The Brag

The Go! Team
Just Go With It
By Alasdair Duncan

Brighton beat-makers The Go! Team take an everything-but-the-kitchen sink approach to music – their albums are a sample-delic collage of old school hip hop and fuzzed-out indie rock guitars, sweet melodies and distortion, schoolyard chants and ‘70s movie soundtracks. The crucial thing about the band, though, is their dedication to putting on a cracking live show. For some electronic groups, going on tour means packing up a couple of laptops and calling it a day, but for The Go! Team, a show really is a show. And as main-man Ian Parton tells it, this can sometimes be a bit difficult to manage…

“We have got a ridiculous amount of gear now,” he says, “and we keep adding instruments. On top of banjos, glockenspiels, keyboards, two drum kits, two guitars, a bass, three singers, I’ve just added a steel drum and, erm -” he pauses, “a typewriter.” I can’t help but laugh, and ask if he ever lies awake at night wondering if the typewriter is absolutely necessary… “It is getting a bit daft now,” he acknowledges. “We try to strip it back as much as we can, but with our music, it’s easy just to keep adding and adding and adding. We could travel with a ten-piece brass band and still not quite feel we’d captured it.”

Of course, such an elaborate set-up means that sometimes things can go wrong. “We let our sampler pick up the slack sometimes,” Parton explains, “and it fucked up once, so we had to run the show off an iPod instead. Thankfully we had that; we would have had to pull the gig otherwise. We’re not an unplugged operation – we need to have the samples. There are only a few times when things have fucked up like that. The first time we played Glastonbury, the whole sound desk blew up – like, literally blew up – so we were playing and the crowd were shouting at us.” The band couldn’t hear anything wrong from the stage… “We were thinking, ‘what are they shouting about?’,” he laughs. “We’ve had a few horror stories, but nothing major.”

So have The Go! Team picked up any wisdom from the last ten years? “I wouldn’t say wisdom,” Parton says with a sardonic laugh. “I think our philosophy, even though we’ve never articulated it, is that unless you go for it yourself as a band, you can’t expect the audience to be into it. We live by example in a way, and we hope that our energy will translate to the crowd. If I saw a band who were just standing there looking bored I’d think, ‘fuck ‘em, I’m not getting into this.’ We try and do the opposite. The live thing is almost about release in a way – when you’re making a record, you’re constantly asking questions like, ‘Is this right? Can we do this differently?’, but playing live puts you in the moment. You can just say ‘fuck it’ and go with it.”

There are moments when this commitment to energy doesn’t translate, and moments when it absolutely does. Parton counts a Glasgow gig from a few years ago as a highlight. “It was absolute mayhem,” he says. “I don’t know what it was, but the crowd were just screaming. It’s the nearest we’ll come to Beatlemania.” On the other hand, there are times when The Go! Team haven’t connected so well with audiences – including a gig alongside Basement Jaxx that Parton is somewhat reluctant to talk about. “We’ve made some bad support band choices over the years,” he says, “and that one with Basement Jaxx wasn’t a particularly good idea.” I ask him why, and he hesitates. “The crowd were a bit too dance-y, I guess, and we were a bit too noisy.”

While the two bands are not a million miles apart in terms of their cut-and-paste style of music, The Go! Team’s uncompromising approach means that commercial success on the level of Basement Jaxx has, thus far, eluded them. Parton seems a little bit down when discussing this. “We could have possibly been a bigger band if we’d mixed things a bit nicer so they’d played better on the radio,” he says with a sigh. “That’s never been a priority for us, though. It’s always been quite important to me to have that distorted, noisy dimension to The Go! Team.” Have the band’s label ever pushed them to take their music in a more commercial direction, I wonder? “No,” Parton laughs. “Historically they’ve told me to go ahead and rough it up even more!”

Take their latest album, Rolling Blackouts, as an example. “I definitely like to mess around with things,” Parton tells me. “We spent thousands of pounds on recording and mixing this album, then at the very last stage we put the whole thing on cassette so we could then record it back – and that’s the version we released. Anything you hear on the finished album that sounds like old-fashioned tape hiss – that’s actually tape hiss. It was commercial suicide, in a way. I like the idea of taking the edge off things, making it clear that we’re not trying to have number one singles or anything here. I think that makes it more exciting, to take the sheen off things. I’ve kind of got a paranoia about hi-fi.”

The album features a variety of guest vocalists, from Bethany Cosentino of surf pop group Best Coast, to Satomi Matsuzaki of avant garde oddballs Deerhoof. How did Parton get them involved? “Well, it really just comes from the song,” he says. “I write a melody and then imagine what kind of voice will bring it to life. In the case of ‘Secretary Song’, I thought, well, this definitely has a Japanese flavour, and it’s about an office girl. I could imagine Satomi’s voice on it, and it was quite easy to arrange because we actually do know Deerhoof. With Bethany’s song, I knew it had a very West Coast, girls-in-the-garage kind of feel to it, and I just wanted to find a voice that fit. I ended up finding Bethany on MySpace. That was ages ago now…”

The Go! Team return to Australia for a series of shows in May, and Parton is excited to be making the trip back. “Australian crowds have this really cool, ‘fuck it’ mentality of just being in the moment and not worrying too much about the hipsters, you know what I mean?” he says. “Australia was, bizarrely, one of the first places to pick up on us – really early, at the demo stage. I found out that triple j were playing the demo of ‘Ladyflash’ and I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “You got onto us really early.”

What: Rolling Blackouts is out now on Memphis Industries, through Shock
With: Fishing, Purple Sneakers DJs
Where: The Metro Theatre
When: Wednesday May 4