Ian Parton, the captain of The Go! Team, tells TONY CLAYTON-LEAabout his magpie messing, being 'one of the first bloggy-hipster internet buzz bands' and his love of out-of-tune kids
Mixing cute ideas with noise – is that the Go! Team’s thing?
Generally speaking, yes. In the indie world people and bands stay in their own camps quite a lot. You've got those who are just in to hardcore, and who think they're really cool, and look down on everything else. I think I've always been into noisy stuff, distortion, alongside things like girl groups and theme tunes. I've always had obsessions with putting things together, like the music of My Bloody Valentineand the theme tune to cartoon series – the idea of melody mixed with feedback. It's like when The Jesus and Mary Chain first came out – their blend of Beach Boys and barbed wire. I don't know what it is that I really like about it. Some sort of dissolute romance, maybe. It's also got some kind of barrier around it with a sign saying "grown-ups keep out".
Where did that come from, blending the neat with the jagged?
I’m not sure. I still don’t think we’ve pushed it as far as we could go. Across the new album, Rolling Blackouts, there were lots of mismatches and juxtapositions. You’d have weird, psychedelic hip-hop songs next to a girl-group melody. I like people not really knowing what is going to come next. It’s the contrast of things, you know, the element of surprise. Essentially it’s messing round with people, like The Velvet Underground doing something as lovely as Sunday Morning and then the next track is a Sister Ray drone.
You have cardboard boxes full of slogans you use for song titles – plagiarism or cultural recontexualisation?
Whoa! Often, they’re not slogans at all, but rather phrases you overhear people say, lines from a film. It’s like when you’re in a pub and someone says something and you go, ‘oh, that’s a good title for an album’. It’s a turn of phrase that jumps out at you. It is recontextualisation in that you’re hijacking things – much like the way people do with music. At this point in time we can look over the history of music and cherry-pick things from various eras, even music from different parts of the world, and put them in to the same song. That appeals to me the most. The ultimate challenge is that the blending doesn’t sound forced. You don’t want to be too clever-clever about it. You just want it to be on one level a simple song that you could play acoustically, yet on another level a little bit strange.
The band have been nominated for a Mercury Prize and is loved by Pitchfork. Is this good for longevity?
I’m unsure about the longevity aspect, but those kinds of things certainly put you on the map. I would claim that The Go! Team were among one of the first bloggy-hipster internet buzz bands. We started about six years ago, and the whole idea of blogs advancing the word about us was great – we found ourselves playing packed venues in America a year before the first album came out. Of course, that hype is transient, but I reckon we’re quite an original outfit, I don’t think there’s anyone out there like us, even six years down the line.
You toy around with odd instruments, don’t you?
Yes, but I don’t use them as a crutch, I use them for the final stages. I’ve got things like a kalimba, which is an African thumb piano, an omnichord, mellotron, steel drums. I think we’re trying to reclaim instruments that might be considered square in conventional NME rock’n’roll circles. Amateur? I like amateurish on a certain level. I like things being out of tune occasionally, and vocals sounding quite fragile – a bit like Mo Tucker of The Velvet Underground. Things can sound more exciting that way. On the album we used 15 kids playing brass instruments, which provided interesting results. They weren’t amazing musicians – not session players by any stretch of the imagination. I remember saying to them in the studio “more energy, more energy”, and the more they tried the more slightly out of tune they were playing. The combination of it made it much more kicking. It’s a subconscious thing, isn’t it? It’s your brain telling you something is not quite right, it’s not quite there.
Does your brain ever tell you that, Ian?
Er, what are you trying to say?
Rolling Blackouts is out now. The Go! Team play Galway’s Black Box, Thurs, March 3 (as part of the Heineken Green Spheres event – apply for free tickets at HeinekenMusic.ie), and Dublin’s Academy on Sat, March 5
