The Go! Team is a phenomenon in that its style is not only hard to confine to even a handful of specific genres, but also constantly playing with fresh ideas.
Despite its modernity, the movement that is The Go! Team has been changing the rules of the game for more than two decades.
When the band returns to Reading for a show at Sub89 on Thursday, March 9, it will be the first gig of theirs in the town for 15 years.
The band’s founding member and songwriter, Wokingham-born Ian Parton, said: “I began it in around 2000, but we didn’t really start properly until 2004.”
This is when the band’s first full studio album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, was released.
“I was frustrated, with the indie scene and with the NME, and all that– how people would stay in all their own lanes, and people weren’t mashing music together much.
“It felt like a boys’ club, that skinny-jean brigade– so I was really just pleasing myself, like a pick and mix where I would grab all my favourite things.”
He doesn’t feel like much has changed, either: “I’ve got this theory, that it’s a ‘like’ generation– the like button is the symbol of our times, where people like lots of things, but they don’t love much.”
This level of love and detail as an influence has endured, as the band’s latest studio release, The Get Up Sequences Pt II, continues to weave together strings of distinct cultural inspirations and genres.
On marrying often disparate elements, Ian says: “Songwriting is hard generally, so for me it’s trial and error.
“I hoard thousands of ideas on my phone, and spend months trying things one on top of the other without getting much out.
“They’re almost sellotaped together; in a song like Get It Together, where I literally had a flute part and a recorder part, the songs grow and grow.
“If the melody is hot, everything else should fall into place, and that’s when I bring in these international voices.”
He says that bringing in external, authentic aspects allows each album to be “a patch-work quilt, always changing, and keeping you on your toes.”
The latest album is no different: “There’s no conceptual link, particularly” he says, referring to the second part of the Get Up Sequences series of albums.
“But there is a feel of an international, multi-colour, trippy happenings, things like steel drums and flutes.
“One minute it’s Bollywood, the next it’s African funk; all the best things in the world, in life, but zeroed in on the good stuff,
“Not happiness or escapism, just filtering out the bad stuff and deciding where you want your attentions to lie.”
The Go! Team garnered much attention of their own when one of the tracks from their first album, Get It Together, featured heavily in the video game LittleBigPlanet and its subsequent marketing.
“I’m not much of a gamer,” Ian says, “but so many people found us through that, so I can’t knock such an amazing thing.
“It’s funny that when they hear that melody, they’re in Sackboy’s world, but I don’t know that world, which is what’s so interesting about music; the imposition of your own feelings and memories.”
Hailing originally from Wokingham, Ian says he’s been to many of Reading’s likely haunts: “We’d hang out there all the time; The Purple Turtle, of course.
“We were there when the Shoegaze thing was still kicking around, so it was an interesting time.
“There were a couple of us getting up to all sorts of monkey business, but I won’t say any more.”
As for the band’s future: “I don’t know; I’ve got more albums in me and there’s never-ending possibilities.
“But I think maybe I want to push harder– I’ve had this obsession with channel-hopping, but I’ve never felt like I’ve nailed that.
“Life is quite humdrum, so for me that hour on stage, where we’ve got two drum kits going off, guitars and jumping around, it’s life at its rawest.
“It’s life at its most exciting.”
The Go! Team have just released their seventh studio album, Get Up Sequences Part Two, available to buy and stream now.
They are performing at Sub89 in Reading on Thursday, March 9, with tickets available from Heavy Pop via: heavypop.gigantic.com
