Interview: GoodLuck

GoodLuck, the trio of Ben Peters, Juliet Harding and Raiven Hansmann, have been extremely busy touring this summer. They managed to take some time out of their busy schedule to have a chat with me.

With over 600 shows since they started in 2010, GoodLuck have mixed feelings about where their absolute favourite audience was at. “We have been working our asses off in the past 4 years! We obviously love our home crowds, but I have to say that the Netherlands are a fantastic bunch and the UK audiences have also surprised us, because we heard from other bands that they were ‘tough’ to crack but we have experienced the exact opposite!”

Before all this success GoodLuck’s humble beginnings originated at the electronic scene in South Africa. “We started out performing small club gigs in Cape Town, where the aim was to bring live instruments into a club environment while keeping the dance floor full.  We started to create this blend of sounds and soon we wrote an original album of live electronic music. To be honest we had absolutely no idea what we were doing and we were totally surprised to have 9 radio singles off an 11 track album of which five of them went to #1 on the top 40. It was a total blur for us, we have been touring ever since trying to spread the message of how much incredible electronic music is coming out of Africa.”

For Ben, musical success ran in the family with older brother Dom being part of electronic duo Goldfish, winners of Best Dance Album of the year at the South African Music Awards in 2009. I asked Ben if his brother being part of the music industry had any influence on him joining, “weirdly the opposite—I always thought I’d end up in some other line of work, but through some quite unusual coincidences I was pretty much yanked into the industry. I’d given up music after school and was focusing on trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life when a friend of mine bumped into me out one night and introduced me to Carl Wegelin who was playing in a band with Jules—they asked me to come drum for them, even though I insisted I was rubbish—and that lead on to me joining Plush as a full time musician and deciding that this music malarkey wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Obviously what Dom has achieved has been a massive inspiration and it’s certainly paved the way for many other musicians to find a place in the local and international scene.”

GoodLuck’s debut album GoodLuck has tracks with jazzy undertones such as ‘Bounce me Brother’. “We struggle to fit into a box in terms of genre—we just try to make the song as good as we can which means we have about 20 genres that we have been influenced by! Overall though we love IDM and electronic music… as long as there is playing with real instruments.”

Their new album Creatures of the Night follows the same theme with a wide variety of sounds with each track having its own vibe. “We really feel that the song should dictate to you what form it wants to take—we try and showcase each song in the style which we feel suits it the best. In this day and age you can have hundreds of remixes anyway so songs/tracks can take on different forms. We just love music and the satisfaction that comes with writing a great song!”

The album cover features The Maneki Neko [or beckoning cat] which is the Eastern Symbol of ‘Good Luck’ or Good fortune due to their love of cats: “we all really love cats so we thought it would be the perfect mascot for our music.” I asked if the band had any superstitious rituals before a show, “I [Jules] like to have camomile tea—it’s like a ‘zen’ moment/quiet time, usually Ben and Raiven are too busy getting the gear set up with the Techie that they are sweating profusely before they even arrive on stage—it’s a crazy industry!” Quite a few artists have adopted the name ‘GoodLuck’ which I noticed when I came across the wrong Facebook page. “There have to be a few bands called ‘GoodLuck’. We know of one in Asia and there is also an Irish boyband called Good Luck… nothing can be purely original these days! Maybe we should start a label…’Get Lucky’ or something?”

GoodLuck plans to return to South Africa for now but definitely want to come to Manchester soon. “We are back in SA for the summer but we definitely plan to tour back to the UK next year. We heard great things about Manchester when we performed our residency in Campsbay.”

GoodLuck. “Say it four times out loud… It should make you smile.”