Whilst the same question could be asked of the South African Rugby team as they narrowly defeated England, but enough about Rugby, let’s talk music! We caught up with the delightful Ben and Jules from South African electronic/pop band GoodLuck to find out a bit more about the music scene in Cape Town and their upcoming European tour. 

or those who are unfamiliar GoodLuck are a three-piece band with electronic music at their heart. They have had exceptional success in their home country with their infectious energy and big stage presence. They have 23 top 40 radio singles, 9 charting number one singles, and literally thousands of shows worldwide. They have performed alongside many global artists like Pharrell Williams, Groove Armada and Basement Jaxx to name a few. They’ve also notched up over 110 million streams on Spotify and Apple Music.

I made the mistake of first delving into their 4th album first which is very different from their trademark electronic beats, I thought I’d clicked on the wrong link!

We are an electronic and live electronic band and that album that you happen to stumble on first, which is hilarious that you found first.

Maybe it was the algorithm but that was actually a covid induced breakaway idea that we had to take all of our hit songs that we had, I mean, the band has been extraordinarily well received on radio, especially in Africa, we’ve had something like 28 radio hits in this continent of the last 10 years with nine. Number one, Top 40 singles. So the music has had a lot of legs on this continent and we thought it’ll be a kind of a opportunity since everything had slowed down just to make an acoustic album and reimagine those songs.

As an electronic band, you’re making all the music yourself in a box with machines and covid, like being forced not to be around people. It kind of inspired us to swing hard the other way and pull a whole lot of amazing musicians that we knew from Cape Town. They had also had an incredibly hard journey through the lockdowns and also just to have an opportunity for us to spend time with humans. it was really cool because we picked the top session musicians from Cape Town, like Ben said, and It was having a full kit of Ableton and plug-in array but they were real people playing instruments. You could just say we’re going to do this like a bossa Nova, We’re going to do the song with a swing track, We’re doing it kind of reggae style and five six seven and they’re just playing it perfectly it’s wild. So, it was a cool experience, but it’s definitely not what we normally do.

You guys really love to tour, you seem to really get out and play live.

Yeah, we started off a residency in the holiday town called Plettenberg Bay a number of years ago and was just supposed to be a sunset concert where we could get our fans together on holiday and just, have a party and it’s growing and growing in kind of become this monster that we just never imagined it would ever be. And now, it’s a festival series that runs from Cape Town, all the way up the garden route to East London. It’s further east and 25,000 people, it’s getting quite big.

The ethos of our band is really immersing into the event, with good times, positive energy, good messages, happy feelings and human connection. There’s no one with ego or if you have, to leave it at the door, Just don’t have that in all in our space. So as a result, I think our events are really happy and just really cool. And if fun is a better word. So, we’ve been doing them now for 10 years, which is crazy.

Three years ago, we started ‘Beats in the Bush’ also in covid. We saw a need for something more exclusive when large gatherings weren’t allowed, we saw the need for people still to connect and we came up with this concept of marrying tourism with music, specifically safari with music. It’s very boutique where you can go on safari during the day and the nighttime, they party like crazy and have drinks on top of mountains with vistas, and it’s a whole safari experience, but with the music festival attached. The Hluhluwe National Park is literally outside your tent.

Are you working on any new material?

There’s a new album in the pipeline which we’re, really excited about it because it has been a long time coming. Before we would make songs just to make songs and write songs and now, I think we’re feeling a calling to actually lean towards making music that we can play live and really incorporate into our live show in the style that we feel proud of.

I think we are going a little more dance orientated with the next album and it’s just organically happening. And of course there’s layers to that I mean some of the sounds are a little bit Afro some of the stuff definitely is very African influenced. We’ve got one song that’s got a UK house sound with a little shuffle to it.

So onto some light-hearted questions… Google’s ai algorithm has gone absolutely mental. It’s been churning out music and no one realised it ran out of disk space. So obviously they can’t use the algorithm to fix it out as it’s gone haywire. So they’ve asked all of the musicians they know to choose one track to keep and one track to delete. So what’s your keeper? And what’s your want to kill?

I’m going to have to kill Drake! Not because he’s annoyed me as a human being, but he’s at risk of beating Michael Jackson to the top spot and I can’t let that happen!

What about a keeper?

Got to be Dusty Springfield!