Jukebox Chatter: Gaggle

Hello Gaggle! We love the album artwork/title, which conjure up thoughts of retro psychedelic fantasy movies for us. Is there a storyline / anything further conceptual to From The Mouth Of The Cave?

Gusset: The album is essentially a musical reinterpretation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave as set out in The Republic. To summarise, this imagines humankind as being like prisoners who are trapped in cave their whole lives facing a blank wall, watching the shadows that are cast there by things passing in front a fire that is behind them. Not knowing otherwise, the cave-convicts take these shadows to be the real things - so what they believe to be reality is in fact an illusion.

Like Plato's conception of the philosopher in this set-up, Gaggle's aim is to enlighten humankind to the existence of a true reality beyond the world of shadows they have up until now been complacently accepting, however terrifying, amazing and discombobulating that realisation might be.

It's either that, or it's just about getting drunk and dancing with your friends....I can't remember off-hand.

What's currently your favourite song on the album and why?

Gusset: Gaslight's sounding great in rehearsals at the moment.....very sinister but in a way that makes you want to dance as well.....and I get to pretend I'm Mark E Smith for a lot of it, which is always fun.

Strick: It’s incredible to sing live and is an opportunity to scream "RED WINE!'" really loudly.

Jezebel: Bang on the Drum... it’s a song that makes me emotional every time I sing it... we have all been in the place that the song is telling us about. Plus it’s my mum’s favourite and she has good taste!!



The age old debate is whether bands should be dictatorships, democracies or somewhere in between. How has that conversation manifested itself in Gaggle?

Gusset: With 21 very different people with 21 different points of view on most subjects, running this thing as a democracy would be nigh-on impossible - it would basically mean we spent our whole time in committee meetings never actually making decisions about anything. If I wanted that, I'd have run for local government.

Jezebel: We have leader but she is not a dictator, she is a creative queen who allows us to join her on this magical journey through the paths of Gaggle. We all have a voice, we all have our special moments. We all work together to create something special.

Swanimaru: Obviously from the start there has been a clear vision and leadership in Deborah - without that Gaggle just wouldn't exist, but that doesn't mean to say it is a dictatorship.

A Gaggle stage invasion might not make that much difference visually. Have you ever played to a relatively empty room and done an audience invasion?

Swanimaru: No but it could be fun. I think the closest we came was a recent gig in Falmouth, the audience were crazy, and we were all dancing as we played song after song in our encore. The boundaries between audience and Gaggle did become blurred.

Gusset: Although there's often not much room, we have had a few stage invasions - they do actually stand out quite a lot in those cases, being the only ones on stage not in mental costumes.

Finally, you have one credit on the jukebox: what's it gonna be?

Gusset: Appollonia 6 - Sex Shooter.