Exclusive Interview: GoodLuck

MusicReview caught up with Cape Town-based GoodLuck for a chat.

For those who have never heard your music before, how would you describe it?

Juliet: Dance music.

Ben: It’s dance music with jazz and pop influences. We are best understood as pop-dance.

Raiven: It’s melodic. It has very good universal appeal and lyrical content, but yeah, it is pop-dance.

Sounds apt. So how do you know each other? How did you come to form GoodLuck? And what was your reason for forming what is effectively a dance band/group?

Juliet: I actually knew Raiven, before I knew Ben, ironically… He actually dated one of my friend’s little sisters. In Cape Town, everyone knows everybody.

Ben: It actually all started with a band that Juliet and I were in before, that we had Raiven collaborate on…

Raiven: Yeah, I came and played sax…

Ben: It was your usual, little sort of pop-rock band. It was 4 piece – guitar, bass, drums, vocals. But we realised that it was a difficult genre to make a living out of. We worked very, very hard on jacSharp. We really made a concerted effort to make it happen. Unfortunately, the reality of it was that we made some mistakes along the way in terms of our timing and business.

Juliet: What inevitably happened is that we started a little project to start playing the club scene. Ben’s brother, who is also an electronic composer (Dom Peters from Goldfish), advised Ben that it would be a good idea to get into the dance scene, as it just opens up a world of venues and clubs to play at.

Ben: Yeah, I actually had that conversion with him a few years ago. The reason that GoodLuck started is purely an economic one. I had my brother tuning my ear off, saying “good luck making it in the rock scene, good luck making it as a drummer”. Everything is going 4 ways, you are paying for everything, you are paying for your own sound, your own marketing… you have to do it all yourself. With that whole, sort of, ‘business practice’ of a rock band – I used my entrepreneurial guise to see how we could leverage more return for what we were doing. Jules, at that time, was doing the marketing, everybody else had their assigned roles and I was sitting there as a drummer wondering what the hell I should be doing. So I thought, okay, can I go and do electronic remixes of our work that we can go and perform in a club? But that didn’t work well. The songs didn’t work. It’s like taking pop-rock songs and trying to make them electronic dance tracks. It just didn’t work.

Raiven: There was a phase of evolution where Ben took the jacSharp songs and tried to remix them into dance tracks. We got a residency at Karma in Camps Bay. After a few shows of using guitars, I eventually got a call from Ben and Jules asking me to come and play sax over the top. There was literally no rehearsal…

Ben: “Like, Raive… Just come and play”. People love the whole brass thing…

Juliet: It was a completely different game when Raiven played with us. We also went to Ibiza and researched what was going on there and formatted our sound to be more and more club scene oriented.

Raiven: The residency at Karma helped a lot. We were there for like 12 weeks. Even at that time we just felt like writing new songs, so we went back to the studio and that’s where Jules and I wrote ‘Disco Pants’ in a single day, which is now being used on the record. Our teething period eventually ended and we started to become comfortable. The other cool thing, and this is a rarity, we have been exceptionally lucky in the sense that some things have just come to us. Things have just fallen in our lap and we have been to take advantage of it.

Who are your local and international influences?

Juliet: For me, definitely the live-dance scene. Looking at groups like Basement Jaxx (not their DJ set, their live show). As well as Groove Armada, Daft Punk and Faithless. I’m generally inspired by people who manage to bring electronic music into a live format and make a success out of it.

Raiven: I’m a jazz student at UCT, so I’ve been studying jazz for 8 or 9 years. The whole premise of jazz is that in order to understand what is happening these days, one needs to understand what has happened in the past. So for me, a lot of my influences come from artists who were around in the 60s or 70s – people like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix etc.

Ben: I’m a bit of a jack of all trades. I don’t get caught up in genres, I don’t get caught up in trends. If a song appeals to me, no matter what genre it is, I’ll be like: “That’s an awesome song!”. It’s weird, for me to tell you who my influences are, I would need to list a lot of bands.

How important of an influence is Goldfish to your music?

Juliet: They are family.

Ben: Yeah look, it is a big influence. Half the reason that I sort of kicked myself in the butt to start this is that I looked at Dom and I thought “Hey, you’re making it…”. On the ground, it is feasible for the style of music that is the collaboration between organic and electronic. They’ve been an influence in the sense that they have pioneered the path.

Juliet: They have been really, really helpful. They have given us amazing opportunities, such as opening for them. Our first gig ever we played opening for them in front of 5 000 people.

Ben: Because they are family, they really helped us in terms of finger pointing. Dom and Dave would just say look in that direction, use that program etc.

Raiven: I think, aesthetically, they show jazz musicians that playing jazz is not your only outlet. You have got to be creative in order to be happy and get work.

Do you guys notice a difference in the way that you are received in Cape Town compared to, say, Johannesburg? Is it like playing in two different worlds?

Juliet: Hell yes!

Ben: There are three different worlds in this country and they are all connected by the Bermuda Triangle. Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. We fly the route all the time and it is a completely different vibe in each city. The audiences appreciate different songs, they respond differently, they dance differently. Cape Town has its own little idiosyncrasies in the way that the crowd latches on…

Juliet: Cape Town is a real challenge…

Ben: Everyone is always going on about how so many bands come out of Cape Town. It is because the Cape Town bands get so beaten down in their own territory. There is no hero worshipping in Cape Town, apart from the big guns who have managed to break out. Bands get slated down their all time. It is a hard, cold world down there.

Juliet: Whereas Durban is the complete antithesis of this, they love everything over there! Just bring it! We played 2 gigs in Durban, then came back about a month later and the whole venue was packed with people singing our songs

Raiven: We felt like superstars!

Juliet: … Like how did this happen? Almost overnight… Johannesburg is fantastic. Music is really big here and people make a lot of effort. Joburg is like a combination between Cape Town and Durban, but is totally area dependent. Reception changes from suburb to suburb.

Raiven: I think the Joburg crowd is an odd mix between the Cape Town and Durban crowd. Reception is initially quite skeptical, but the general persona of everyone in Joburg is so friendly. So in other words, if they like you they will come up to you and chat to you and offer to buy you a drink.

We are very excited to catch a glimpse of your album soon. Tell us more about it. When will it be released, how many tracks are we looking at and what can fans expect?

Juliet: That’s a bit of a tricky one. We want to release singles to radio and generate hype with events before we launch the album. We want these events to be mind blowing experiences which will be really memorable.

Ben: Yeah, we are talking about lights, music, performances, interesting venues etc.

Juliet: So yeah… I’m thinking somewhere towards the end of November. The music is actually almost there, we are in the mastering phase currently.

Are you guys personally mastering the album?

Juliet: No, we have sent it overseas for mastering.

Ben: You have to let go of an album at some point. The problem is that you are way too close to your music and it is a good idea to send it off to someone else.

Juliet: Yeah, the mixers never master their own music.

How many tracks are we looking at?

Juliet: 11 on the first release.

Raiven: As for the content, we have taken some of our tracks from the debut EP and remixed them for the album. One of our tracks, ‘Harlem’, has Lisa Kekaula from Basement Jaxx singing it. We have also done quite a bit of work with some great artists from Cape Town.

Ben: It’s what Miles Davis always used to say: “I’m a terrible trumpeter, I just surround myself with amazing musicians”. That’s what our secret is. Don’t ever get precious about your music. One of our most important rules is that the hero is the song. It’s never one of us, it’s never the band.

Now for the fun questions. Who in the group knows the most girls?

Raiven: I’m actually quite good. I’m renowned on an internet site as being a pimp.

Juliet: Actually, seeing as I went to an all girl school, I think it is me.

Juliet, do you have male groupies and are you single?

Ben & Raiven: Yes, she does!

Juliet: I don’t know, I don’t think so… in terms of being single – not really

Who in the group is the biggest drama queen?

Raiven: Jules!

Hands down?

Raiven: Hands down! Although, drama queen is quite a broad concept, Jules is more of a diva while Ben and I get drama.

Thank you GoodLuck, we wish you all the best!

Photos by Marcello KZN

- Bret Dugmore
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