The Vines

Thu 9th Jun, 2011 in Features

The return of the prodigal son is a parable the music industry is obsessed with. The rise, fall and rebirth of a rock star is a story that has been told so many times, it has become ingrained in rock culture. Nobody knows this better than Craig Nicholls. Lead singer and musical mastermind of The Vines, once hailed by NME to be ‘the saviours of rock,’ the band was never able to return to the lofty heights of critical acclaim and success that their debut album Highly Evolved garnered.

The success of Highly Evolved soon became the albatross around Craig Nicholls’ neck, the failure of Nicholls to follow up the success of their first album and the relentless pressure from the press and public soon led to the unravelling of both Nicholls and his band. Mental breakdowns, cancelled tours, being banned from Triple M radio play and kicked off The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; the band was in an inexorable downward spiral, one that looked to be the end of the band. Flash-forward to the present day, with their fifth studio album it’s a very different story. The grievances of the past have been put to rest and the band is on the long road to recovery and perhaps even a return to the glory days of Highly Evolved. Fasterlouder chatted to a quietly optimist Nicholls about the future of The Vines.

“My life is what I do. It is the band; there’s nothing else,” a fidgety Nicholls reflected, looking back at the troubled times that have plagued The Vines’ career. “Maybe I considered stopping playing live and stop travelling and all the stuff that goes on between writing and recording but you kind of have a break from that and you get back in to it.”

From the time that The Vines followed up their sensational debut album Highly Evolved with the markedly less successful Winning Days, the band swan dived in to a fetid mire of public criticism and suppositions on Nicholl’s mental health, culminating with a blow out at the Annandale Hotel in 2004. This proved to be the event horizon for the band, which was continually plagued with bad luck and modest sales during their subsequent releases. Despite seemingly being cursed with the music industry’s version of ‘the black spot’, Nicholls cautiously hopes the band’s fifth studio album Future Primitive would herald better times for the band. ““I think [the future] holds more good times y’know?... I’m not sure what it’s going to do yet… We’ve had a lot of good feedback from people saying they really like it, which has been nice. So I’m not sure what the outcome’s going to be. I hope it goes really well, I know people really like it.”