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One Weekend with Goldfish
To the outsider, the life of Goldfish seems a cliche. To them the perception is it's all champagne, jet-set parties, playing wild gigs all over the world and generally living the dream.
They are right.
As Hunter S. Thomson famously wrote:
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
He is also right.
So, somewhere in the middle of these two disparate scenarios is us. Its awesome - and it’s also hectic.
Let's just look at a typical weekend on tour with the Fishies. OK, not so typical. Every weekend is different! This time, just off a 4 month European tour, we’re flying from Cape Town back to London Thursday night for a quick whirlwind weekend tour before the Summer Tour begins in SA. Do the red eye, arriving at Heathrow 6am Friday morning to be picked up in a big black car to have a meeting with big record company xyz who have their beady eye on us. We’re pretty damn particular about who we sign our music to, and a face to face meeting is always good for gut feel. Neither of us have had much sleep. The driver picks us up and we sit in London Traffic for 2 hours. Dave and I catch up on emails, look at some tracks for a mix compilation we are working on for a release in Australia, and remind ourselves why we do what we do as we inch into the center of London. Must be hectic to do that everyday. Then it’s a 2 hour meeting with Mr MD of xyz. He seems nice. We schedule another meeting. Lets see what happens. Xyz have given us the car and driver for the day, and our flight to Ibiza is only around 7pm, so we grab some lunch and head to a museum by the Thames to ingest some Kultcha. End up laughing hysterically when Dave meets a Yeti in the one display. I try feeding my Macbook to the Robotic Tyranosaurus Rex – he looked hungry for an apple. I don’t think we’ll ever grow up.
All good, a laugh in London, now another 2 hour drive in traffic to Stansted Airport for our flight to Ibiza. The usual airport shenanigans follow, we pay our customary exorbitant excess baggage and try to get comfortable in a seat designed for lower limb amputees. Tonight we are heading back for one night only to play Pacha Ibiza. After living for 4 months in Ibiza over the European Summer, it feels pretty weird to be back here again, especially for one night. We’ve got pretty used to living a life of constant change and general surreal-ness but if someone said I’d be living on a small island in the Med every summer a while back I would have laughed in their face. That’s Ibiza for you though…it’s a place of dreams.
We arrive 11:45, catch a taxi, check into the Pacha El Hotel,(awesome hotel..pity we won’t really get to actually enjoy much sleep in it) Across the road from Pacha. Then it’s a manic 15 min set up before the club opens at 12am.
Another thing to get used to in Ibiza, clubs only get busy from 2ish. We’re on at 3:30 am and the hours being in planes, taxis and not sleeping properly for 2days is starting to catch up. We’ve still got a big gig up ahead of us so we head straight back to the hotel after soundcheck to grab 45 minutes sleep. Hey, every minute counts! Wake up, Dave’s banging on my door, fall out of bed grab a Red Bull from the minibar and take the elevator down in silence, both of us pretty exhausted an still fuzzy from the short sleep. We better start looking a hell of a lot more interesting, we’ve got a show to do! As if by magic when you walk into Pacha, it all melts away. The club is packed and we have a prime slot on the main floor. All the travel and tiredness from the days’ adventures fall away. This has got to be one of the dream clubs for any DJ or live producer to play at, and it never gets normal for us to play here, and it never will. We have an absolutely stomping gig, what a blast! So cool to see the support with some crew flying in from London just to catch the gig. Nice one guys.
Pacha Ibiza
Then it’s a couple of drinks with the guys from Pacha, catch up on all the new Ibizan stories, some laughs and then back to sleep at 7am. Awesome. It’s like we’re on Tokyo time. Wake up, check out and catch a flight Barcelona.
Tonight (Saturday) we’re playing a rad club called Discotheque. Barcelona is definitely our favourite city after Cape Town, it’s just groovy, amazing style, nice climate and we just feel an affinity for the place. Set up, sound check, this time we have some time on our hands, and we’ve stayed at this hotel down the road from the club before. We want to eat something interesting so we head to the restaurant just round the corner. Old school, waiter in waistcoat kind of vibe. They have a set menu. Seafood. Remembering one of our favourite Author’s Anthony Bourdains’ advice –“Good eating involves some risk” we roll the dice. The Spanish own it when it comes to seafood anyway. Cockles, Mussles, Razor Clams as the starter. Cockles tasted a bit like licking the harbour wall, Mussels…hmm pretty average(we’re from Cape Town and we know what a good mussel is) but the Razor Clams were a revelation. The strangest elongated rectangular shells, housing a calamari-esque alien looking thing that tasted simply incredible. Set Menu came with a bottle of Cava (Spanish Champagne) and soon Dave and I are having a little giggle on the open-air pavement whilst the waiter looks on appreciatively. These buggers who look German but with strange accents are enjoying our seafood. They’re ok. Next course is grilled and salted cutlet of Salmon and grilled Whitefish – turned out to be Hake, but flip it was better than any Hake we’d ever eaten.
Desert, tiramisu and two happy Fishies ready to take on a big gig. Napolean’s musings about an army marching on a full stomach was on the money.
THAT’S what travel is about. Not grabbing McDonalds down the road, but rather trying to experience something local and real. It’s hard to do that sometimes when you are in Barcelona for eight and a half hours like we are.
We pull into the gig, the club is absolutely ROCKING. Packed to the rafters with hip and beautiful 20 somethings, and it’s so good to see how many faces we recognize in the crowd from last time. It’s sensory overload with a heaving dancefloor, lights, screens, massive sound and the Fishies in the middle of it all. Hardly anyone speaks English but it doesn’t matter - music is the universal language and it’s all smiles on that dancefloor.
Goldfish Karaoke
We pack up and head straight to the airport after our gig, we’ve got to be at the airport at 5:45am to fly to Amsterdam. Sleep deprivation starting to kick in now, and all the adrenal highs and lows of the weekend are starting to take their toll on us. The flight is a clanger. Land at Schipol and check straight into the airport hotel, hang the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door and crawl into bed. City number four in as many days.
We sleep the entire day, and wake up starving, realizing we haven’t eaten anything in ages. Grab a bite and then the day’s work begins. We are here to play ADE, Amsterdam Dance Event for the uninitiated. This is one of the premium weekends on the calender for anyone in dance and electronic music. Similar to Miami Winter Music Conference, the who’s who are in town playing gigs to the music-mad Dutch. We’ve never found a country so passionate about electronic music. They are so into it, it’s like the national sport! No wonder the number one DJ in the world is Armin van Buuren this year. We get the news that our show tonight at Club Home has sold out a week in advance and people are begging for tickets. Woohoo! It’s game on. We must be doing something right if we can do a gig in Holland on a Sunday night and it sells out. Enough with the high fives, there is a gig to do and we want to make it worthwhile for everyone queuing outside in the cold. By the time we go on you can’t fit a tooth pick in between everybody in there. It’s rammed like sardines.
There is an electricity in the air, that air of expectation…that feeling of when two people meet, and they know, they just know they are going to be good together.
When we drop into our first track Fort Knox, it’s a furnace in there. Never mind how cold it is outside, you could fry an egg on the walls inside. No one cares as we all sing along. Club Home is at critical mass and we can’t remember the last time we had such a wild gig with everyone, absolutely everyone, jumping up and down in a seething mass. The club owner come up to us afterwards with wild eyes and says he has never seen anything like it before. We smile and agree. The weekend is finally over.
9:35 AM
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