Go! Team

Here They Go! Again

Profile: The Go! Team
Words: Matt Thompson

“I just wanna thrash when I’m onstage,” says Go! Team mastermind Ian Parton, minutes after his band complete a set at Belgium’s Pukkelpop festival. “Playing live to me means jumping around and acting like a loon. With the rest of the band they’re all just as enthusiastic but really different, and I love that visual clash we have. We’re all so distinctive, and have our own way of rocking out. Even from the stage I love watching everyone doing their own thing.”
It’s this meeting of personalities, backgrounds and standpoints that made The Go! Team such an explosion of technicolour when they first came to our attention with debut LP ‘Thunder, Lightning, Strike’. Now, three years on, and the unlikeliest band in indie/hip-hop/pop/garage rock/motown are back with ‘Proof Of Youth’, their new LP that’s every bit as multi-faceted.
Says Ian: “With this one I wanted to break new ground, and the idea throughout has been to look at how two world’s – blaxploitation boogie and white art rock – can come together. Black music has traditionally been about letting go and getting loose, while white rock normally involves swaggering around, drenching sounds with feedback and looking cool in sunglasses. For me taking that old skool vibe and mixing it with Sonic Youth guitars is really interesting. It makes for something nice and confusing, ballsy and more kicking. I guess it’s quite bubblegum at some points too, and I’ve always been a sucker for melody, so when we were making the record I’d sometimes think ‘Is it too catchy?’. But when it got like that we’d always put walls of sound around the songs to let people know we’re not trying to make hits. We’ve never been into doing something just cos it’ll sell. That’s just not important to us. Music shouldn’t be desperate. It should be different. It’s the noise that’s the key.”
For a band like The Go! Team, that’s not just a clichéd soundbite. It’s fact. Littered with obscure samples, off-piste collaborations and a cover of the now long-forgotten theme to schools programme ‘My World’, ‘Proof of Youth’ has been laboured over, honed and layered with idea upon idea upon idea to make sure it’s quite unlike anything else.
“In my experience, good things don’t come out of jamming,” says Ian. “Not where I’m involved. I’m more a grafter and a plotter. I’ve got this tight-arsed love of sampling and I’m the one in the band that can be bothered to find all these dodgy TV samples and sounds. I’ll hunt that shit down and look through movies, tutorial videos, old TV shows, documentaries and library tapes to search for it. That’s what keeps us outside of any musical genre and it’s how come The Go! Team sounds like it does.”
For mature musical minds, it’s what makes The Go! Team so wonderfully enduring, too.
‘Proof Of Youth’ is released on Memphis Industries on September 10th.