Cover Feature Gang of Four: Goat Girl

When Goat Girl signed to Rough Trade back in July 2016, they ticked off a career milestone just as the UK was sealing its fate with the Brexit referendum. Two years later, their self-titled debut landed against the backdrop of #metoo and a seemingly never-ending slew of crimes enacted against women. Now, the four-piece have just released follow-up ‘On All Fours’. In terms of global events, it’s a choose your own adventure of chaos as to how the history books will remember the start of 2021.

It’s perhaps inevitable then that the band - vocalist Lottie ‘Clottie Cream’, guitarist Ellie ‘L.E.D’, drummer Rosy Bones and bassist Holly Hole, who joined ahead of the writing of their second - have always leant in to addressing the injustices around them. Growing up, both as people and as artists, during one of the most consistently turbulent periods of modern history, the shadow of a world out of balance, destroying itself from the inside out, hangs over their entire outlook - from the seething lyrics that populated their debut to the protest signs that fill the window of Lottie and Rosy’s London house. “Build a bonfire, build a bonfire / Put the Tories on the top / Put the DUP in the middle / And we’ll burn the fucking lot,” sung Lottie on 2018 track ‘Burn The Stake’.

“This lockdown’s shit,” begins Ellie bluntly today, as the usual Zoom introductory niceties disperse. “They should have just kept it locked down for longer the first time. It’s so fucking tactical, opening it up a little bit before Christmas so everyone will go into town and spend fuck loads of money.” “With the schools going back for one day as well; I swear that’s just so people went to go and buy new school uniforms and pencil cases and things,” agrees Holly. “Otherwise why would anyone in their right mind make all the teachers and everyone go through that? Make people arrange for childcare and then go in for one day and cancel. It’s all to get the money in, it’s just mad.”

The four, Lottie explains while attempting to slyly eat a bowl of baked beans (the singer is nursing a slight post-birthday sore head, but claims to perversely “function best when hungover”), have been turning to comedian and all-round legend Daisy May Cooper’s piss-taking Instagram clips - “What if I’m a cat trainer but the cat lives in Berkshire but I need to train this cat?!” - for lockdown relief. But while the farcical decisions being made by BoJo and co are ripe for the mocking, the main conversational mood today still lands between disbelief and rage.

“There’s a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, but there’s also people holding the government and these outsourcing companies accountable, like with this latest scandal with free school meals, which is fucking disgraceful. The only way you can make change now is by making people feel embarrassed and outed, which is so fucked up that they can’t do it just because it’s evil not to,” Lottie asserts. “Then you look at someone like Elon Musk. He’s now the richest man on the planet and he’s trying to use that money to create a society on Mars that you fly to and you work off your debt by working on Mars for the rest of your life. This man is fucking delusional, he needs help, and yet he can have so much impact.”

“These people that have so much wealth and power - there’s no test to make sure they’re decent people,” continues Holly. “When Donald Trump was suggesting that people inject themselves with bleach [to stop Coronavirus]… That someone with such little knowledge can be the most powerful person in the world is just beyond fucked.”