Yolanda Be Cool Feeling The Vibes This Summer

By Dan Hutton on January 22, 2016 in Arts

There are few better blokes in the music industry than Eastern Beaches locals Matt Handley and Andrew Stanley, a.k.a. Yolanda Be Cool. The boys have signed up for the upcoming return of Vibes On A Summer’s Day, which will be held at the Bondi Pavilion on January 24, and we managed to fire a few questions at Matt in the lead up to the big day…

My earliest music memory is… probably an Elvis tape when I was about five years old.

The idea for the name Yolanda Be Cool came from… Pulp Fiction. If you check out the diner scene towards the end you should get the gist.

I’d like to think that our music is… awesome! But seriously, we try to make music that we would want to listen to on a dance floor or at a party, so I guess we’d like to think it’s dance floor friendly (and f**king cool!).

When I hear our hit single, ‘We Know Speak Americano’, these days I feel… a little bit cringey, because let’s face it, it became a bit of a joke of a song. That said, I’m stoked that we made a song that got heard by so many people and, as a result, opened the doors to all the awesome things that have followed it.

The most exciting thing about the local music scene in Australia is… how everyone is so supportive. It really feels like people genuinely care and get excited about the success of their mates.

Our biggest fans have got to be… our parents, who also think they are A&R experts!

There was this one time when we were starting out that… we used to play at Ravesi’s every Sunday for about 3 years. We called ourselves The Vandals back then and it was still all on vinyl. We would play from 6 to 11 and drink a million vodka cranberries.

If I could have written any song, it would have been… ‘Erotic City’ by Prince.

One person I’d still really like to record with is… Pharrell. We did get in the studio with him once and he started rapping over one of our beats and we secretly started wetting ourselves, but it never ended up being recorded.

If you ever come to see us live, you can expect… house music all night long.

We never want to get to the point where… making and playing music feels more like a job than what it feels like now – we’re in a very lucky position to get paid to do what we love and would do for free.

Vibes On A Summer’s Day is going to be awesome because… it’s down the road from where we live, it’s outdoors, it’s right on Bondi Beach, and the rest of the line-up is awesome. Oh, and it was the first festival we ever went to back in the day, so it holds extremely fond memories.

Our dream gig would be… in front of all friends in the sun down at Bondi!

To book tickets for Vibes On A Summer’s Day, visit www.vibesonasummersday.com.