Colour-coordinated clothing. A rictus headshake. A manky hat. There's an infinite number of low-maintenance ways to create your own frontman trademark...and then there's Craig Nicholls.
So many months of beating holy hell out of himself, and still going at it hammer and tongs from tonight's first song to the screeching end of a precision-timed sixty minute set, our Craig must surely realise that his signifiers of choice - stagger around in bombed fashion, treat electric guitars without due care, drop-kick amp head, half-nelson its cabinet, rearrange drumkit, repeat - will be a lot more taxing in less-supple years to come than the cannier choices of Jack White, David Gray and Badly Drawn Boy.
He doesn't look that worried.
In the event, no, this isn't the first time Nicholls, nor indeed other artistes of note, have expressed volatility onstage in such physical fashion. But you might as well complain, and no one with ears here is, that tonight's massive steamroller of an opener, 'In The Jungle' - all Blue Oyster Cult intro chords, grungetastic tempo lurches, throat-shredding screams and guitar-tossing - sounds pretty much exactly like Nirvana and Pixies in some kind of glorious rock-to-the-finish. And played like this - all attack and no apologies - it's fantastic. Topped only by the evening's concluding number, 'Fuck The World', which does the same thing again, but louder, with whip-lashings of Sabbath and the shrieking ghost of Bon Scott. Ay caramba.
But the most compelling thing about this gig isn't the ear-splitting moments, the faintly silly stage-trashing, the swaggering backbeat of a careering 'Outtathaway', the endearing way Ryan Griffiths' acoustic guitar begins so many songs with the same 'Space Oddity' chords, the way the gig is anchored and frequently saved by the wickedly tight rhythm section, or the way the rest of the band understandably keep their eyes glued on Nicholls - there goes another guitar, there goes another amp - all night.
Forgive me, children, but it's the Neil Finn moments. It may be an Antipodean thing. It may just be me. But for someone so fond of shredding his own throat, Nicholls has a gorgeously, unmissably Finn-like voice - and the wistful, Beatles-soaked inclinations to match, ill-hidden under his addiction to chaos. From a raggedly charismatic, insolently brief rendition of the astounding 'Highly Evolved', to the drifty little-boy-lost harmonics of 'Amnesia', 'Homesick' and 'Autumn Shade', to 'Mary Jane' making epic heartbreak of its wafer-thin content and the 'Waiting On A Friend'-style slouch of 'Get Free', this is the music that makes you want to see The Vines this time, and next, and the time after that.
And whether Craig Nicholls - as arrogantly in love with his own 'Being F*cked Up' as on his ability to deliver songs that fellow f*cked-up-boy-wonder Ryan Adams would give his Elton John fanclub card for - will trash the drumkit at those gigs, too, is pretty much beside the point.
