to Our Ears

There isn’t a record executive in America who wouldn’t hurl a seven-figure contract at the Australian rock band the Vines after seeing just 30 seconds of the group’s new “Outtathaway” video.

In the clip, which will be released to MTV this month, gripping lead singer and guitarist Craig Nicholls flails around the stage of a gritty rock club, his eyes rolling eerily back into his head as if an exorcism is taking place.

It’s a striking image that links Nicholls with the long tradition of obsessive rock stars. The music mixes the raw energy of Nirvana and the lively, garage-rock sensibilities of current media faves the Hives.

The sights and sounds of the Vines place the band right in step with a cadre of new bands that are rejecting the drab, one-dimensional anger and alienation of late-’90s U.S. rock by drawing on the energy and imagination of legendary rock acts of the ‘60s.

This movement was jump-started in recent months by the success of the Strokes, the White Stripes and the Hives--bands with varying styles, but a shared independence and passion that have caught the ear of media taste-makers and adventurous fans in this country.

The Vines came to the party late and their vision isn’t as focused or as absorbing as the Stripes’ or the Hives’, but the group is extremely promising and has been gaining momentum rapidly. They were discovered by the rock world last fall in England, where New Musical Express, a pop weekly with enormous influence on the music scene there, began championing them after just one single.

“The Vines are the latest group to offer a thrilling, stripped-down take on the traditional rock ‘n’ roll blueprint,” the weekly wrote. “Their songs are short, sharp and fuzzily melodic.”

For most U.S. fans, the discovery process began weeks ago when MTV and alt-rock radio stations, including KROQ-FM (106.7) in Los Angeles, began playing “Get Free,” a statement of youthful desperation that has been described as Cobain-like.

That exposure built enough of a following for the group’s debut album, “Highly Evolved,” to enter the U.S. chart in July at No. 11--the highest position gained by any of the bands in the new movement.

The Vines seem so perfectly suited to this new energy that it’s easy to suspect that they’ve tailored their music to fit the stripped-down tone of the times. But Nicholls was writing the songs on “Highly Evolved” in his bedroom at his parents’ house in suburban Sydney three years ago, when the group’s style could hardly have been less commercially viable.

It’s only through the faith of a series of industry professionals that the band was able to burst on the scene with such impact. The band’s story is an example of how all bands have to go through numerous private discoveries before reaching public attention.

The first discovery in the Vines’ case was in the winter of 1999 when two of their Australian managers, Andy Kelly and Andy Cassell, saw them playing to 20 people in a tiny club in Sydney.

“They were incredibly scrappy and totally obsessed with the music,” Kelly says. “Within 30 seconds, I turned to Andy and said, ‘Do you see the same thing I see?’ Craig was just lost in his world on stage, playing this amazing music. We couldn’t believe this person that no one knew anything about could have so much talent and charisma.

“They had only done about five or six shows to this point. Craig spent all his time writing songs and recording them on this little tape machine. We asked for some tapes, and he was so prolific that we ended up with about 21 songs. Normally, you’d pick the best four or five of them and send them to producers and record executives, but we sent them all because there wasn’t a weak track on the tape.”

Rob Schnapf, a Los Angeles record producer who has worked with Beck and the Foo Fighters, heard the demo tape early in 2000 and was so excited he sent an e-mail to the band’s representatives simply repeating the band’s name hundreds of times: “The Vines, the Vines, the Vines ....”

“Now people are saying a lot about this Nirvana stuff,” Schnapf says. “What I heard was the primal snottiness of the early Kinks. I hadn’t heard anybody do that in a while. It was 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. It makes you want to drive fast.”

By summer 2001, the Vines were in Los Angeles beginning work on the album with Schnapf. The sessions weren’t easy. It was the first time the shy Nicholls had been out of Australia, and he and his bandmates, bassist Patrick Matthews and drummer Dave Olliffe, apparently found it difficult to adjust to Los Angeles. Nicholls was also worried about his music being compromised in the studio.

“Craig was very protective of his turf,” Schnapf says. “I worked hard at trying to show him that I was there to help, 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 no act. I’d be at the console watching him just going out of his mind some days, bouncing off the walls. He was so intense about what he was doing.”

About three weeks into the sessions at Sunset Sound Factory, Andy Slater, president of Capitol Records, bumped into Nicholls and was so intrigued by his persona that he made it a point to listen to the Vines’ music. It was the final piece in the discovery process, and he signed the Vines to Capitol a few months later.

A former manager and producer who made a quick impression around town by helping launch the careers of such substantial talents as the Wallflowers, Fiona Apple and Macy Gray, Slater had only been at Capitol for a few months and he was looking for new acts.

“I was at the studio with OK Go another new band on the label, and this kid walked in and he had this immediate presence. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular, just wandering around the studio kinda looking at the air. Sometimes artists are tapped in to 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.”

About the music, Slater, who served as executive producer of the album, says, “I was floored. It had all the energy and spirit of rock ‘n’ roll rebellion, yet all the melodic sense that a gifted singer-songwriter would bring to a record. For a while now, you get a feeling listening to the radio that we are coming to the end of one era in rock and the beginning of another one. No one knows just what shape the new one would take, but this music sounded like what should be on the radio.”

Having seen the excitement in England over the new wave of bands, Capitol and the Vines’ managers decided to showcase the group there, and it was an immediate hit with the media. Capitol even flew U.S. radio programmers to England to sample the buzz. When “Highly Evolved” was released, NME, with its usual exaggerated enthusiasm, was predicting that the Vines would be bigger than U2 by the end of the year.

Olliffe left the group last fall, complaining about pressures within the band. He is now with another Australian group, the Red Sun Band. Rhythm guitarist Ryan Griffiths, an old chum from Sydney, has joined Nicholls, Matthews and new drummer Hamish Rosser.

Much of the media fascination with the band centers on Nicholls, whose obsessive tendencies on stage and his sometimes nervous outbursts backstage before shows tempt writers to associate him with the self-destructive tradition of rock singers that stretches from Jim Morrison to Cobain.

Some see his out-of-control antics, including a recent spot on “Late Show With David Letterman,” as contrived. Others worry that it is more deeply rooted and alarming. This summer, NME warned darkly, “Our advice is simple: see them soon. You never know. It could be the only chance you get.”

For his part, Nicholls frowns at the idea that he’s self-destructive.

“No, no,” he says. “I am just passionate about what we do. People often think I’m freaking out when we’re playing, but there’s a joy in turning yourself over to the music and letting it lift you. It’s almost a sacred thing to us.”

Nicholls, one of four children, describes his childhood as pleasant--nothing like the dysfunctional stories of so many of the grunge-era rock stars. His father is an accountant, his mother a secretary. Before music, he loved skateboarding and drawing, and he took a graphic design course in college.

But music has been his first love since his mid-teens. He recalls the excitement of hearing Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and trying to play the songs on a guitar. He later traced some of Nirvana’s influences to the Beatles, the Kinks and other ‘60s rock bands.

“There was something very artistic, worthwhile about what I heard in those records,” he says, warming up to the topic. “It felt real, like someone expressing his life passion, not just making music to get on the radio.”

There were ‘90s bands that Nicholls liked, but not the American anger brigade. He preferred the more upbeat, melodic sounds of such British bands as the Verve, calling its “Bittersweet Symphony” a masterpiece.

“There’s an intensity to our music that may sound like negativity sometimes, but mostly I see the music as optimistic,” he says. “I’m certainly an optimistic person. I don’t see any point in being alive if you’re not. Music helps you feel that way. It has certainly lifted me. Before music, there wasn’t much in the world for me to do. It gave me a reason to go outdoors.”

At Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, where the Vines are filming the “Outtathaway” video, Nicholls sits quietly in a dressing room and stares at the wall. He’s polite but not big on eye contact. His co-manager Kelly attributes it to shyness. You see this quality even more when he steps in front of a camera, all but shutting down as he closes his eyes or offers a blank expression.

“To me, that’s his shield, his protection,” Kelly says. “I don’t think he’s trying to project an image. On the contrary, he often finds it difficult to understand why people are interested in him or why people, especially in England, are trying to make him into something he’s not. The only thing he’s interested in is writing and recording music. Back home, he pretty much stayed in his room and worked on his music. That was his whole life.

“Our job at the moment is to take a bit of the heat off the band and go home. They’ve been away from home for over a year. They need to go home and be normal.”

Following its scheduled appearance last week on the MTV Video Music Awards, the band was due to fly home for some rest before its most extensive tour--a trek that will include shows in Australia, Europe and the U.S. The shows could tell us a lot about the future of the Vines because discovery by the fans is the only one that really matters.

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at [email protected]