Photo by Jenna Decker
The Go! Team
Issue #24
No matter what side you’re on, this band will have you rooting for their team
By Anna Breshears
Published: June 1st, 2005 | 1:39pm
The crowd that has gathered to see England’s the Go! Team anxiously stands on their collective tiptoes and scans the stage, eagerly hoping to catch a glimpse of any of the six members. When founder Ian Parton takes up his guitar, hot, smoky bodies surge forward in anticipation. The Go! Team were one of the most hyped acts of this year’s South by Southwest music festival.
In short order, the rest of the band joins Parton and they launch into “Panther Dash,” the first song off their 2004 debut Thunder, Lightning, Strike (Memphis Industries), combining trashy guitar riffs, wailing harmonica, relentless double drums and sampled police sirens into a thick, chunky stew of rocknroll. By the time vocalist Ninja addresses her soon-to-be fans, no one is standing still. As the tiny but powerful band cheerleader, she commands the audience to clap, shout, and dance, requests to which they gleefully comply.
The following afternoon, after spending an hour searching for a quiet space in downtown Austin, Texas, the beating heart of the festival, I gave up and settled into rocknroll bar (and purveyor of the city’s juiciest burgers and slowest service) Casino El Camino, where Parton and bassist Jamie Bell dropped by for a short chat. The boys were exhausted after days of parties, interviews, and last night’s performance.
I hadn’t been certain of what to expect from the Go! Team’s live show, given Thunder’s layers of found sounds, but they surprised me, proving that their music is not merely the product of studio trickery. They don’t hide behind a laptop onstage, and they perform like any band worth their salt, with two guitars (Parton, Sam Dook), bass (Jamie Bell), double drum kits (played by Chi), keyboards, and a recorder (played by multi-instrumentalist Silke). The Go! Team’s stage presence and penchant for audience involvement harkens back to an era of larger-than-life Motown bands. I asked Parton if the Go! Team’s live shows were inspired by any particular performers, expecting him to name-drop a few soul singers. “We’re not consciously trying to be like anyone else. There’s no one band we look to, but more bits and pieces, I suppose,” he says. “What we’re doing with the samples, the double drummers, and noisy guitars on top of it with a kind of funky bass line … it’s a bunch of things that don’t normally come together that we make work.” The result is a warm — rather than electronic — sound, both onstage and on their record, despite extensive sampling.
The Go! Team careens headlong through history, incorporating hip-hop, funk, R&B, and ’60s garage rock through the lens of American pop culture. This music has come to them not through immediate experience so much as via TV shows, their parents’ eight-tracks and dusty record-store finds. A hodgepodge of genres is held together by the band’s sheer exuberance. The Go! Team’s show is a uniquely positive, celebratory experience, and though their onstage optimism may sound a bit dorky on paper, it’s a refreshing change of pace. Even the grumpiest of critics tire of earnest musicians who hide behind their bangs and stare at their shoes.
I’d read about the band’s refusal to let McDonald’s use one of their songs in an ad despite being offered bags of money, so I questioned Parton about the role a political point of view plays in their music. Though they don’t pepper songs with overt messages, the Go! Team has developed an anti-corporate stance. “I think [our political stance] is more in the stuff that we turn down that we’re asked to do and the decisions that people don’t know about,” Parton says. “With all the stuff about ‘branding’ a band, the lines get blurred between ‘Are you a band?’ or ‘Are you here to sell things?’ It takes away from this energy that you’ve got. … I reject stuff all the time, but I don’t think about it.” Their goal is to make a living through their music without selling their souls.
And though that seems so distinctly, well, un-American, Thunder is populated with stateside musical references. Without the vocals, a listener would be hard-pressed to determine where exactly the Go! Team makes its home: they could easily be from Brooklyn, not Brighton. “There is a very American sound to the album, I think. Especially with the trumpets. … I think people grow up on TV shows and listening to the same kind of music, but I don’t think it’s a conscious thing for us. We aren’t affecting American accents or anything like that,” Parton says. “The second album may sound less American, really. This album was just a reflection of our personal tastes with ’60s music and Charlie Brown. I don’t like Brit pop much.”
Like talented DJs, the Go! Team spins through a lifetime of musical memories, ranging from the Jackson 5 and schoolyard chants to Salt-N-Pepa and Peanuts soundtracks. The multi-genre approach births an infectious, party-worthy vibe that’s sincere, not kitschy. With electric live energy and an album that reminds the listeners of everything they love about music, the Go! Team proves they’ve earned their “media darling” status, even if they’re uneasy about fame. As far as “making it big,” Parton says, he’d rather not. “That’s the funny thing. People keep telling us, ‘You have a really commercial sound.’ The objective is to survive on it, not get rich … to keep a conscience about it all and make original music. We don’t need to live in a mansion or anything like that.”
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