Interview with Ben and Jules from the South African Electronica Band GoodLuck

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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 4src 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 11src 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 1src years with nine. Number one, Top 4src 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.

Touching on Cape Town. Obviously. It’s a huge melting pot of cultures that brings with itself a lot of diverse music, and different rhythms. What are your influences? Where do you gain your inspiration from?

I think because it’s such a melting pot as you describe, you’re just inherently far more open to everything. So if you ask us what are our influences? We’ve just said It would be music, because growing up in this environment you have all these different cultures, working together, collaborating together, all the different styles, no one’s scared of jamming things together even if they are from different genres. Is it a good song? Yeah. So our Influences, are good songs. Yeah, we like it good! That’s the things that inspire us and we don’t care whether it’s a jazz record or a pop song or a DnB track or metal song or rock or something from the 4srcs, just so long as it’s good.

There is no place like this city. Honestly, it’s one of the most magical places in the world and anyone who comes figures that out very quickly.

The music scene is, it’s so diverse, it’s so alive. the only thing that we sometimes struggle with this weather