Go Baby Go

Remember that whole thing about books, covers and judgements? Well it may be a fair point but sometimes you just need to go with your gut instinct. Take band names, for instance. Sometimes you just know that a record is going to be totally your thing simply from the name of the act that produced it. And never did a moniker better sum up a group than The Go! Team – a name that screams attitude, spirit and a total love of life, the qualities that marked out last year’s debut album Thunder, Lightning, Strike as one of 2004’s largely unsung high points.

For The Go! Team though, the tide is starting to turn and more and more people are beginning to get the message, with the band currently on a tour that will take them around the UK and Europe (including some debut Irish shows) as well as to the US. For founder member Ian P, this is the culmination of a process that began on a far smaller scale.
“It kind of started with me, thrashing around with stuff in my bedroom,” he recalls. “I was trying to realise this idea of it becoming a live thing. I recruited five others, a mix of people who I knew in Brighton and friends of friends in London. We’re not the sort of people who might normally be in a band together and that was the idea, not to be just another guitar band.”
If that was the aim he’s pretty much achieved it, with The Go! Team standing out amongst the current wave of rock bands like a funky sore thumb, occupying the middle ground where Sonic Youth meets the Jackson 5 and picking up where the currently AWOL Avalanches left off. They make rock music you can dance to, or is it dance music you can rock out to? Ian has his own theories.
“The idea was definitely to be a thrashy band, a team,” he explains. “There was no influence from club DJs or anything like that. It’s taking the technology of dance music and the style of writing but applying a thrashiness to it in the way we play and the line-up. I hate the idea of people standing behind decks waving their hands in the air or laptop type artists because it’s been done and it looks shit.”
I mention that their album sounds very much rooted in their native Brighton.
“You think so? I guess it is. There is a diversity to the place, especially these days as there isn’t really a Brighton sound; it's lots of different things from noisy stuff to the more clubby end. I would never describe it as part of that myself but I can see how people on the outside might think that.”

Thunder, Lightning, Strike is out now on Memphis Industries. The Go! Team play Whelan's of Dublin on April 16.