Gaggle is a self-styled “all-female weird choir” founded by Deborah Coughlin in 2009. They have been cited by the NME in the top 50 “most forward-thinking people in music” and declared by the Evening Standard to be leaders of a movement called “Choir Mania”; they’ve recorded a Radio One Maida Vale Live Session and won Camden Crawl’s Best New Act award.
In 2011 Gaggle released a limited EP called The Brilliant and the Dark Live at the ICA. This was a reworking of a forgotten 1969 Women’s Institute opera about the history of women. Later in 2011 they took the show back to its original home the Royal Albert Hall, in the Elgar Room. The Guardian described it as a “vivacious, visceral, spectacularly indignant wall of sound”.
In 2012 they released their debut album From the Mouth of the Cave on Transgressive Records to critical acclaim and with a series of guerrilla performances around London . The cost of their second single, Power of Money – £3000 – was intended to spark debate about the value of music. At the end of 2012 Gaggle presented an immersive reworking of Lysistrata, with the support of PRS Women in Music.
In 2013 Gaggle opened a three-week gallery, shop and workshops that they called Pop Up Adventure in Lifestyle, Craft & Noise. It took place in at abandoned shop in New Cross. It featured Sound Engineering for Girls and Production for Women; the Guardian called it- “Gaggle’s School of Rock”. They also released the free Gagglephone choir app on iTunes.