The Go! Team
Despite the apparent chaos, the UK group’s “sassy noise” is well-planned, says mastermind Ian Parton

Clockwise from left: Jamie Bell, Sam Dook, Chi Fukami Taylor, Ninja, Kaori Tsuchida & Ian Parton

Courtesy of Avex Entertainment

When I finally connect with Ian Parton, he’s on his cellphone at a vintage clothing store in Toulouse, France. It seems an apt place to find a producer and bandleader who’s made his name cobbling together old samples and a motley crew of musicians into the riotous patchwork of party music known as The Go! Team.

The band first arrived as a one-man project in the form of the refreshingly different album Thunder, Lightning, Strike, recorded in his parents’ kitchen in 2004. But when that disc’s mash-up of rock, hip-hop and funk, with everything from Bollywood samples to double Dutch chants, earned him widespread acclaim, the onus was on Parton (pictured in red T-shirt) to transform his music into a live experience.

“I was wracking my brains, and realized that the way to do it was to get lots of people who could play lots of instruments,” he remembers. “I was also always a sucker for mixed-sex bands like Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth.”

The process was partly driven by his aversion for the contemporary British music scene. “The inspiration behind the band as much as anything—as much as the stuff I like—is the stuff I didn’t like,” he says. “The UK has always had an obsession with the fancy indie band, and I didn’t want to be just another bunch of lads with guitars.”

The DJ/producer model was another direction he rejected. “I did a bit of DJing early on,” he says, “but I was never interested in doing it on my own. The world doesn’t need another bloke hunching over a laptop—it’s the least entertaining thing possible. I knew the key was to get a gang together.”

And a good thing he did. The oddball bunch he assembled made their Japan debut at Fuji Rock in 2005, revving up the crowd with a high-energy performance. With members including the irrepressible African-American rapper Ninja, Japanese multi-instrumentalist Kaori Tsuchida, and two drummers, The Go! Team are one of the most distinctive live acts on the circuit.

But despite having assembled a band, Parton says his second album, the just-released Proof of Youth, is very much his own brainchild. “It’s still my tastes and my favorite stuff rolled into one,” he insists. “I’m the one who actually wrote the songs and I’m the one to hunt down all the samples [and] wade through ’80s Bollywood soundtracks. The sound was born out of my record collection melted into a sound. If we all jammed in a room it might not sound like The Go! Team.”

A listen to Proof of Youth demonstrates the truth of this. The album hews closely to the template established by Thunder, Lightning, Strike, something that has pleased fans but not all critics.
With the weight of a Mercury Music Prize nomination behind him, Parton was free on Proof of Youth to pursue his dream collaborations. One of these is with Public Enemy rapper Chuck D, who appears on the song “Flashlight Fight.” “We sent an email off, and three months later still no reply so I’d given up hope,” he recalls. “Then out of the blue we get this reply, signed ‘Peace, Chuck.’ In the meantime, I’d written this song ‘Flashlight Fight’ which was really Public Enemy-influenced, and spoken to his manager, a real Don King-style intimidating character, who was like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”

“But when Chuck heard the song, it piqued his interest, and I’d read that he likes to do unexpected things. He did the vocals at home and emailed them over to me, so I never met face to face with him. The song is a lot denser than you’d normally hear in hip-hop these days, which is normally very stripped down and clean. I wanted to reclaim that denseness that we used to associate with hip-hop.”
In addition to Public Enemy, Parton cites artists from DJ Shadow to Japan’s Cornelius as sampling influences. “I like it when you can vaguely hear bits and pieces of stuff that you recognize, but never hear in that context,” he says. “I like breathing new life into something forgotten. I’m interested in contrast and not just simply looping a sample and rapping over it and calling it a song.”

He cites the single “Grip Like a Vice” as most representative of the current state of The Go! Team. “I was interested in how you could graft a sassy, girly ’80s party song onto something more menacing and noise rock,” he explains. “I’d never heard a song that had done those two things before. That’s the best of both worlds for me. I like the concept of ‘sassy noise.’ Maybe that should be The Go! Team genre. It was one of the first songs we recorded, and quite a nice snapshot of where we’re at now.”

Club Quattro, Dec 4 and Unit, Dec 7. See concert listings (popular) for details. Proof of Youth is available on Tearbridge International/Avex.

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