“It's because I've got a bag on my head”
What Steven asked David Goggin, the musician behind Little Storping in the Swuff
Ahead of the release of Little Storping in the Swuff's second album Hassle Olympics, Steven met the man behind the project, David Goggin, at the Wolfe and Castle on Rochester High Street. Unfortunately, it was busy hosting a birthday party, so they moved on to the Jolly Knight and discussed exactly what a swuff is, what happened to his former band, Brigadier Ambrose, and why he performs wearing a paper bag.
What is your official occupation?
My official occupation is Head of Repertoire for a music licensing company. I have done for 20 years, and the company's remit is to make sure that performers and record companies get paid whenever they get airplay, get music used in public. My department's job is to make sure we've got all the information we need to pay those people. I really enjoy it, and its not-for-profit organisation. It's all about getting money out to performers and session musicians.
How did you get into that line of work?
I did a music industry or music production degree at Canterbury, and then I was in a band. I was doing various band things and decided that it might be useful to work within the industry and see the other side of it. As various bands fell away and didn't become super successful, I found myself really enjoying what I was doing and developed from there.
What is your current role in the world of music?
Little Storping in the Swuff. I drive it, in that I write the songs, and I perform most of the instruments. I've got various band members that I work with. Matt, who I've always worked with, he was the best man at my wedding. He's a piano player and backing vocalist. He's always involved. I guess it's my vision really.
I remain moderately obsessed with 1960s culture
Why are you known as Little Storping in the Swuff?
I remain moderately obsessed with 1960s culture, and there was a television programme called The Avengers, a brilliant, eccentrically English, amusing detective drama thing. I loved it in the 90s when I first discovered it. There is a town, it's very niche this, in one episode of that programme, called Little Storping in the Swuff.
What is a Swuff?
I've never been asked that question. I've been asked lots of questions about this, but never that. I'm going to say a Swuff is like the countryside.
What is psych chamber indie pop?
I think chamber pop is a 60s term. I think the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds would be chamber pop. That slightly ornate pop music with the use of harpsichords and baroque classical instruments, I suppose.
The psych bit and the indie bit are just the extra bits that I throw in. Psych as in 60s psychedelia. Very early Pink Floyd, or Beatles’ Revolver.
What are the Hassle Olympics?
This is the name of the new album. It's a phrase that came to mind. The album has lots of songs that refer to or are about domestic chores, where people find themselves competing with each other on how good they are at those things, and there's a certain mindset that you get into, which is completely absurd.
If you're at a family dinner, I find it really interesting how there's this one-upmanship type thing that goes on where you might say, “I spent ages steam washing my patio.” Then the response would be, “Oh, I did that last week, you should have seen, I was there for three hours.”
I just found myself reflecting on the absurdity of having to challenge others on how good you are or how much effort you put into quite mundane and silly things. That's the hassle of it, that for some reason we are invested in competing on.
Why did you half immerse yourself in the freezing shallows of the River Darent?
That was for the last album, Baroque Anxieties.
Because it's a very silly thing to um do. The person that takes the photos, Chris Spurr, is my brother-in-law. I've worked with him for a long time on various things. We were just throwing back and forth some ideas on what we could do. I was quite keen to be submerged in water in some way, and we liked the idea of doing it in a suit, because it just looks silly, and it's getting quite absurdist.
_hopskipjump
Who was Brigadier Ambrose?
That was a made-up name for the first band that was successful that I was in. We were trying to think of a comedy name. We wanted to be called Captain Mannering, and that's the name of the guy from Dad's Army. We just started mucking about with different ways of saying Captain. Brigadier came out. And we went with Ambrose because we're all quite huge cricket fans, and Curtly Ambrose, the first fast bowler. That's literally it.
Why are you no longer in Brigadier Ambrose?
It just ran its course. That was a while ago now, late noughties. There was four of us, Matt as well, and it was fun. We were very naïve, and I'd only started working in the music industry during that process. We got quite lucky early on in that it was when MySpace was doing its thing, and we got noticed by Radio 1, and we started getting airplay a lot quicker than perhaps we thought we might. It was an interesting place because I don't think any of us really knew what to do. We had a couple of years of doing everything ourselves, festivals, loads of brilliant stuff, but just didn't know how to get to that next level, and the discussions with the industry didn't really go anywhere. I think that drive was quite important because ultimately, not everyone in the band had the same drive. If you're not all prepared to travel to Leeds on a wet Sunday night to play a gig to 15 people, then it's just going to start to fall apart, and that's what happened.
If I'm dialling up the absurdity on stage, I find it easier to do it
With Little Storping, what's with the drawn face on a paper bag?
This is your reference to me playing live with that one? A thing to consider about Little Storping in the Swuff is that I'm quite keen that it's not a forced thing, because I think it wouldn't work if it was forced. But I'm interested in trying to do things differently, I guess, and the thought of a nearly 44-year-old man, just standing on stage and playing songs, I just find that in itself quite an absurd thing to do. If you just take that out of context, what is that? Why am I doing that?
Partly because I used to be in Brigadier Ambrose, one of the reasons it didn't work very well in the end was because I used to hate playing live. I really didn't like it. I made a conscious decision with Little Storping in the Swuff. Without getting too dramatic about it, if I'm dialling up the absurdity on stage, I find it easier to do it, because it's more of a character, I suppose.
It's a bit Frank Sidebottom-y?
Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. I think comedy in that sense is a huge influence on what I do. I would say comedy generally is as big an influence on the band as any music is. When people come to watch us live, I quite enjoy the idea of there being this slightly different type of entertainment that's going on at the same time, some of which people will love, and some of which will really confuse people because they're there to see a band and they're not expecting what they might see. There's a whole range of things we've done along those lines, of which the bag on the head is one of them. It was an idea we had that whereby there is a particularly difficult song, which I don't find very easy to play on guitar. I thought, well, why not make it harder for yourself by putting a bag on in it? Which in itself is an absurd thing to do, but also leads me to this silly joke about if I make a mistake now, then that's why. It's not because I'm rubbish at playing it, it's because I've got a bag on my head.
