Best.Night.Ever

Melbourne good time boys Vaudeville Smash have written it into their mission statement that every show they play is a party with an inherent '80s hangover. It isn't often that a frontman like Marc Lucchesi can get away with a sax solo without either taking the piss or having the piss taken. Being footloose and fancy free, they have been able to corner a unique market, a throwback into a decade of decadent fun while steeping it all in irreverence and jovial excess. Now they are preparing to release new single Best Night onto the world, Lucchesi admits that its genesis comes from the idea of any wild night – although one in particular springs to mind.

“The little chant that's in the chorus ['This is the best night of my life'], we used to sing that song whenever we were out getting plastered. It was a little mantra, so we would do it on tour a lot, but when Nick (Lam, guitarist) came to me with the crux of the song, we had a totally different chorus. It didn't work so we threw this chant into the chorus, which made us pick one night that we could pinpoint as being the best night of our lives. And I remembered this time about a year or two ago when I was in Lagos (Portugal) with a bunch of friends, and we'd had too much to drink and a lot of other stuff, and a lot of crazy things happened on the beach there that have been loosely thrown into the lyrics.”

Best Night serves as the perfect encapsulation of Vaudeville Smash's musical aesthetic – a crazy menagerie of sounds that sees soul shimmying up alongside some loose funk, with a collective espousal of Hall & Oates, Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald thrusting their hips in the background. While the band has embraced their love of the “godfathers” of yacht rock in the past, Lucchesi admits that it is time to take that adulation to the next level with other masters joining the fray.

“Those guys are big influences, especially Mick McDonald,” Lucchesi advocates. “But I think that this time we wanted to go all out and have a crack at bringing a Prince-like vibe. Or moreso [Michael] Jackson. We are still retaining elements of our other stuff, but this is more of a dance track than anything else. That funk edge – ever since we were teenagers we have been listening to early [James] Brown and those sorts of bands, so it was about time that that all comes out.”

The songwriting process has developed remarkably over the years as the quartet become more assured of their direction, most obvious with the immediacy and confidence that Best Night exudes. “When we started out we would look at our live show and try to see what was missing, then sit down and write a song around filling that space,” Lucchesi admits. “We would have too many ballads or medium level songs and needed something to ramp things up. Best Night did come out of a similar idea, in that we wanted to write a song that would really pump people up, but also pump us up too. And this song was one of those moments where I was showing Nick some of my songs, then he played a demo he had recorded at home with melodies and such and you just know that you have hit on something. We always test songs out in front of an audience before deciding what to do with it though. And Best Night is the perfect introduction to this new phase of the band.”