Daily Archives: March 14, 2020

#690: Goldhawks – Keep the Fire

Rewind to late 2009. I was lying in bed watching Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Why that is I’m not sure, guess it was something to pass the time. He was about to interview Andre Agassi. Before that happened, a little montage played showing Agassi’s highlights as a tennis player. This exact montage actually. I thought the music that played matched the visuals perfectly and it sounded fantastic. I had to know what this song was and who it was by.

It took me months to find out. I thought it was Supergrass for a while, because the vocals sounded just like Gaz Coombes. I believe I sent an email to a Supergrass fansite asking if this was some exclusive new song the band had made. It wasn’t. Supergrass ended up splitting in 2010 anyway. So here was this great song by a new band that I could possibly get into and no one seemed to know who they were. Lyrics weren’t available online. You couldn’t download it. It took me months to find out who made this song. It started playing in football adverts and everything, it was very frustrating. It’s so long ago now I actually can’t remember how I finally found out who it was. I actually think it was on some forum somewhere after someone asked what song was playing in a particular advert. The response was more or less “The song’s called ‘Keep the Fire’ by Goldhawks’. And there it was.

The track is the third on the band’s only album Trick of Light, released in 2010. As you can assume from what I’ve read it’s the first song I ever heard by them. It was only the track’s chorus and its ending that played that night on that Jonathan Ross show, but I thought it was the best few seconds of a song I had heard in a long time. I’ve tried to describe the band’s sound in a suitable manner in a previous post. Listening to it more and more, it’s basically about trying to keep a relationship alive and flowing so thing’s don’t get so boring. Though I think its focal point is lead singer Bobby Cook’s vocals. He just sings it brilliantly. A lot of emotion, and very earnest.

A year and a bit after I initially heard the song, the band finally made a music video for it. You can see that at the top of the page. I was very disappointed in it. It definitely deserved better than what it got. They basically did a Pixies move. I definitely prefer to just listen to it and have my own visions in my head while it’s playing.

Anyway, you don’t hear much from Goldhawks now. That’s because the members no longer play together. This song’ll last forever though.