Vaudeville Smash

Coburg, Tuscany and a karaoke machine

The band is built around three brothers. Marc Lucchesi sings and plays saxophone and flute, Dan Lucchesi drums and sings, Luca Lucchesi plays bass and sings. They grew up in Coburg, in Melbourne's inner north, in a house where their father played guitar and their mother played piano. Marc was three when the family left San Cassiano in Tuscany for Australia, and the Italian thread runs through more than the surname: the group took its name from a late-1980s advertisement that ran on Italian television for a karaoke machine called the Vaudeville Smash.

The first gig was at Bar Open in Fitzroy in September 2009. The taste was set early and has barely shifted since — Hall & Oates, Michael Jackson, Earth, Wind & Fire, Huey Lewis and the News, Todd Rundgren and Prince, with the Italian singer Mango in there too. The current five-piece is completed by James Bowers on keyboards and Ash Griffin on guitar. The guitar chair has changed hands over the years; Martin Lubran held it during the period around the band's second album.

Records made without asking permission

The recorded output has come in bursts. Three EPs arrived first — Hey, It's the Vaudeville Smash in March 2010, Love Yachts Geronimo in April 2011 and V-Grade Horror in October 2013 — bracketing the debut album Dancing for the Girl, released on 2 May 2013. The Gift followed on 24 August 2016, led by the single Laura. The Neverending Glory, the third album, came out on 1 April 2021.

The attitude behind the records was stated plainly by Dan Lucchesi to Beat in September 2012, when the band were hand-stencilling logos onto CD sleeves: they decided to do exactly what they liked, and if people loved it, good, and if not, at least they did. The songs bear that out. Best Night, from that period, grew out of a chant the band used on nights out and a specific evening in Lagos, Portugal, where Marc watched a crowd form around Luca dancing; the guitar part was lifted in spirit from Black Or White, and the lyric finds room for Bono and a prank call made from Portugal to Australia. Funk arrangements, horn lines and jokes that are actually jokes have been the constant.

The football song

The track that carried the band furthest was not a single from any of those albums. In 2014 they recorded Zinedine Zidane with the sports broadcaster Les Murray, a spoken tribute to the French midfielder laid over a disco arrangement. Billboard named it one of ten unofficial anthems of that year's World Cup. It has kept accumulating views ever since — the band's own press kit now puts it above 30 million on YouTube, and their site has cited figures in the eleven-million range for streams.

Twelve years on it remains one of the three songs the band play most often, alongside Richter Scale and Drunken Cowgirl, according to the setlists logged by audiences. The risk with a novelty hit is that it eats the catalogue. It has not, largely because the rest of the set is built to the same specification: horns, a bassline, and a reason to stay standing.

Where the touring went

Between records the band has worked the road hard and unusually widely for an independent Australian funk act. They have toured Japan and headlined the Sapporo Music Festival, played South by Southwest in Austin, and appeared in New York, Toronto, Singapore, Spain and Italy. At home the festival list runs through Woodford Folk Festival, Queenscliff Music Festival, Caloundra Music Festival and the St Kilda Festival.

In Melbourne the band's recent base has been the mid-sized rooms — The Night Cat in Fitzroy, Brunswick Ballroom, Howler — where a 13-song set with no support from a PA-sized production still fills the floor. A Night Cat show on 24 May 2025 ran to thirteen songs; the Brunswick Ballroom date on 30 November 2024 folded in seasonal covers alongside the regulars.

September 2026: a residency and an album that is nearly here

The band's current standing is best read off two things. The first is the album. Their press kit states that a fourth studio record is in development for release in early 2027, with a new single due in July 2026 — the first new music since The Neverending Glory in 2021, and the first sign in five years that the studio side of the operation is moving again.

The second is Spiegel Haus Melbourne, a two-level entertainment precinct that opened in the Golden Square car park off Lonsdale Street in Chinatown on 29 October 2025, with a 380-seat Belgian spiegeltent, a 400-seat black box theatre, an open-air space and a rooftop dome bar, holding around a thousand people across the site. Vaudeville Smash were part of the opening programme: Vaudeville Smash'd, a variety show they host, ran for five Saturdays at 10.15pm from 8 November to 6 December 2025 in the ground-floor spiegeltent.

That inaugural season ran from November 2025 through to July 2026, and the venue's creative director Chris Mitchell said it had shown how much appetite there was for a room where circus, cabaret, comedy, music and family entertainment could share a bill. Season two opens in September 2026, and Vaudeville Smash'd returns on 26 September as one of its headline strands, alongside a four-week run of Briefs: The Works and the Melbourne premiere of La Ronde from 21 October. Three Vaudeville Smash'd dates are currently on sale — 26 September, 3 October and 10 October 2026 — with the October pair landing inside Melbourne Fringe, which runs from 29 September to 18 October. The show is registered in the Fringe programme as 18+, wheelchair accessible, and carries warnings for alcohol use and drug and sexual references.