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The Go! Team Biography
As the girl out of Poltergeist once said, “they’re here”. And here they are, ready to put the disco in discordant, ready to red limit all the levels, it’s The Go! Team. Lodged somewhere in the previously undiscovered zone where Sonic Youth meets The Jackson 5, The Go! Team’s debut album on UK indie label Memphis Industries Thunder, Lightning, Strike kicks out the jams and then spread it on crumpets for tea.
It all started, according to band leader Ian Parton and former indie kid, “about 5 years ago. I got an old Eighties sampler and a four-track (tape recorder) and (along with brother and engineer Gareth) just started welding ideas from songs with samples I’d heard in random places and live instruments”.
The first EP Get it Together appeared on tiny UK label Pickled Egg, which came to the attention of slightly bigger UK label, Memphis Industries, to whose ship The Go! Team jumped in mid 2002. Ian spent the next year flitting between his job as a TV documentary maker (including classics such as Sleepwalkers Who Kill and Tales of the Living Dead) and creating the album. Of recording the album, Ian says “Lots of it was played by me, but I pulled in random people to play bits and pieces. It was pretty chaotic. It was recorded in a basement, everything was slammed to tape with the levels in red”.
The Go! Team live team was put together by Ian in three weeks when Memphis sprung a Swedish tour supporting Franz Ferdinand in June 2004: says Ian: “There are three lads and three ladies. The blokes (Ian – guitar, harmonica & drums / Sam Dook - guitar, drums, banjo, Jamie Bell – bass) are from Brighton. Chi (Fukami Taylor), who’s Japanese, lives in London. I put a shout out for anybody who knew drummers. And then there’s Silke (German born Steidinger) who plays everything – recorder, melodica, guitar, keyboards, drums. Ninja was the tricky one, I wanted someone who was big into hip-hop, but not all bling. I sent her a CD and she really dug it. She was one of the few lady rappers that got it. She’s into the idea of experimenting. She feels no pressure to sound like everybody else…” The aim was to put a band together of people who would not normally be in a band together. Thunder, Lightning, Strike was released in the UK in September 2004 to critical acclaim.
The record has slow burned itself into the coconsciousness of the British record buying public since then. The Go! Team are all set to headline the John Peel Stage at this year’s Glastonbury Festival and the new bands tent at the Reading Festival as well as appearances at Fuji Rock, Eurokeenes and Roskilde.
In the US interest swelled at the end of 2004 via the power of blogs and music review websites. Pitchforkmedia described The Go! Team’s track The Power is On, as “ridiculously unique” giving it a 5/5 as well as putting the album in their top ten of 2004. The Go! Team were then invited to play at the BBC/BPI and VICE magazine and The Fader shows at SXSW where they seemed to go down rather well.
Rolling Stone described them as “the buzz band of SXSW” and Billboard said they were “one of the hottest bands at SXSW….lead singer/rapper Ninja is a star”.
And it’s live that this gleefully uplifting music begins to take full effect, the music crashes triumphantly along, blaring, distorted samples, noisy guitars, Ninja’s gleeful rapping, dancing, double drumming, yelling and hugging each other. Imagine the most exhilarating block party you’ve ever been to and then multiply the fun quotient by 100. The audience do everything they can to express their approval save forming human pyramids. They are right: it’s hard to think of anything in 2005 that’s more exuberant, more joyous, more goddam fun than The Go! Team.
