Nobody does an indie-rock-garage-dance fusion quite like Mercury Prize-nominated sextet The Go! Team, and boy, do they do it well. From their humble Brighton roots they’ve taken their experimental sound all over the world and anyone who’s been privy to one of their live shows will vouch for the fact they’re not to be missed. Chantelle Pattemore caught up with The Go! Team founder Ian Parton as the band prepare to release their eagerly awaited third album, ‘Rolling Blackouts’.
Ian created The Go! Team in an effort to create a style of music that incorporated all the genres and artists he loved. Six years and three albums later, did you anticipate that what started off as more of a seemingly personal project would gain the recognition that it has?
I still think we’re a cult band – it’s still pretty rare to find people who know our music. But yeah, we’ve been lucky and managed to travel the world and play to people who know us. It’s pretty weird when you write something on a crappy 4-track and then next thing year at Glastonbury playing it to thousands of people.
There’s been (roughly) gaps of three years between each of your album releases, which some might argue is a longer period than most bands would take in writing and recording. What were you doing in these years to develop as a band?
We never really stopped – we were touring for ages going all over the world; Singapore, Ukraine, China. Plus I had a kid, which always slows things down – in a good way – and the music takes a long time to write. I’m no genius so I work best by hoarding ideas with lots of trial and error. There were no left over songs at the beginning of album three; it was a nice blank slate.
Who are your biggest influences currently, both musical or otherwise, and how are they affecting your work?
There’s no one band I’d like to be like but more about taking things from loads of places all at once. Public Enemy, 60′s girl groups, B-movies, MBV; this album’s definitely driven more by songwriting and features more singing rather than the double-dutch chants people know us for. I wanted to make strange little pop songs – I’ve always been really into catchiness and melody because its the hardest thing to do – but not to have a hit or get into the charts. So on this record I was really putting melody first and letting it run the show. When you’ve got something you think is watertight, that’s when you can start fucking it up.
Quite a few of your songs have been used in various adverts and TV shows. How integral do you think these mainstream media inclusions have been in your success?
I have no control over who uses it in TV shows – if I could stop shows like Come Dine With Me and makeover trash using it I would but I can’t. I have actually turned down loads of TV ads and sacrificed a load of money so it’s strange that people know us through ads. I do say yes occasionally. We were recently used on an NFL ad in the States for an anti-obesity campaign – I figured it was actually quite an ok ad to do. It features these massive American football players sitting on a bus with headphones on rocking out to ‘The Power Is On’. Pretty funny because if you could see me, I ain’t no jock.
Your debut, ‘Thunder, Lightning, Strike’ was nominated for the Mercury Prize and named as one of Pitchfork’s best albums of 2004. Do you feel this acclaim created a certain level of pressure for you when creating ‘Proof Of Youth’ and ‘Rolling Blackouts’?
There was a bit of pressure for ‘Proof of Youth’ but not so much for ‘Rolling Blackouts’ because I figured people might have thought The Go! Team had stopped anyway. I wasn’t fussed about rushing it out there. I just concentrated on the melodies and less about the hype.
You said in a previous interview before recording started on ‘Rolling Blackouts’ that you wanted the sound on this record to be more ‘schizo’. Do you feel you achieved this and how did you go about creating this?
That was an early idea [of] how I wanted the record to sound but in the end the record turned out to be more about songwriting than cut and paste. The kick-off for this album was to listen to thousands and thousands of records and collect ideas; either samples or my own melodies and eventually I would have enough good stuff that songs would be forming – often they were my original melodies and I would fit samples to them. Once the song is written I would get on the hotline to the rest of the band and they would come in the recording stage and it grows in layers.
You’re well known for sampling other artists’ songs in your own. Whereas some might say that this method is a great way to introduce others’ music to a new audience and reinvigorate older sounds, others would argue it is perhaps an easy way out of having to spend time and energy creating your own sound. What would you say to them?
I think there are two kinds of sampling – there’s the kind where you wholesale lift a well-known song and stick a rap over it but what I’m more interested in is taking snippets of pretty obscure songs and putting them in a totally new context. I like the idea of a song featuring samples from different decades and different musical worlds – sometimes sampling can be a real art form. The Go! Team is actually less reliant on samples than lots of people think – some songs feature no samples at all [whilst] some have twenty.
The live shows the band put on are renowned for being rather energetic. For those who haven’t been to a Go! Team show before, what should they expect to experience?
Thrashing around. Yeah we go for it every gig – I’ve never known us do a gig where we haven’t come off stage like total wrecks, particularly Ninja – its like she’s run a marathon. Once she popped her knee joint out from jumping around. There’s a fair bit of instrument swapping and we have two drum kits on stage – it’s pretty chaotic, not super professional.
The band are obviously heavily dominated by percussion, yet we’re currently in a time where simple guitars and drums seem to be at the forefront of the industry. How would you place the band in amongst your peers and do you believe that the ‘scene’ could do with more percussion and variety in order to kick-start it back into life?
Even now I still feel like we don’t fit into any scene or sound. Even with people like Sleigh Bells around who we get comparisons with I still feel like we’re way apart. Part of the goal when I started the band was to put a wedge between us and the hundreds of ‘blokes with guitars and haircuts indie bands’ and I guess that’s still true.
You’ve got a series of dates stretching out ahead of you now in support for the new album. Do you feel The Go! Team and the band’s ethos are best portrayed on stage or do you prefer being in the studio where sounds can be more easily manipulated?
There’s two sides to The Go! Team and both are important. The studio is all about patience and trial and error and focus, [and] the stage is all about forgetting that shit and jumping around. We don’t try and perfectly replicate the record on stage – it’s a bigger sound. Somebody once said you can wear our sound like a suit.
Both Deerhoof and Best Coast have collaborated with you on the new record and lead vocalist Ninja has also worked with Simian Mobile Disco. Who would be your ultimate dream collaboration?
If I could go back in time it would be Mary Weiss, the lead singer of the Shangri La’s or the kickass female rapper Roxanne Shante.
This interview was originally published on www.culturedeluxe.com
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