). Having a Vine Time
The Courier-Mail
Kathy McCabe
March 29, 2006
THE Vines frontman Craig Nicholls and guitarist Ryan Griffiths are laughing their heads off.
Band drummer and king of the quick quip Hamish Rosser is throwing one-liners up at them from the courtyard of their Sydney management offices.
There is an ease and excitement about the trio as they convene around the courtyard table on the eve of the release of their third album, Vision Valley.
This is the album few people believed would be made and Nicholls, Griffiths and Rosser are not-so-secretly chuffed they have defied the premature expectations of their demise.
Nicholls, in particular, looks happy and relaxed, laughs easily at Rosser's jokes that punctuate the frontman's pauses during the conversation.
No one in The Vines camp would have thought he could be either happy or relaxed back in 2004.
But he gave up smoking marijuana nine months ago and is "managing OK", dealing with Asperger's syndrome by "talking to someone".
"It's great to have a new album, just to be able to be back in touch with things on the music side. People thought we weren't going to have a new album, but I knew we hadn't broken up," he says.
To recap, The Vines exploded on the international music scene from a Sydney garage four years ago with their debut album Highly Evolved, spearheaded by the screamadelic single Get Free.
That album sold more than 1.5 million copies and critics scrambled to anoint them as the new Beatles or Nirvana, depending on how impressed they were by Nicholls' deft melodic touches or the band's aggressive live performances.
"I was in the band a month and we were overseas, playing festivals," drummer Rosser recalls.
"By the time I had been in the band for a year, we'd done the cover of US Rolling Stone (the first Australian band to grace the prestigious front page in 20 years) and played Reading and Glastonbury and America. It was amazing, a huge opportunity. Most bands play for years and never get out of Australia."
After touring around the world and back again, The Vines headed to a small town in upstate New York to record their second album, Winning Days.
They should have been on a high when they embarked on their promotional campaign to launch that album. But it all started to implode.
Nicholls' behaviour became increasingly erratic and occasionally violent, on and off stage, with many dismissing him as an indulgent rock star.
The controversial incidents stacked up, culminating with the now infamous gig at Sydney's Annandale Hotel in May 2004, when The Vines were to perform for Triple M competition winners.
Bassist Patrick Matthews, who met Nicholls when they worked together at McDonald's, stormed off stage following the first song after the singer kicked out at a photographer in the moshpit.
The gig descended into chaos from there, with Nicholls baiting the audience to "baa like sheep" after hearing someone laugh during one of their quieter songs.
Triple M staffers were furious and banned The Vines from their playlist.
The singer's bandmates, management and family shut down the touring plans for Winning Days and tried to figure out how to help Nicholls, who was obviously suffering and not just from the effects of fame and success.
The band's guitar technician Tony Bateman suggested the frontman may have Asperger's syndrome, a type of autism spectrum disorder.
Some of Nicholls' behavioural problems lack of eye contact, unwillingness to be touched and the strange accent many journalists accused him of putting on were typical of the syndrome, as was his extraordinary talent for music.
An Australian authority on the condition, Professor Tony Attwood, agreed to meet Nicholls, his family and the managers. After several tests and meetings, he confirmed the singer had Asperger's.
While all were relieved they now had a name for Nicholls' behaviour and could help him deal with it, there was another serious issue to deal with.
An assault charge arising from the Annandale Hotel incident was finally dismissed in Balmain Local Court in November 2004 and Nicholls and his bandmates were now free to contemplate the future.
Rosser and Griffiths said they never had any doubt in Nicholls' ability to write songs and while waiting for a sign of the future was sometimes frustrating, they had confidence The Vines would move forward.
Nicholls retreated to his home in Sydney's south and the songwriting floodgates opened.
As he completed a batch, he would summons Griffiths, a childhood friend, and Rosser to his home and they would record demos of his works in progress.
"There was a cloud for a while, yeah, but it had lifted by the time we started writing and recording the demos," Nicholls says.
Thousands of fans and more than a few media types would have loved to have pressed a glass to the wall of Nicholls' home to hear what the Vines were up to.
The trio seem amazed that none of the neighbours ever complained about the raucous rock 'n' roll emanating from the suburban home during the months they worked up the new songs including Take Me Back, Gross Out, Candy Daze, Futuretarded and the epic Spaceship.
"Craig set up a little digital eight track box, a couple of mics and a drum kit," Rosser recalls.
"We demoed all through the night on a few occasions. The neighbours are fairly close so we were playing very quietly, with little guitar amps and a lot of time I used brushes."
"If we felt we were making too much noise we would try to wrap it up."
Recorded in Sydney studios with respected producer and mate, Wayne Connolly, Vision Valley is both an insight into Nicholls' particular reality and a flight of imagination.
The soundbites detailing his inability to deal with the demands of success and touring are all there but this isn't just the therapy album.
"Writing songs is good for me . . . it's a good outlet being creative. I guess a lot of them are pretty personal. I can't really think of any theme. Most of the songs are detached, separate ideas," Nicholls says.
"There is positive projection in a lot of songs which is good."
Sonically, the album sounds like it has emerged from the late '60s, with psychedelic guitar assaults giving way to stunningly beautiful acoustically-driven melodies and orchestrations.
Not quite the retro rock of Jet or Wolfmother, the album's sound comes more from the fact that Nicholls doesn't listen to the radio as evidenced by the first single, Don't Listen To The Radio and is only in touch with what other music is out there via video shows.
While their fans will see them in action in at least two clips for singles from Vision Valley, the question as to whether they tour remains unanswered.
And at this stage, unanswerable.
Taking Asperger's sufferers out of their daily routine is a bad move, but Nicholls and his bandmates are itching to play their new material.
The frontman laughs heartily when Rosser suggests they do a stadium tour because "they all look the same", meaning Nicholls wouldn't be exposed to disparate environments.
And they have to find a new bass player with Matthews now a full-time member of Youth Group.
So they will start with one gig, sometime, somewhere and build from there.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm looking forward to getting back into (playing),"says Nicholls. "I wasn't the best at dealing with a lot of stuff that goes along with it. But this time around we're going to see what we can do to make it easier for us playing."
Vision Valley is released on April 1.
