Interview with King Goon: ‘Our next song ‘Realpolitik’ is about the mentality of special political advisers …they wield far too much power for unelected people’

South Wales-based six-piece band King Goon will release two songs next month on a double A side, ‘Realpolitik’ and ‘Just Whose Side Are You On?’, with an album due out before the end of the year.

King Goon comprises James Morgan (bass and vocals), his twin brother Joel ( vocals/guitar), Hywel Griffiths (drums/percussion), Elaine Forde (sax), Gareth Howells (vocals) and Keith Robertson (guitar).

The band have been together for 10 years, according to Joel: ‘Me and James my twin brother go all the way back, well, to the womb really,’ he laughed. ‘Hywel and I went to school together and played in bands at the time. Keith was at school with us, too, but he was far too cool to be in a band then. Now he’s in ours! We met Elaine on a hen night. I was pushing a wheelbarrow and Elaine came along with four shot glasses and a bottle of tequila!’ (Sadly, I never find out how this story ends, although a limo also features in it!) Joel met Gareth working in a call centre around 20 years ago: ‘ He moved into my house about eight weeks later and has been hanging around ever since!’

‘It’s about Oxbridge in politics’

‘Realpolitik’ is ‘about the mentality of special political advisers, such as Dominic Cummings’, according to Joel. ‘It’s about Oxbridge in politics, the hymn of the spads, I call it,’ he said. ‘I imagine they would sing it like a school song! All these people tend to come from similar backgrounds and they shape governments and are only answerable to whoever pays their wages. They wield far too much power for unelected people.’

As the song goes: ‘When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow, there is no lie in a burning sky that a fool won’t leap to swallow.’

‘Just Whose Side Are You On?’ has a very different flavour, with Joel calling it ‘the quietest song on the album’, titled ADMIT NOTHING! DENY EVERYTHING! LIE! LIE! LIE! Elaine describes it as a lullaby, before Joel interjects, calling it ‘a horrible lullaby’: ‘The idea behind it is that one day you’ll wake up and realise what side of the bed you’re on,’ he said. ‘The chorus goes ‘Come the war, we’ll soon see just whose side you’re on’. When we wrote this song, I didn’t expect us to be talking about a cultural war, I thought we’d be talking about an actual war. It’s about mobs and every mob being as bad as the other. As Terry Pratchett said, the IQ of a mob is the IQ of the stupidest member divided by the number of people in the mob.’

‘It’s quite profane, I like to see people’s faces when they hear it’

One song on the new album that Joel particularly likes is ‘Beauts and Consequences’. ‘It’s quite profane,’ he said. ‘I like to see people’s faces when they hear it. A beaut is slang for a bloke who’s a bit gobby and a bit daft but in the song he’s a bit nasty, too. The kind of bloke who likes to show his knife in the pub.’ James particularly likes ‘Pretty Words’ and ‘Tops Off Proper Fighting’: ”Tops Off’ has big harmonies, I like singing it.’ The title comes from primary school – if there was going to be a proper fight, everyone would shout ‘tops off!’, according to Joel: ‘The song’s not really about that, though, it’s about masculinity. I like a joke, a play on words in the title.’ Elaine is also fan of ‘Pretty Words’, calling it ‘a big song, it’s dancey’.

Joel writes ‘the majority of the lyrics and they tell me what’s wrong with them’, he said. Or as Elaine puts it: ‘We’re not playing it wrong, he’s written it wrong!’ James, for his part, beats himself up for not playing the intro to ‘Beauts and Consequences’ with ‘more gusto’ compared to how he has played it live: ‘It pains me,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should just play over the beginning of it before I send it to you?!’ Joel jumps in: ‘It’s still phenomenal, though!’

There will be 12 songs on the new album (9 of which are new), including these two, and ‘Three Cheers For The Fat Italian’, which first appeared on their EP of the same name in May.

The ‘fat Italian’ is ‘a local character who became this mythical character’

The ‘fat Italian’ at the heart of the song is someone they know locally: ‘There was this guy we met a few years ago, a taxi driver or purveyor of nefarious wares out of his car, selling dodgy DVDs and the like,’ Joel said. ‘He’s a local character who became this mythical character driving a Mercedes. He’d always try to upsell you a bag of viagra or a blu ray of Avatar or something. It was always boom or bust with him, so you might see him with a bloke and three Thai women.’ When I ask if he looks like the character in the song, they tell me that ‘he’s very much fat and Italian’. ‘This song has stuck around much like the fat Italian himself,’ Joel laughed.

His omnipresence shines through in the song: ‘Come the dimming of the lights, the cold blows straight through you, worse still, we’re running out of wine…what can we do to get through? Just tap the glass and count the cash,
you are the one the only. He’ll come for two! He’ll come for you! He’ll come for two! He’ll come for you!’

Another song on the EP, ‘The Playing Fields Of Eton’ was actually the first song they wrote, almost 10 years ago, under David Cameron’s government. ‘They were foul creatures,’ Joel said. ‘As things get worse and worse, that song gets more and more appropriate. It’s disgusting, it’s about the class system and the cold arrogance of the aristocracy, their sense of entitlement. ‘It’s a neat little song, though, it’s funny. The version on the EP is quite slow. We have another version that we play live that is 10 times faster!’

‘It’s about how addiction makes all social and moral obligations redundant and a distraction’

Problems with addiction feature on one track on the EP, ‘The Buyer’, which is about ‘the mindset of someone living with day-to-day addiction’, according to Joel. ‘It’s about how addiction makes all social and moral obligations redundant and a distraction. The buyer doesn’t want to talk about the football, he wants his gear in his pocket and his foot on the road home. I got the idea from William Burrough’s book, ‘Naked Lunch’, which has a ‘buyer’ in it. It’s a different kind of buyer but it got me thinking. It’s about the characters I met in my misspent youth!’

Their name, King Goon, came about because the band members had a history of calling each other goons. ‘One day, a mate – Kirk Bowen of the band World vs. World – called us the ‘kings of the fucking goons’ and we thought, yeah, that could be a good name for the band!,’ Joel said.

Joel is a fan of artists such as Nirvana, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and ABBA. Elaine likes local band The Dapper Cadavers. As James says: ‘We’ve grown up listening to our friends play for more than 20 years, so we’ve been inspired by them. My wife sings in the band Lost Tuesday Society and our cousin Darren plays guitar in it.’

Hywel would love to tour with Soundgarden or Pearl Jam so he could watch Matt Cameron play the drums every night. Joel says he’d like to play back-up guitar in Bob Dylan’s band in 1966 ‘when he was getting booed and called a Judas, or go out with The Eagles in about 1975, for the parties! Either that or tour with Nirvana in 1991 just to watch them play ‘Drain You’ and see people lose their goddamn minds!’

(Photo from left to right: Gareth, Keith, Joel, Hywel, James and Elaine)