The Vines story of 2002 is now a well-documented whirlwind of frenetic and spine-tingling musical history that saw them go from being four unknown Sydney music fans writing songs and recording them on old cassettes, to being one of the most talked about and listened-to bands of the year. In February 2002, The Vines left Sydney and spent the next 18 months playing clubs, theatres and festivals in front of thousands of fans in the USA, UK, Europe and Australia, appearing on the covers of countless magazines, from NME and The Face to American Rolling Stone and selling more than 1.5 million copies of their debut album Highly Evolved along the way. Television appearances became legendary. The Letterman Show and Later with Jools Holland hosted a band who genuinely behaved and played exactly as the moment took them – to put it midly. Their glorious performance of “Get Free” at that years’ MTV Video Music Awards put them in front of a worldwide television audience of over one billion people. In amongst so many extraordinary highlights, there were times when the real reason for The Vines’ success – the songs – became somewhat obscured.
From the first incredible raw demos recorded on a temperamental 4-track machine to the fully realised perfection of Highly Evolved, central to The Vines’ appeal is the fact that Craig Nicholls is a songwriter of rare talent, and that Patrick Matthews (Bass), Hamish Rosser (Drums) and Ryan Griffiths (Guitar), are the three people who can make the songs sound on record and on stage like they sound in Craig’s head.
The stories accompanying Highly Evolved were of a rapid rise, drama, press attention, 18 months of constant touring and a fascination with what was going on inside Craig’s head. The band’s second album Winning Days shows the progression of a band who by chance arrived on the scene at the very time that “rock” was declared to be the height of fashion again, but who had in reality been writing and recording frankly staggering songs in isolation for five years, without any consideration for where they would “fit in” on the music scene. To The Vines, as long as what they wrote sounded classic within the confines of a suburban bedroom, they felt they achieved their aim. The new album is an extension of that approach to writing and recording.
Winning Days is an album that succeeds in the notoriously difficult task of straddling a wide variety of musical styles while remaining thematically unified. From the lush, harmony-laden songs (“Autumn Shade 2”, “Amnesia”) through the warm acoustic rock numbers (“Sunchild”, Rainfall”) to the throat-shredding rock n’ roll show-stoppers (“Ride”, “She’s Got Something To Say”) Winning Days is an album of classic songs made by four friends playing together in the same room. Alone in the middle of the country, The Vines have made an album that clearly demonstrates just how great they really are, and that the promise they showed right from those early 4-track demos was no fluke.
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Radio Release from the Vines
