Great Expectations

Freddie Cowan raises an eyebrow. A smirk crosses his lips. He's heard the word 'expectations'; his band, the ridiculously hyped UK combo The Vaccines, all too familiar with both the expectations and being asked about them. “I feel like every interview I've ever done asks about expectations,” smiles the 23-year-old guitarist. “Expectations after your first gig, your first demo, your first single, your second single, your first album – expectations of what? What are we actually talking about? What are we trying to achieve here?

“In reality, The Vaccines just want to make music, and we want to tour. But all this talk of expectations – it's clear people all want something of us. That we should be striving to be the biggest band in the world, or not the biggest band in the world, or a band that should be more ambitious, or a band that should be less ambitious, that should be making slicker records, or should be making dirtier records. That's journalism, I guess, you've gotta have something to talk about. And maybe we're not giving them enough?”

If, as those overused and variously attributed (Brian Eno? Frank Zappa? Elvis Costello?) quotes go, music criticism is so much dancing about architecture, then writing about The Vaccines is dancing about dancing about architecture; all interpretive pirouettes so removed from the literal building as to be its own art. After all, The Vaccines' music is, essentially, a slightly garage-y version of landfill indie; perhaps, as Cowan says, they're not much to write about. But since their first gig, the Brit-rock buzz about The Vaccines has been so constant, so hysterical, that it is the story; a tale of hype and backlash and the music industry; of bands-as-memes, and debates over nepotism and privilege and music-industry machinations. Are they, perhaps, just the Lana Del Rey of slightly garage-y, landfill indie?

“It's funny, I'm talking now as if I'm writing my biography,” Cowan notices, where he's speaking about the band's birth, in 2010, and debut with 2011's What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? as if it's ancient history. “We've only just finished our first album campaign, but already people are talking about us as if we were something that happened. But that's how things are now: everything is so sped-up. Lana Del Rey is a retired singer, now. She's like Cher in the '90s. You know what I mean? She's thought of as a superstar, she has her own line of handbags, she spends more time going to premieres than performing gigs. People talk about her career as if it's all over, and her first album came out six months ago.”

The hype was born from the beginning; with the band's insider status – Cowan is the brother of The Horrors keyboardist Tom Cowan and the pair spent years living together in a £2.45mil Fulham maisonette owned by their mother – making their first gigs well-trafficked by press types. The hype was immediate – transcending anything that The Horrors ever experienced – turning The Vaccines into overnight popstars-in-waiting in the UK, with the band eventually signing to Sony and being primed for chart success. When What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? debuted at number four, they'd been together barely over a year. Cowan had been a first-hand witness to the hype unleashed on The Horrors, and now, he was thrown into the “surreal” circus of the overnight arrival.

“Any band that gets successful these days, it happens extremely quickly,” defends Cowan, of the 'overnight success' narrative. “It gets out on the internet and then it just goes like wildfire; things spread instantly. People don't really get it, yet, that that's the norm. We constantly get asked, 'Why has it happened so quickly for you?' But I can't think of any band that's come up slowly in the last few years. There are bands like Elbow or The National who played around for years, but even that just becomes a story to sell. And if they started playing together now, maybe they wouldn't spend years playing to no one; that slow rise is for a different era.”

So, as well as being asked about expectations, and overnight successes, what else are The Vaccines constantly negotiating with? “People in England are constantly talking about us, now, as the hardest-working band in the UK,” Cowan says; this, apparently, the logical reaction to a band that puts out two albums in 18 months, whilst touring all the while. “That's our cross to bear. With The Horrors, it was the clothes. The clothes were bigger than the music for a stretch, and once the clothes were gone, lots of people just gave up on them. Now that we're no longer that new band, I'm wondering how many people are going to give up on us.”

The Vaccines are endlessly savvy about this press game; which, too, suggests their insider status. They called their debut album What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?, recalling the disappointment-etched titles of early-'00s New York hype magnets (The Strokes Is This It?, Liars' They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top, The Walkmen's Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone), and effectively pre-empting the backlash to the hype before it began.

“We thought it sounded traditional, in the vein of The Other Side Of Bob Dylan or Meet The Beatles, whilst obviously being a stab at the press,” Cowan says, of their debut. “Because there was so much positive and negative anticipation for the record, it felt like it was becoming all about other people's” – here's that word again – “expectations. We wanted to get ahead of the inevitable backlash, in some ways, and kind of control the message that was going to be put out about [us].”

Their follow-up album also pre-empts the press, but this time getting out in front of a classic critical cliché: The Vaccines Come Of Age. In this case, coming-of-age means questioning their meteoric rise (“the songs are more about, 'Isn't it weird getting up on stage in front of all these people, when I never wanted to be a rockstar'”), while losing the awful pop-radio-ready compression that dogged the first record (“Ethan Johns doesn't make polished pop records, he makes rock'n'roll records,” Cowan swaggers, “no AutoTune, no editing, no click-tracks – as live as possible”). And coming-of-age also means being hype survivors, elder statesmen who can counsel bands new to Brit-rock buzz-making.

“We see it in the support bands we play with, when they start to get that attention,” Cowan says. “You're trying to find your feet and work out who you are and all of a sudden you're being told who you are. Someone's telling you you're the next Clash or whatever, and there's this immediate sense of false self-importance, you become this caricature of yourself, and it takes you further away from what you should actually be.

“This time, I feel like I know who I am now, I feel like I know who we are now. But when we were going through all that, I didn't, and that was certainly a negative thing. But it also doesn't really matter at all. You don't find yourself thinking too much about the expectations of the blogosphere, you just care that people are at your gigs.”

The Vaccines will be playing the following shows:

Friday 28 December to Tuesday 1 January - Falls Music & Arts Festival, Lorne VIC
Friday 28 December to Tuesday 1 January - Falls Music & Arts Festival, Marion Bay TAS
Friday 4 to Saturday 5 January - Southbound Festival, Perth WA