Why The Vines deserve a serious reappraisal they’ll never get

AC/DC. INXS. Midnight Oil. Silverchair. Gotye. Sia. Tame Impala. Flume. Courtney Barnett.

Any list of Australian artists who’ve made huge waves overseas would be incomplete without The Vines. Yet the Sydney rockers don’t get the same bulletproof respect as some of their US-and-UK-invading peers.

Sure, Highly Evolved has been regarded as one of the best Australian albums ever, but the rest of their catalogue isn’t treated as fondly.

Instead, The Vines are widely considered a textbook cautionary tale of rise and fall. A band as much remembered for the headlines and media attention as the music they release.

With the benefit of hindsight, The Vines, and particularly frontman Craig Nicholls, could be seen as the latest in a long line of budding talents chewed up and spat out by a youth-and-trends obsessed business desperately in search of the Next Big Thing.

Rock'n'roll saviours crucified in the name of entertainment? Or just another rock band?

Listen to the The Vines J Files above:

Few artists – of any genre – exploded as swiftly and with as much impact as The Vines did in 2002 with their debut album Highly Evolved.

Cherry-picking the most addictive bits of Nirvana, The Beatles, and Silverchair, the record packaged grunge blasts and sharp pop sensibilities into an industrial strength brand of radio-friendly garage rock.

America loved it. Attention from the US catapulted The Vines from playing half-empty Sydney pubs to #11 on the US Charts and the cover of Rolling Stone – in very good company when hailed as the “saviors of rock” alongside The Strokes, The Hives, and The White Stripes.

The British music press adored The Vines even more.

They appeared on the cover of NME five times between 2002 and 2004, who hyped them as “the second coming of Nirvana” and regularly compared frontman Craig Nicholls to Kurt Cobain. Sometimes in some very irresponsible ways (which we’ll get to).

As Nicholls became music’s most talked-about rock star, the group’s future seemed limitless. Highly Evolved was hailed an instant classic, making The Vines one of the biggest bands around, scooping up critical adoration, awards, and sold out shows.

But what goes up must come down.

A backlash began brewing even before the shine around Highly Evolved had even begun fading.

“Our next album will be a hundred times better,” Nicholls boasted in 2002 to Rolling Stone. It wasn’t, was the general feeling at the time.

The Vines’ second album Winning Days received a tepid welcome from fans - lead single ‘Ride’ scraping in at #94 in the Hottest 100 of 2004, a year after ‘Get Free’ towered at #5 in the countdown.

Media now seemed less interested in the music and more in the erratic behaviour of Nicholls – the howling focal point of the band’s electric live shows.

What was once revered as thrillingly unpredictable grew to become derided as messy and unreliable - as typified by the now-infamous performance of ‘Get Free’ on David Letterman’s Late Show.

Tours and press appearances began being cancelled as ever-wilder stories about Nicholls surfaced through interviews and write-ups.

Things reached a disastrous point of no return in May 2004, when The Vines played a hometown show at Sydney’s Annandale Hotel, sponsored by Triple M and consisting of an audience of comp winners and industry types.

Nicholls berated the audience – “Why the fuck are you laughing?' You're all a bunch of sheep. Can you go "baa"?' – smashed the camera of a photographer and stormed off stage.

As per The Guardian in 2006: 

Shortly after, Nicholls was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism spectrum disorder, and the assault charges were dropped on the condition he continue seeking treatment.

The logic was that Nicholls’ reputation for rule-breaking was linked to his Asperger’s, and exacerbated by the inherently non-regimented lifestyle of an in-demand touring musician.

“The guy who diagnosed Craig said his life consisted pretty much of the worst things you could do for someone in his condition,” The Vines manager Andy Kelly once told The LA Times.

“Being in a different place every day, meeting new people, just having everything be totally unstructured. Things went downhill very quickly.”

To say that fame and turbulent touring life didn’t fit well with Craig Nicholls is an understatement. He wasn’t well equipped for the overwhelming reality of being the face of a new movement. But then again, who the heck would be?

"I have been out of my mind a couple of times in my life," he told Rolling Stone in 2014. "To me, that's just what I'm like. When I was younger it seemed cool to be crazy. I'm not trying to be crazy now. I'm trying to be normal. What's important to me is my family and making the albums."

Over the course of a decade, that’s just what Nicholls did. He’s the only consistent member across the six albums recorded since Highly Evolved, each trumpeted as a ‘comeback’ album in their own way, but accompanied by very selective touring and press opportunities.

Though uneven, there’s some material every bit as good as their debut scattered among those records (not to mention some excellent covers of The Beatles and Outkast). Start with the spacey ‘Don’t Listen To The Radio’ and the psych-barrage of ‘Black Dragon’, then go deep with 2014’s self-funded, two-part Wicked Nature.

However, as the world lost interest in the ‘New Rock’ narrative, so too did the buzz around The Vines never reach the same fervent heights of the early 00s.

NME even issued an apology about how wrong they were for hyping the band in a scathing review of their fourth album, 2008’s Melodia:

“They were never the saviours of rock’n’roll we said they’d be, but we had hoped for a return – however slight – to ‘Highly Evolved’ form. We hoped in vain.”

There’s a mean streak to the review that goes beyond just disappointment of promise unfulfilled, and it typifies a lot of how the media treated The Vines once business stopped booming.

Nicholls was glamourised as the out-of-control Bad Boy of the ‘00s garage rock revival, made famous for ‘difficult’ interviews, chaotic performances, and his colossal appetite for marijuana and McDonald’s.

He was labelled ‘barking mad’ and ‘crazy’ before his Aspergrer’s diagnosis, and even afterwards – in a few tasteless examples. The spin was less about concern for the singer-guitarist’s mental state and more about spectacle.

‘What WILL he do next?’

The media circus stopped just shy of encouraging the then-27-year-old musician to burn out rather than fade away. 

“See them soon,” the NME once wrote. “It could be the only chance you get.” The implication wasn’t subtle, suggesting The Vines frontman was doomed to face the same sacrificial fate as Kurt Cobain.

A snarky 2004 article from The Guardian is even worse, outright complaining that Nicholls is “not only frustratingly alive, but hale and hearty,” suggesting that “the field for the next big rock tragedy is down to two: Pete Doherty and Courtney Love.”

How is this ethically okay?

Certainly some of The Vines’ downturn was due to Nicholls’ self-destructive streak, as the frontman himself would later admit to the same publication in 2014 about Asperger’s being the root of his “erratic” behaviour:

“I seemed to have a problem with things that most people don’t have a problem with … That’s a good excuse anyway, for acting like a jerk."

But it certainly didn’t help that the same press that once valourised The Vines began vilifying him, and in the ugliest instances, even wishing their frontman a tragically early demise.

It raises pertinent questions about the dangers of idolising artists. Does pop culture journalism have a responsibility to acknowledge the mental health and darker impulses of its musicians? What are the how’s and why’s of separating art from artists?

It is complicated territory to navigate, and more recent examples, amid a climate of the #MeToo and cancel culture movements, suggest we’ve still got much to learn.

Sadly, the way troubled celebrities are exploited – from column inches to online content – is an ongoing phenomenon.

Amy Winehouse was an undeniable talent, but arguably a victim of our collective toxic fascination with celebrity coming at the highest of costs to those bestowed with it. An idea harrowingly depicted in the 2015 documentary Amy.

Similarly, 2021’s Framing Britney Spears criticises (perhaps hypocritically so) the media’s unfair treatment of the titular pop star, examining her rise to global superstardom as a teen and the ensuing tabloid scrutiny over her widely publicised mental breakdown and conservatorship court battle.

Sound familiar? Sure, Craig Nicholls hasn’t suffered quite the same level of ingrained media misogyny. But there’s little denying he was lionised then brutally made a whipping boy by the press.

Nicholls and The Vines could make for fertile territory for a similar documentary that looks back with more kindness than the hype machine of the 2000s did. But it’s unlikely it’ll happen.

The rest of the band’s discography lives in the shadow of their debut, but they arguably deserve a more serious reappraisal than ‘Highly Evolved? Great!, everything after? Bad’.

The Vines aren’t doing talk shows and cover stories anymore, but they have their fans. In 2018, Craig Nicholls even made a cameo with The Killers and, somewhat miraculously, even got the original line-up back together for a tour with Jet.

The controversies, bust ups and line-up shuffles overshadowed their success, but there’s no arguing the impact they had. The Vines brought attention Down Under, arguably cultivating an international appetite for Australian music that countless artists are still benefiting from to this day.

Their legacy isn’t clean cut, but it’s still remarkable to see what The Vines achieved, and chiefly what Nicholls survived, given he was basically a skinny, high-school dropout who quit his day job slinging burgers to fulfill his big dreams of making an album in the same L.A. studio as some of his rock idols.

That’s the strongest sense you got of the frontman when he reminisced on making Highly Evolved after the album ranked #37 in the Hottest 100 Australian Albums of All Time; a fanboy who lived and breathed music that couldn’t wait to be part of the world of making it.

“Yeah, it’s really sentimental for me," Nicholls told triple j’s Richard Kingsmill around the 2011 countdown.

"Because being in a band for years before that… I was very driven and obsessed with music. Doing demos, just waiting to get the opportunity to go into a studio and finally do it.”

“I think it turned out really well. I’m really proud of it.”

In the end, The Vines are just a band and Craig Nicholls is only human. Perhaps things are better that way.

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