Brighton-based sextet The Go! Team might be painted as a 21st century blaxpoitation soundtrack band, but founding member Ian Parton tells Tim Cashmere that there is much more to the band.
“First of all, I don’t often sample modern stuff, it’s all old stuff,” Parton told Undercover. “You can find hundreds and thousands of songs easily and rattle through them without spending a fortune, so you can get the to the good shit straight away and there’s every kind of music on blogs from Bollywood to whatever, so that’s my tip to samplers out there. I was literally listening to thousands of records every week. At one point I found myself with an hour’s worth of samples.”
“[Horn-heavy new song ‘Bust Out Brigade’] has got hardly any samples in it. That’s a completely original composition. People often get the wrong end of the stick with The Go! Team and they think it’s all wall-to-wall samples and I’ve stolen people’s hooks, but that one was a live brass section with baritone saxes and all of that.”
So with six people in the band playing an assortment of instruments, what kind of a role does Parton play in the genesis of the band’s music?
“I’m not an amazing musician,” he explains. “I’m kind of average at lots of things, but I think I’m quite good at spotting catchiness and latching onto things. My ears will prick up and I hear something vaguely interesting. I’ll sing into a microphone or I’ll run up to a computer or sing into a dictaphone or whatever. That’s my bag. I’m obsessed and relentless and I have the patience for it. I think it’s a never-ending quest as well. The quest for the perfect song is never reached, you know?”
“I guess [being a musician] is a technical thing. Maybe I’m a songwriter, but I guess I am a musician. I started off as a drummer, so I guess that’s what I’m best at. The one thing I’m getting more interested in is the idea of “grooviness” and what makes something groovy or not. I think I was paying more attention to it on this record too.”
While many of the songs are unique, funky and impossible to sit still when listening to, Parton isn’t afraid of straight out pop.
“I imagined a girl group Phil Spector-y kind of song I suppose, and my biggest challenge all the time is to find the right voice,” he said of the band’s single ‘Buy Nothing Day’. “I never really want one voice to be across the whole record, in fact I want everything to change across the record from the drum sound and all that, so yeah I had to find a voice for it and I was struggling. Kaori couldn’t sing it, but I came across a band, Best Coast, and this was before the hype and she was up for it and she did a recording like I knew she would. I definitely wanted it to have a sun-drenched kind of sound.”
When asked if there was any danger of the band ending up as a 70s inspired Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - purely reviving the olden days - he vehemently distanced himself from the idea.
“No chance, I’m more interested in the Venn diagram idea of when things overlap. I’m not interested in... I hate acid jazz or any of that shit, I’m much more interested in the tough side of that sound, the more menacing element of brass and the idea of mixing that distortion and white noise. There are different sides to us and I think you have to listen to all of our records to get that. If you were just a casual observer you might think we just did one kind of thing, but I think there’s lots of different sides to us.”
Australian fans will get a chance to check out the many different sides of The Go! Team when they head here in May. If you don’t have a ticket, be sure to pick one up quickly to one of the following shows:
MAY
3 - The Zoo, Brisbane, QLD
4 - Metro Theatre, Sydney, NSW
10 - The Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
13 - The Bakery, Perth, WA
Tickets are on sale now through all the usual outlets.
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Check out the Undercover interview with Holy Fuck below:
