"It's like looking at the flowers while you're walking through the garden. You don't really look at them, you just kind of walk past them."
Remember that annoyingly talented guy from school who consistently scored near perfect grades, was the star player of most, if not all, the sports teams and was going out with the hottest girl in the year? Well, Michael Di Francesco, guitarist and synth player extraordinaire, and his bandmates from Sydney outfit VAN SHE are the musical equivalent. Damn them! Don't you wish you shared a label with the Presets, had the privilege of remixing Feist and possessed mad DJ skillz to boot?
Di Francesco is unexpectedly philosophical when quizzed on the band's rising profile. "It's like looking at the flowers while you're walking through the garden," he muses. "You don't really look at them, you just kind of walk past them."
Floral analogies aside, Van She are definitely no shrinking violet. After a three year absence following the release of their eponymous debut EP, new album V sees the boys return with a bang. Or is that a lick?
Closer inspection of the album cover reveals a somewhat saucy gesture being made by a young lady. Di Francesco laughs off my innocent outrage at such suggestions of sexual innuendo. "That's why there's a 'Warning: Explicit Material' [label], but the funny thing is that it's too late," he chuckles. "By the time you look at the cover, you've already seen the explicit material." Sneaky devils!
Though there may have been a lengthy delay between releases, Di Francesco is quick to point out that Van She have kept quite busy in the interim. "In short, we just got side-tracked doing dance music," he admits. After impressing critics and fans alike with their remix of the Presets’ Are You The One?, the boys were offered song after song to add their own synth-pop spin to. "It got to a point where the label was like 'hey guys, you're a band... what are you doing? Are you an electronic act now? You've got to write an album. You've gotta get on with it, this is ridiculous," he recollects. "We were like 'that's fine, but you keep giving us all these remixes!'"
The solution to getting Di Francesco and company to knuckle down and churn out a quality album? Banish them to the countryside. "[Our record label] sent us away to Berry, on a farm," he explains. "We went there – no distractions, no remixes, no girlfriends, no internet – and hung out for a couple of weeks and wrote a load of songs." The result is the too cool for school indie-electro retro goodness of V which, coincidentally, the Van She boys are preparing to unleash at a venue near you in the very near future.
What they have in mind for their upcoming tour, however, is more intriguing than your average concert. "We didn't want to do just band gigs," Di Francesco reveals. The band will play live and then immediately follow up with a blistering DJ set, lasting until the wee hours of the morning.
Essentially you get to see Van She twice for the price of one performance. Neat! Though won't this live / DJ party tour take its toll on Di Francesco and his colleagues? "That's what we do," he shrugs. "If there's no work, you're complaining and when there is work you should embrace it." Talented AND modest... talk about dreamy!
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