Early years

Every band has its own unique story, and so do we. This story begins back in 2004 when Martin Nyman and a couple of friends who had recently started a band together, were looking for someone to play bass guitar.

At a local youth club Martin met Victor Klint for the first time. Victor was asked rather quickly to join the band and play bass guitar. He decided to join in even though he, being a drummer, didn't even know how to play the instrument. When the band had their first rehearsal Victor instinctively sat down by the drums and started to play. He wasn't nearly as good a bass player as a drummer and the original drummer was not nearly as good on drums which led to the two of them playing drums in turns. The band switched members a couple of times along with their band name, though Martin and Victor always were a constant part of the machine. Around 2005 the guys asked Sebastian Alfredsson if he wanted to join in and he did not hesitate.

In 2006 Victor was about to move to Australia for a year. Up until this point the band had still been struggling to find a permanent bass guitarist. At the farewell party for Victor they asked Hampus Björk if he would like to join the band and fill the spot. Hampus had only played bass a couple of times before, but was willing to give it a shot. During the year that Victor was gone, the rest of the band continued to rehearse although they didn't play any live shows. When Victor came back from Australia they began to rehearse more. This was when they actually became a serious band in any real sense and they no longer played covers at this point. The band started to think more about their sound and started to look for something to steer their sound in the direction in which they wanted to go. As a result, Martin's older brother Fredrik joined the band on synthesizer/keyboard.

Up to this point the band had not quite settled on a name. The band had been struggling with this issue and tried several different band names with varied quality. Some examples are Frankie Lee (from the song: "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" which also inspired the band name Judas Priest), Pennsylvania and The Vans.

The band finally decided to call themselves "Vacancy Labour". Which more or less came out of the blue. The official explanation of the somewhat antithetic name is that the contrasting words are meant to describe the idea of the band; something the band treats as a job but they regard as their vacation away from reality. There are many more layers to the name, but some things are better unexplained.

"The Cherry Recordings"

Since Victor's uncle was a producer, the band always had an access of good equipment for recording music. Therefore recording material was a huge part in the early years of the band. Very early the band decided to record an EP called "Heading for Exit" but the EP was never finished. This was mostly because none of the band members had any real experience of sound mixing and were not content with the sound on the recordings. Instead the band started focusing on writing new material and playing live.