The Go! Team interview – “It’s neverending… like a puzzle you can never solve.”

Behind the scenes with Brighton’s most colourful Team

They say there’s no I in team, but in the case of The Go! Team they really couldn’t be more wrong.  Listen to practically any record by the Brighton band, from 2004’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike to Get Up Sequences Part One, which emerged a matter of days ago, and it immediately summons up the image of a room bulging with people having the time of their lives.

It’s certainly true that numerous musicians have been involved in the group since its inception.  But in reality The Go! Team, and especially their recorded output, is all very much about one man – Ian Parton.  Indeed, the legend has it that Ian had already created the first album in his parents’ kitchen, getting his brother to mix and co-produce it, when he accepted a booking to play live at Sweden’s Accelerator Festival – and had to find a band to fulfill it.

It’s a modus operandi that has stayed pretty much intact to this day, as we discover when we chat to Ian in his Brighton flat on the eve of the release of their latest offering Get Up Sequences Part One.   He kindly talks us through the process of making the album – and it’s not always what you’d expect.

It starts, of course, with records.  Not just a few, though.  Hundreds of the blighters.  “I start out by listening to about 100 records a day, for day after day.  I grab little snippets of melody so I build up this big library of ideas.”

Will he have a theme to this binge listening sessions?

“No,” he tells us, “although I used to be like that.  I used to pick something like film soundtracks, Turkish psyche, 60s or whatever, and then cane that genre for weeks.  But not anymore.”

The results, somewhat amazingly, do not get sorted into the genesis of separate tracks, but rather all end in up one huge, amorphous computer file.  “A mega file of my ideas…” he calls it.

This monster file will be lived with and listened back to in the search for nuggets of sonic gold.  Although, to Parton, recognising inspiration is not the tough bit.  “The good ideas just jump out of the speaker…”  The albums, he laughs, are like “a greatest hits of my edits… After a while the best edits rise to the top.”

Parton evidently knows what he’s looking for, though.  A keen sense of what the essential, core aesthetic at the heart of The Go Team! is.   It’s there in the friction caused by juxtaposing different vibes, even different gradients of sound quality, that music from different eras throw up.

“I’m really into the idea of channel hopping,” Parton says, “jumping around and playing with the fidelity.  The Velvet Underground had that, combining white noise and these cute songs.  I know it’s a Go! Team Song when I’m almost oblivious to that jolting.”

It’s  only once the songs are close to being fully formed that the band gets any parts to play.  “I lock the songs down before I give them to the band,” he says, “and then the last stage is the vocals.”  Which, in the case of Get Up Sequences Part One, meant a sojourn to the Isle of Wight and a studio built on one layer of a huge former Water Tower.

How was that, we ask?  “Nice and cavernous,” he answers with characteristic succinctness.

It’s certainly a surprise to discover that as a character, Parton is every bit serious and direct as the music he makes is joyful and playful.  But then he does, to be fair, describe the music of The Go! Team several times in our conversation as being like a parallel universe, perhaps one in which the other side of his personality can hold sway.

“It’s a parallel dimension,” he says, ”where all these things can co-exist, where you can have Roxanne Shante with My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth and the Jackson Five.  I’m always surprised by it, always craving it.  For me a The Go! Team! is about grabbing these things, drawing on them.  Pick and mix, combining things that we  love.”

And when we ask, given that The Go! Team have just released album number five and have a Get Up Sequences part two already lined up to follow in its wake, what keeps him continuing to make music, it’s clear the option of not doing it has never entered his brain.

“It’s neverending – it’s so mysterious, like a puzzle you can never solve.”

And, just as he is precise about what lies at the heart of a Go! Team tune, he is equally knowing about why they make the music they do.

“I very naturally lean towards these very positive songs, something really sincere and helpful, positive frequencies…”  

Don’t, for a moment, doubt the motivation behind those positive vibes either.  Parton says he’s highly suspicious of the term retro and, although it’s one that is regularly thrown at the band, it’s one he thinks misses the point entirely.

“For me this record is sincere, not retro or ironic.   It might be bits from the 60s, 70s and 80s but I think the production is contemporary.  It’s about the good things in life, not like some Coke advert, but more like the best bits of a holiday, the good shit basically.  And I’m curating the good shit.  That’s what I’m trying to do.  But I don’t want to be sickly.  It’s a tightrope and I’m tiptoeing along it.”

For Parton, the creative process was even trickier to negotiate than usual this time.  Due to a rare disease – nothing to do with exposure to noise, the doctors have assured him – he woke up one in 2019 and realized he’d lost his hearing in his right ear.

”All the bottom end had come out of my left ear and there was no right at all.  What I could hear fluctuated and sounded like a dalek talking. “  A scary experience for anyone, but for someone whose entire whose world revolves around their hearing, even more terrifying.  He was dizzy and disorientated, and haunted by the thought that what was left would also disappear.

And yet somehow, quite amazingly, he battled on to complete the album, actually referring to the project as a ‘life raft’ that helped him through the feelings of dread and depression that followed.  “I very naturally lean towards these very positive songs, something really sincere and helpful. Positive frequencies.”

Even though his hearing has not yet recovered, he’s resolved to carry on battling and creating.  There’s already a second volume of Get Up Sequences already in the can, and Parton is considering starting work on a third.  “It’s a case of limbering your brain up for it,” he declares, matter of factly.  In the world of The Go! Team, in other words, it’s still a case of all system Go!

Ben Willmott