The UK’s exuberant cut ’n’ paste sextet return with their new single ‘Buy Nothing Day’, a giddy slab of sunshine pop that features Bethany from Best Coast on lead vocals, off their new album Rolling Blackouts. We have a word with founding member Ian Parton
Before The Go! Team, Parton worked on such documentaries as Sleepwalkers Who Kill and Tales of the Living Dead.
I always had a slight guilt complex about TV. I think music is a lot more wholesome way of life. Particularly nowadays there’s so much trash around and you have to satisfy the executive producers.
Drummer Chi Fukami Taylor collects photos of dogs.
If we’re ever in a car and we drive past a dog, she’ll scream. Her computer must be full of pictures of strangers’ dogs. It’s normally pugs.
Parton’s mum’s side of the family is big on game shows.
We once auditioned for Family Fortunes. I was too young but my uncle was the team leader and I think his jokes were too subtle, I don’t think they were wacky enough. My mum tried to get on Countdown twice. My auntie is a serial game show contestant. She’s been on Wheel of Fortune and The Golden Ball. Her son’s been on Deal or No Deal and I think he won £20,000. It’s such a strange little programme, I find it a bit scary!
Band member Ninja pursued James Brown for his autograph.
We were at the Oxegen festival in Ireland. She knocked on his dressing room door and his wife answered. She still hasn’t got her pen back. Snoop Dogg – who she also approached – was playing basketball and Ian Brown was next to him. She’s a serial hassler. She just likes to be cheeky, she likes the challenge and she’s fearless.
They’ve played in China.
We’re one of the few bands to make it there. We had to send through lyrics to some cultural department to check that they weren’t going to inspire the outbreak of democracy or something. Ninja changed them so there was no chance that they’d be controversial in any way. It felt like music was almost like it was in the ’60s to them because their whole world has been cut off for so long. It felt like the birth of something, like there’s going to be an explosion of something pretty soon.
The Go! Team’s differences are their strength.
We were assembled for one gig in Sweden and I never really looked beyond that. We were and we are genuinely really different people. You couldn’t have picked a more diverse bunch musically, backgrounds and personality-wise. It’s pretty amazing that we’ve stuck it out, really. But none of us have egos and there are no power struggles. It sounds cheesy to say but musically, the overlap is The Go! Team.
