The Go! Team

Wed 2nd Feb, 2011 in Features

You could be forgiven for writing The Go! Team off as a band who craft their sound by patch working together sounds from all over the place. That’s definitely true of their first two records, but really it’s not what their third effort is all about. Cheeky lead singer Ninja spoke to FL about how Rolling Blackouts is an album that has been put together with the live show in mind and has seen song writing take on entirely new meaning.

When a band is so strongly bound by the creative vision of one member, you could easily question the foundations on which they stand and indeed whether they really are what they claim to be: a band. With The Go! Team it’s been a case of commander in chief Ian Parton allowing his grip to loosen on what has been his musical baby from the very beginning. With each record they’ve released, the Brighton sextet have been sharing song writing duties more and more and steering away from that sample driven sound.

“It’s really important that people know The Go! Team isn’t entirely based on samples, I mean the first record that was all samples, then the second had a lot less and Rolling Blackouts has even less, there are even some songs that have none at all,” insists Ninja. The Go! Team are definitely a band who pride themselves on team work, with all six members having plugged in their instruments live in the studio for this one. Whereas the two previous albums have seen the recording done in bursts, orchestrated remotely by Parton but this time around it was much more conventional. The album signals ‘mission complete’, fitting for a band that’s named after aeroplane accident investigation teams.

Rolling Blackouts executes The Go! Team’s tried and tested girl gang chants with ramped up elevator music vibes to blow your mind while a marching band is always just around the corner in readiness for their coup d’état. There’s the title track with Ninja’s angelic reverb soaked vocals and shoegaze guitars that takes you right back to 1980s, while The Running Range, featuring an African gospel choir with London accents complete with horn section, is one of the most epic sounding songs they’ve put together for this record. “We’ve gone for a lot of live instrumentation on this record. We have a live brass band, made up of 16-17 year old teenagers from Brighton, we have two drummers, there are guitars, bass, keyboards, steel drums, a xylophone oh and a typewriter!” boasts Ninja. It could have been even crazier: “I really regret not getting my Mum on the record, I think she would have loved it, I could have said my Mum’s on the album you know. She’s got a really loud voice,” she laughs. Maybe it’s best Ninja’s dreams didn’t come true.

Fans can check out a trailer for Rolling Blackouts, which features snippets of the video clips for the album. “We have always used this guy based in Berlin called James Slater to do our videos, he gets our vision, that we love that old school, super 8, nostalgic look cause this album has a clip for every single song, you can see them all together in a trailer before the album comes out”.