Excerpt from Goldfish’s Interview on iAfrica.com
As Goldfish gear up to support Faithless and head out on a national tour, we catch up with Dom Peters during down time on a photo shoot in Cape Town.
“We’re the unlikeliest fashion models ever because we’re normally schlumping around in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt,” he laughs before we start talking about surfing, overenthusiastic fans, travelling the world for a year-round summer, and walking into the wrong hotel room.
Judging from your foray into fashion modelling, there’s clearly more to being a musician nowadays than just making music.
The extra stuff is icing, really. It’s still obviously all about the music, and it always will be all about the music. The gigging and the playing live and the listening and recording are still 90 percent of what we do.
Actually I forgot to mention, there’s a good 45 percent taken up by surfing as well [Laughs], but we actually come up with a lot of our stuff while we’re surfing. It might sound strange but it’s very inspirational for us to be out in the water, taking a break and making music, even if it’s just in your head while you’re humming a tune out at the backline.
Sometimes when we’re in the studio and a song’s not going well, Dave and I will say: ‘Let’s take a break and go for a surf and then come back to this.’ Generally that’s been the remedy to a couple of writer’s block issues we’ve had in the past. This Is How It Goes, that track that’s done so well for us, came about from walking along the pathway after a surf, sort of humming it to myself. So sometimes taking yourself out of the pressure of the recording studio or out of your traditional music-making environment can sometimes lead to happy accidents.
I guess that also helps explain why you make such sunny and bright and summery music.
Obviously we come from a very sunny and bright place, which is Cape Town. Also we’re pretty much only spending summers in Cape Town these days so I’m sure it has some sort of influence on what we do. But I think we’re just happy dudes. There’s enough horrible stuff happening in the world – the last thing you want to do is make boring, sad, depressing dirges.
Do you think you could actually write a sad, depressing dirge?
I’m sure we could [Laughs]. Make some bad decisions in our personal lives and then take it from there. [Laughs] You never know, we’re going to get older and a bit cranky – maybe it will happen. [Laughs]
But at the moment you’re getting to enjoy summer all-year round because you spend half the year in Ibiza.
Ja, we’ve got a really great scam going on at the end of summers here – three or four months in Ibiza and then there’s a good two months in the rest of the world, like Brazil and Australia. So we’re doing six months, six months – it’s a good balance actually. You don’t want to get to the point where you feel you’re constantly on tour and we get to spend summer at home.
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Title Pic: Sean Brand