For a band that left Australia after a handful of live gigs and managed to conquer the world while appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone and NME, you could be forgiven for presuming The Vines would be well known in their home country. No sir. Hardly anyone outside Sydney has heard of them despite their rising on the world stage. Though their back to back homecoming shows are sold out, the locals spilling into the Metro tonight aren’t all there to sing undiluted praise to the new antipodean hopes - merely there to test them, it seems.

The Vines enter to the usual cheering, but play the first clutch of songs to a largely unresponsive crowd. “Gotta get outtathaway!/ No time for me to stay/ Everyone in the world don’t affect you”, they cry and appropriately it goes almost unnoticed. The band are gracefully bashing out album tracks such as ‘Country Yard’ to an unimpressed crowd.

Then a little surprise brings a sea change. As the band start an unrecognisable acoustic tune, Craig Nicholls, now jacketless bearing a sleeveless Vines t-shirt and an unruly mop of bed-hair, slings his guitar over his shoulder and whispers: “Sorry Miss Jackson, I am for real…” and the crowd instantly yell out with the Outkast classic, beautifully transformed into a tortured apology. Nicholls now wheels about on the mic and seems to shut off from the crowd, turning him into what looks for all the world like a Teardrop-era Julian Cope entrenched in his own world.

Now it’s really kicking and it even seems as if the lighting engineer has woken up too. The justified centre of it all, Nicholls, sometimes singing in a falsetto to mock his own tunes, becomes steadily more uncorked, thus becoming compulsive viewing. You even wonder how he ever kept it together enough to record the album.

The band thankfully don’t give themselves much cooling off time before the encore and Nicholls spends more time on the floor for ‘In The Jungle’, ending in a now typical, but almost psychotic, fall through the entire drumkit. And they’re gone. Phew. A band who finally brought a way too cynical crowd around by simply playing for themselves show that the basic elements of rock ‘n’ roll can be as entertaining and compulsive as any pyrotechnics of choreography.