Van She  

Van She are a Sydney four-piece who bridge the musical gap between boldly adventurous shoegaze and danceable glint disco. The band are known to step off the stage and into the booth, twiddling knobs under their DJ guise of Van She Tech and remixing tracks by the likes of Daft Punk, Ladyhawke and Feist.

The band is formed by Matt Van Schie on bass guitar/vocals, Tomek Archer on drums/sequencer, Michael Di Francesco on synth/guitar and Nicholas Routledge on vocals/guitar

The story of how Van She met is said to go something like this. All four members answered an ad for a vocalist in Sydney’s Drum Media. The ad called for fans of Sepultura and was, apparently a fake. Their chance encounter led to the creation of Van She.

This is, as Di Francesco puts it, “complete fiction.” The four met through mutual friends at a club called Bang Gang, which they see as their equivalent to Studio 54. However, that pesky fabricated story about the ad still follows them around.

Their 2008 debut album was V which peaked at number 10 on the ARIA album charts. The single Strangers saturated the airwaves as did Kelly,  a track originally taken from their EP and reworked for V, Van She delivered a wave of 80s nostalgia while still performing a catchy, modern indie pop piece.

V is a record for which the seeds were sown some time ago, following the release of the Van She EP in 2005. That EP spawned a couple of minor hits in the shape of Kelly and Sex City, saw release in not only Australia, but the UK and US, led to the band touring all three territories extensively and saw them develop the Van She Tech remix and production side of the band. 2005 and 2006 saw the band on the kind of touring schedule that's to be expected of a hotly tipped new band in Australia, and writing new material was confined to small bouts here and there in between remixes, national and international tours, and the barely retained day jobs. In short, it wasn't working. Come 2007 and it was time to get serious about pulling together this debut album, and the band packed up their Surry Hills studio and relocated it and themselves to a small farm house a couple of hours south of Sydney in Berry. Two weeks were spent short circuiting the old country properties power, pretending to be sponges and almost losing their mind on acid, teasing their blue haired engineer, haunting the whole of kangaroo valley with their late-night jamming and actually writing a bulk of the songs that were to make up V.

The band then made the trip to London to record the album at the famous Konk Studios. Van She spent two months with acclaimed UK English producer, Jim Abbiss (Massive Attack, DJ Shaddow, Artic Monkeys). The outcome was a beautiful, confident and spacey modern rock album. The album also received the royal Tech treatment and was remixed and re-released by the band, fittingly titled Ze Vemixes.