Mouthpiece: I am the man who invented Geese
As overnight sensations Geese head to Barrowlands this August, the poor loves have had to weather accusations of social media jiggery pokery and of being ‘industry plants’. Our regular columnist Kevin Fullerton makes a few admissions about his own dramatic part in their rise to prominence
Forget the internet hyperbole: Geese were no industry plant; nor were the scales tipped in their favour by calculated social media campaigns. And nor were they the result of middle-aged music executives desperate for the alt-rock of their youth to surge back into the mainstream. Only I know the true origin story of Geese. For it was I who invented them...
I devised the band name after watching a late-night Channel 4 documentary called Avian Rocks in which Danny Dyer, Nile Rodgers and Goldie attempted to teach four birds rudimentary guitar music. Determined to create a band of my own, I retreated to a small garden shed I rent from a pockmarked retiree in Penicuik (we operate on a ‘cash in hand, no questions asked’ basis). I began by making my floppy-haired lead singer, Cameron Winter, from pipe cleaners, a loose-fitting t-shirt purchased from Primark and a large Vileda mophead from Home Bargains.
The rest I fashioned in much the same way, taking inspiration from a 2006 issue of NME and photofits of Charles Manson. I travelled to Camden to harvest some brains and, before spearing them onto their pipe cleaner bodies, injected them with promethazine to ensure they were medically incapable of smiling in press shots. But how to compose an entire album of indie-rock throwaways? That was easy: I simply put the discography of Radiohead in a blender with a selection of Grizzly Bear’s greatest hits. For lyrics, I fed printouts of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s beat poetry to a highly trained Pekingese; whatever order it excreted the words, those were my lyrics. I then invited a group of influencers to my shed, offering them one selfie with the hottest band of the year in return for six months of positive coverage. As with all influencers, they were alarmingly delighted to work for free.
Imagine my surprise when Geese blew up on social media beyond my wildest dreams. As it turns out, all you need to be the future of rock is to sound like its very recent past. Had my tinkerings inadvertently tapped into the time slip that’s defined the past few years of contemporary rock, one that simply revives the 90s and mid-2000s in the manner of a creaky tribute act? Perhaps.
Either way, now I’m stuck. Amidst mounting success, I’ve had to hire a crack team of puppeteers to help Geese perform live, while scrawling Jim Morrison-esque screeds for my fictitious frontman to recite on the radio. I have become a manufacturer, expanding my shed to the size of an AI data centre. The retiree I pay is less than pleased and has told me it’s getting in the way of his tomato plants. If you think orchestrating the success of an indie rock sensation is easy, then think again: I’ve just run out of pipe cleaners.