By Joe Matera

In an era filled with the promise of great new hopes for rock, 2002’s title already belongs to a young quartet from Sydney called ‘The Vines’ and their debut album, Highly Evolved. Produced by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Guided By Voices, Foo Fighters) at L.A.’s original sonic temple, Sunset Sound Factory (where Led Zep and the Stones made some serious history), Highly Evolved is a swaggering, tuneful shot of raw rock with a chaser of blissful psychedelica that had UK’s ‘New Musical Express’ panting, "a perfect synthesis of the Beatles and Nirvana" and declaring "this band are the future of rock!". While in town on their current tour Joe Matera caught up with Vines bass player Patrick Matthews.

Joe Matera: How does a band like The Vines who only ever previously played a handful of local shows, go on to become the most hyped band in the world?

Patrick Matthews: Careful manipulation of the mass media! [laughs] The main priority for us was to make a record, it wasn’t to build a live following before we made the record. We’ve always been fans of records and bands that we would never see live like The Beatles. So we went over and made the record first. And because our name fitted in with whatever the current trend was in music, I suppose it just happened for us.

We signed to the Engine Room label on Xmas eve 2000, then spent the next six months in Australia rehearsing the record. Not that we couldn’t have gone in and recorded it the next day, but things were only being readied for us in America. The second half of 2001 saw us record it and at that stage the interest from the media started building up in England. We also had a lot of record companies come down during the recording process and eventually - though we had no say in who we signed with, due in part that we signed our rights to Engine Room who were keen for us to sign with Capitol - we signed to Capitol records in America on the day George Harrison died.

JM: It was reputed that the budget for ‘Highly Evolved’ was $500,000?

PM: Yes, in Australian dollars. But that also included the cost of our tour we did with You Am I, and things like our food for 6 months, our allocations, all our hire and flights. So that was all included in the recording budget.

JM: The single ‘Get Free’ doesn’t give a good indication of what to expect the rest of the album to sound like as there’s such a diversity of styles on the record?

PM: Yeah, it goes back a long way to the Beatles and The Kinks. I personally like a bit of Bob Dylan  and obviously combining all those influences with pretty much with what’s musically current gives us our diversity.

JM: The songs were written years ago and are old hat by the band’s standard, so do you ever get sick of doing them live?

PM: You do reach a point where you just get into the moment which is partly why Craig [Nicholls, Vines vocalist/guitarist] doesn’t sing the same line in the same voice, like sometimes he’ll be falsetto and sometimes he’ll be low. Apart from being tired and getting bored, it’s mostly about getting involved with the potentiality of the melodies which would be just like any other band that after ten shows would be walking around going, ‘we’re bored’. Keeping that element in the music makes the music still fun to play live.

JM: You’ve already got enough material to do another album?

PM: That’s the plan but it’s just about getting the chance to go in and do it. We always had enough material from the sessions to make two albums and we’ve written more in between as well.

JM: Was the reason behind using the sessions drummers due in part that your original drummer David Olliffe was not cutting it in the studio?

PM: David had already left by the time we got Pete Thomas [Elvis Costello] to come along. The reason Joey Waronker [Beck] came along while David was still there was because at that stage, David had his confidence totally shot and it was really obvious that we could get more out of the drum tracks of some of the songs. Because as you know, you can only put the tracks through ProTools so many times.

JM: So you obviously utilized Pro Tools to the max in the studio?

PM: In a way yeah, there’s a fair bit of ProTools on the drums, but the guitars and vocals, there wasn’t much that was Pro Tooled. The bass we hardly ever as it was too much effort to work the bass. It’s mainly the drums. On the vocals if we had a vocal take on say the first verse and it was exactly the same as the second verse, we would just cut and paste it, that sort of thing. It wasn’t a totally live recording, but I don’t really know how many recordings are these days.

JM: Tell me how did Craig get that fat sound on the record from just using a Strat fitted with standard single-coils?

PM: We weren’t always using Strats actually, we used a Gibson SG a lot on the record as well as a Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. There was also a Fender Telecaster that we used on bits and pieces. These all went through a bunch of distortion pedals that Craig had.

JM: So why use the Strat live then?

PM: The reason we use the Strats live is because one, it looks good and two, they’re pretty hard to break.

JM: So what sort of bass set-up did you use on the record?

PM: I had a old antique ’52 Fender Jazz Bass that went through an old Ampeg ‘Fliptop’ amp though   sometimes I would play through a Marshall head and cabinet.

JM: With the amount of touring you’ve done so far what’s one thing you really hate about it?

PM: The filthy dirty clothes with no laundromats in sight for days!