by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“You know what, you should put this in your article,” says a resolute Ninja of the English band the Go! Team, whose Montreal debut falls squarely on Halloween. “We want costumes—and I need a costume too, so someone should bring me one. And everyone should bring a pumpkin as well, because Ian has an obsession with pumpkins.”

Ninja’s the cheerfully motormouthed singer/rapper/DJ positioned by default as the on-stage frontperson, cheerleader and public relations officer of the band masterminded by Brighton, England’s Ian Parton. As her duty demands, she reiterates her opinion real loud ’n’ clear like. “They must come in costume,” she hollers over a cell phone from a tour stop in Tempe, Arizona, “or no entry!”

To be fair, I’ve baited her into taking a strong stand on the matter. Montreal is due for a really outstanding show, the kind with loads of colour and noise and kooky audience-participation nonsense (like, say… costumes), the kind you leave sweaty, exhausted and convinced that all is right in the world for the moment.

Me Mom & Morgentaler used to deliver such shows, and more recently the Flaming Lips induced an almost transcendental collective euphoria at Metropolis. If any band on the live-show horizon is qualified to make not just good but great times happen, it’s the Go! Team.

“Yeah, we do that to people,” says Ninja. “We do have people coming up and going, ‘I cried at your show!’ and stuff, this kind of thing where they haven’t been to a show like that in years.”

Sure, but then, the Go! Team are working from their debut LP Thunder, Lightning, Strike, the kind of album that hasn’t been heard in years.

Pushing the limits

“That’s the goal of it all, really,” says Ian Parton over the same cell phone. “Making it kick ass.”

As shy and soft-spoken as Ninja is brash and chatty, Parton doesn’t particularly sound like an ass-kicker by nature. But kick ass his album does.

It’s more than just the source material, sampled or played, that feeds the overdriven, mashed-up majesty of Thunder, Lightning, Strike. It’s more than the obtusely raw, needle-in-the-red production that makes the drums explode like fireworks, or the vigorous tempo of the proceedings. It’s an overwhelming sense, to this writer’s ears, of youthful exuberance, of sugar-shocked preteen goofball wildness, one step from utter chaos and all the more impressive for it.

It’s recess on the first true day of spring, it’s Christmas morning in a portable pocket-sized format, it’s the lightning bolts and disco font, church bells and balls-out brass of the opening credits to that ’70s PBS kid’s show The Electric Company (those born after ’81 kindly ignore this reference), stretched out over a 35-minute record. Have I made my damn point?

“The bottom line for me is energy and excitement,” says Parton, “and finding different ways to create that. It wasn’t overtly trying to be happy, actually, even though lots of people take that away from it, mainly. I’m into things being kind of relentless, and going a bit further than you thought they would, pushing the limits in some way.

“I wasn’t trying to say, ‘Isn’t the world great after all?’ I’m kind of glad that is a side effect of it, but it wasn’t that literal. I’m conscious of things being a bit sickly and too feelgood,” he laughs.

Right, this from a guy who titled a tune “Feelgood by Numbers.”

Bollywood, bubblegum and bog bodies

The fact is, if you wanted to do a breakdown of the elusive quality of “feelgood,” a clinical deconstruction of what makes a piece of pop music obligate you to scare your cats with sudden, spontaneous little dances, or throw your hands in the air and howl “Woo-hoo,” the Mercury Prize-nominated Thunder, Lightning, Strike (re-released by Sony BMG earlier this month) would be the perfect test subject.

It’s a veritable Frankenstein’s monster of everything yummy and fun in pop. There’s the bubblegum soul of the Jackson Five next to the bristling guitar grit of Sonic Youth, the go-for-it naivete of early hip hop next the brass fanfare of Hawaii 5-0, the Bollywood bits next to the snappy piano shuffle of a Charlie Brown TV special. The proverbial bells and whistles are there, as are the banjos, harmonicas and recorders.

Thunder, Lightning, Strike is something Parton, formerly a drummer in assorted bands, had been slowly cobbling together in his bedroom since the late ’90s, during downtime from his day job. The nature of that job, creating TV documentaries on archaeology, NASA, animals in movies, ice mummies and bog bodies, offers tangential insight into Parton’s modus operandi.

“I’ve often thought that our music has quite a lot to do with editing, with how you put things next to each other. It’s all about the decision-making process, what you keep and what you don’t use. It’s quite visual music as well—people often talk about how it puts images in your mind. Subconsciously, there might be some parallels there. Nothing that literal, though. I always kept the two separate. I still kind of think of the music as a hobby—I certainly try not to think of it as a career, a money-making venture. It’s really just stuff I’d be doing anyway.”

The gang’s all here

Parton is possibly being a bit disingenuous. There was a method to his musical madness, a plan there all along. “I wrote lots of the songs—all of the songs—before the band actually got involved. Then the geezer who runs Memphis Industries, our label in England, basically bullied me into agreeing to do a festival in Sweden. This was with a couple of months to spare. But I’d always planned on making it a live thing. I never wanted it to be a solitary venture, mainly because—well, lots of reasons, really. Laptop nerds always look shit on stage, basically, and I much prefer the idea of a gang of people with different skills all coming together to kind of make it happen.

“This festival was the trigger, I guess, for actually getting my finger out. It came about through various ways—friends around Brighton, friends of friends and adverts. It came together pretty quickly, you know. There wasn’t any kind of auditioning or anything like that. It was very much just speaking to people and seeing if they got it.”

They certainly did. As a result, in the less than two years that the Go! Team has been a six-headed live entity, the band’s rep, both on record and on stage, has expanded exponentially.

“We’ve been really lucky,” says Ninja. “Everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve sold out, apart from less than five shows—and we’ve had loads and loads of shows. I’m quite happy that we get more of an older crowd, because the younger people, they like what they’re told to like. If the band’s put on the cover of a magazine, or on TV, the young people will like them because they’re told to, whereas older people go out on their own and find music they like. It’s nice to see 40 year olds come to us after and go [affecting an odd, possibly Dutch accent], ‘I never dance, but you guys, you made me dance!’

“So when we get an older crowd, I know they’re liking us for what we are, and the music for what it is. They haven’t come because we’ve done commercials.”

Aversion to adverts

That remark broaches a prickly topic. Parton is firm in refusing to license his tunes for ads, having notably told McDonalds to go screw. “I think that somehow, it’s actually wound up on a Hispanic anti-smoking advert in America somewhere,” he chuckles. “I don’t know much about it, but I think it has. That’s the only advert it’s been on. Literally every week there’s some kind of request. Just last week I turned down something for a French mobile-phone advert. I’m kind of seesawing between pride in saying no and guilt that I’ve turned down this money. It’s only gonna get given to someone else. But it’s quite important, I think, to keep songs special in some way, and I think everyone should try to. Particularly our music, where you can see people attaching a lifestyle and branding to it, because it’s quite upbeat. As soon as that happens, as soon as it gets attached to whatever the fuck it is, beer or petrol or whatever, it would change in some way.

“People would assume that our music is perhaps vacuous and one-dimensional, but it’s not just in lyrics that you can have an impact or take a stand for something. You can do things—or not do things, more importantly, which often will be unknown because nobody will actually hear about it. But, y’know—fuck it.”

With the Grates and Kiss Me Deadly at la Tulipe
on Monday, Oct. 31, 9 p.m., $18.50

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