|
The band started off as solo act who just used a lot of samples in his records. He then got requests to play live gigs which he did.
From Sunday Times Magazine, I'll print the whole article if you want
"Part of the reason why the Go! Team don't behave like a traditional rock band is because they weren't originally conceived as a rock band. They started out as a bunch of records. Around the turn of the millennium, Ian Parton, a TV researcher from Brighton, started messing around in his bedroom with a digital sampler. Parton says he "liked the idea of making new things out of old". In his case this meant obscure and crackly old vinyl records from his own collection, which he would selectively sample then take the results and patch them together to make his own songs.
Such music has been around since affordable samplers came on to the market nearly 20 years ago. Many modern pop and dance tracks, and nearly all rap records, are now made out of samples. Rock, by contrast, has tended to stick with the old idea that what you hear is what the musicians in the band play themselves. What made Parton's experiments unusual was, firstly, the fact that here he was making guitar-based rock music entirely out of samples. His second USP (unique selling point) was the breadth of styles he dipped into: Bollywood strings, over-amped "noise" bands, 1960s girl groups, wailing harmonicas and big, banging drums.
These ingredients don't usually mix. With the help of his brother Gareth, a recording engineer, Parton made them work rather brilliantly. "I wanted everything to sound exciting, in a car crashy kind of way," he says, cryptically. Over the space of three years, working at home in the evenings he put together an album. He and his brother played a few bits and pieces, but most of the backing tracks and all of the vocals were taken off old records. It cost Parton next to nothing, because Gareth didn't charge for his services, but also because he didn't bother to contact and pay the owners of the copyrights of the records he sampled. He was making, in effect, bootleg recordings. More of this later. None of the labels Parton approached to release his stuff paid any attention until a tiny operation with a grand title, Memphis Industries - run by two brothers out of a garden shed at their parents' north London home - took him on in 2003.
Parton's first singles, released in pressings of only a few hundred copies, went out under the name the Go! Team "after the guys who survey the wreckage after a plane crash". The tracks went down so well that in early 2004, the promoters of the Swedish festival Accelerator approached Parton to ask if he would perform at their next summer bash. He had mixed feelings. "I could just have put all the samples on a laptop and played them like a DJ, but that sort of thing has been done and it always looks like s**t."
So he spent six months converting his bedroom experiment into a proper band. "How a band looks is very important," Parton declares. "I know it's a shallow thing but I really dig the idea of female drummers." Two friends and near neighbours from Brighton, Jamie and Sam, were easy to recruit. The women took longer. After advertising in the NME, Parton eventually found his girl drummers, Silke and Chi, in London. The last member to join was the singer and front person, MC Ninja, whose roots are in rap and R&B. "I didn't want a cliched male rock vocalist. I sent her a CD and she sent me back a note saying that listening to it was 'like running through a field of corn on a sunny day'."
Parton was content that, once assembled, the Go! Team "all looked different, with different tastes, like a social experiment but not that calculated". Their job was to play like a bunch of samples. Everybody was instructed to swap instruments and jump around. Anything that they couldn't play, like the Bollywood string parts, came over via laptop.
The first Swedish gig was "pretty ropey" in Parton's view. "And after that I thought, do we have to play live? Let's just keep it a studio thing."
When the Go! Team returned to England, Parton was undecided, but the word was already out. Nobody quite understands how these messages travel so far so fast, but in the world of rock'n'roll, a huge reputation can be built seemingly overnight. By last October, the nebulous community of tastemakers had decided that the Go! Team were a hot ticket.
|