Visit The Go! Team's Web site TOUR DATES 10-14 Houston, TX - Engine Room 10-15 Dallas, TX - Trees 10-16 Austin, TX - Emo's 10-18 Phoenix, AZ - Clubhouse 10-19 San Diego, CA - Casbah 10-20 Los Angeles, CA - El Rey 10-23 San Francisco, CA - The Fillmore 10-24 Portland, OR - Wonder Ballroom 10-25 Seattle, WA - Showbox 10-28 Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue 10-29 Chicago, IL - Metro 10-30 Toronto, Ontario - Phoenix Theatre 10-31 Montreal, Quebec - La Tulipe 11-01 Boston, MA - Paradise 11-02 New York, NY - Webster Hall

THE GO! TEAM– Thunder, Lightning, Strike!
Memphis Industries / Columbia
By Dany Sloan

If one thinks about music in the terms of color, then The Go! Team would be a rainbow, and a mighty large one at that. Their debut album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike!, hits the listener on all fronts with a vast array of rhythms and a marriage of hip hop-electronica and guitars that not only work, but one-ups the competition by being the embodiment of pure joy.

While group mastermind Ian Parton may not see his music as happiness personified, a growing cult of worldwide fans, which oddly now includes the McDonald’s advertising department, beg to differ.

“I felt that they had interpreted the happiness in the music as commercial sounding,” Parton recalls. “I was disappointed because we had deliberately fucked up elements of the music to distance ourselves from things like CD:UK.”

The album, which was released on Memphis Industries in the UK in September of 2004, blew up over the course of a few months, leading the NME to say something typically hyperbolic and eventually finding its way stateside via our friend, brother and confidant, the internet. The album will be released in the U.S. through Columbia on October 4th.

“There is no way we would have made any impact in the U.S. without the internet,” Parton says. “It may be that most of our fans illegally downloaded the album, but I’m not about to get all Mettalica about it. As long as I survive on music it’s fine by me. I don’t see it as a career. And you never know, people might buy it when it comes out properly.”

Despite their status in the U.K., any concerns with breaking America are brushed aside. Parton, a man of his music, is more pragmatic about things.

“The reality of breaking America is spending six months there slogging your guts out. We're just happy to be playing in front of people in the other side of the world who dig us,” Parton states. “The truthful answer is that we don’t see it in terms of that at all.”

And the jump from a small indie to the huge major? It’s a bit scary, but Parton remarks, “I never really imagined being on a major but we needed the legal might of a big company when clearing so many samples. We’ve insisted on certain things, so hopefully not too much can go wrong.”

The band started out as a Parton-only affair, but as time went on, he pulled friends into the project. “After I’d written the songs for the album, I recruited the other five people to make the live thing a reality. It’s people I knew around Brighton, friends of friends and through adverts.”

Most of the songs came together solely through years of trial and error, with Parton sticking together diverse samples and his own ideas for melodies until it worked. With his collection of hundreds of tapes dating back years, a big part of it was remembering everything and piecing things into a perfect fit.

Translating many of the songs into the live setting is difficult being that most of the material is buttressed by several samples per song, but things are moving along nicely. The group, which is rounded out by Silke (drums), Chi (drums), Sam (synths), Jamie (bass) and Ninja (MC/DJ), never aimed to be a party band, “but it’s always the aim of the live show to get people moving their asses!” Parton boasts.

“When we do the songs live, the samples are still the framework, plus the noise that the six of us make on top. It’s noisier than on record with two drum kits, two guitars and loads of other shit,” describes Parton. “There are no other bands that I look to for the sound of The Go! Team and whether you like the music or not, I think it’s been successful at sounding different.”

BIO.
One of the most exciting bands in the UK right now, The Go! Team is an international, 50/50 boy girl scrimmage : Sam Dook on guitar, Chi on drums, multi-instrumentalist Silke, Jamie Bell on bass, Ninja on vox and band leader Ian Parton on electric guitar and fucked up harmonica. Samples galore, sort of like if !!! and The Avalanches got together to form a superband. Marvelous.