Cape Town based electronic act GoodLuck are overjoyed with their two SAMA nominations for Best Duo or Group of the Year and Best Pop Album.  When asked about their thoughts, the stunning front lady Jules Harding responded with “Who would have thought that an album recorded outside in the Namibian desert could achieve this” – referring to the Best Pop Album nomination.

Before the SAMA nominations took place yesterday we spoke to band member Ben Peters about their recently released doccie “This might Sound Crazy”

Who came up with the crazy idea of recording an album in such a hostile environment like the Namibian Desert?

It was me.  Basically we were coming off the back of our first album which had such crazy success which had like nine singles and five number ones and three SAMA’s and I suppose as a producer I was sitting their thinking what are we’re going to do next.  The first album was really my first attempt at producing electronic music; I had never done it before so I really wanted to top my previous work with this second album and I knew that the only way to do that was to do something extraordinary.  The only way to get something extraordinary from an artist is to place them in an environment that’s inspiring yet challenging at the same time also during a particular time in the year Namibia is the quietest and stillest place in the world which is pretty much all you need for a studio.

You've spoken about the environment and inspiration, we heard that Jules suffred from a writers block during the shooting of the documentary.  How were you guys able to get inspiration from that environment?

Jules had been struggling for months during the build up of the album and obviously we had been touring the entire time and the work load has been pretty extreme which leaves little room for creativity to flow through.  So the idea was to get Jules out of that mind set as a producer its part of my responsability to make sure that the artist are in a place where they're able to deliver work that's going to be award winning.  But we manage to hone in inspiration through just being in the desert and observing the environment we were in, we also did quite a lot of adventerous things whilst recording the album which also added onto the inspiration. We went for a ride on the hot-air ballon, sand-boarding and quad-bike riding and all of these activities just made Jules creative juices flow. 

We also asked Ben his predictions were for the SAMA nominations and he was actually spot on with his predictions.

"MiCaSa is the group that generally bring home the bacon, I'm sure they're going to be doing well.  I'd also love for us to get a few nominations, it would be great to get a nod from the industry for all the hard work that we've been doing.  In terms of the Hip Hop front the likes of AKA and Kwesta to be nominated, I've worked with AKA before on Matthew Gold's album which I produced and I think him and Kwesta are very talented guys."

Well eventhough AKA didn't receive any nominations Kwesta and MiCasa as well as Goodluck managed to scoop not one but a couple of nominations. We now wait for the 28th of April to see who will scoop the actual awards.