Blasts from the past

EVER since the glory days of Wham! western bands have been trying to strike it big in China.

For all that country’s much trumpeted embrace of turbo-capitalism, though, in some respects it seems Beijing is as steadfastly totalitarian as ever. Or at least that was the experience of funk-pop all-stars the Go! Team when they performed in China recently. Believing they were in for a thrilling pop adventure, the British outfit instead found themselves participating in a true life retelling of Orwell’s 1984.

“We’d never been there before and we were really looking forward to going,” explains frontman Ian Parton. “Then we found out we’d have to submit lyrics. Can you believe it? Some fucker was sitting in an office somewhere, checking our songs wouldn’t inspire a revolution. It’s incredible. That shit is scary.”

Nonetheless, the Go! Team held true to their pledge to play Beijing. Greeting them was a scene straight out of an early rock and roll movie. “It was like the ’50s in terms of the music scene,” says Parton. “By which I mean, there really wasn’t one. The minute we started playing it kicked off. We had people stage diving, crowd surfing — all that kind of stuff. Things we didn’t expect.”

What about their supposedly revolutionary lyrics? He laughs. “We made load of changes so that it sounded like absolute gibberish. I don’t think there was any danger of anyone being offended.”

Straying off the beaten touring track is something of a Go! Team speciality. Over the past five years they’ve played in countries as far flung as Indonesia, Mexico and Tasmania. One of those groups for whom no touring schedule is too punishing, they frequently notch up more than 100 gigs a year. Which may explain the four-year gap between their last album, Proof of Youth, and its imminent follow up, Rolling Blackouts.

“I don’t know where the time is gone,” laughs Parton. “The new album actually took quite a long time to make. It’s quite fiddly. There was lots of trial and error. Plus, I had a kid in the middle. As you can imagine, that slowed things down as well.”

Sounding like five of your favourite bands jamming in an elevator, the Go! Team stuff their songs with disparate influences. Making heavy use of retro samples, their speciality is a sort of pop/rap/funk gumbo that cheerfully does its best to avoid categorisation. One moment they are Public Enemy collaborating with the Shangri-Las, the next the Happy Mondays trying to fight their way out of a 1970s prog instrumental.

“Tracking down obscure samples is extremely difficult sometimes,” says Parton. “On one occasion, we actually had to bring a private investigator in, to find the chap in question.”

Of course, even when they have made contact with the writer, there remains the sticky question of securing permission for the sample. “I usually just give the label a list and try to forget about it,” he says. “Worrying about what the lawyers will say or what have you isn’t conducive to good creativity. I stay in the realm of the song and put the other stuff in the background.”

There have been occasions, he reveals, when he’s been prepared to stump up a large chunk of his royalties in order to secure a sample, rather than going without. “I’m happy to forgo money if it means keeping the song how I want it,” he says. “Otherwise, you end up putting in a ‘fake’ sample instead — and it just sounds like muzak.”

A blaze of hype accompanied the band!’s arrival in 2004. Hailed as one of the most exciting new acts in Britain, their early singles were accompanied by great outpourings of hyperbole from the always excitable British music press. Unlike so many young English acts, however, they made good on their early promise, scoring hit after hit. Inevitably, advertisers soon started to knock on their door, offering “silly” sums to use small snippets of their music. Until recently, however, Parton has always held his nose and the ad-men away.

“I’ve said no to loads of things,” he says. “I don’t want to do anything tacky. It’s something I feel strongly about. Recently, I said yes to an ad for the NFL in America. It’s a clever ad, it’s about music — it seemed a good fit with the Go! Team. I’m hoping it might play during half time at the Super Bowl. That would be a massive thing for us.”

With their reliance on crackly old samples, the Go! Team are often tagged as hopeless nostalgists, a group who would rather dwell in the past than face up to the present. Parton doesn’t see it like this at all. Far from wallowing in the ’70s or ’80s, he wants to make old music come alive, he says, in an utterly modern context.

“Thinking things were always better in the past — it’s a bit of a dangerous way to go,” he says. “That’s not the way I would like to see the world. I’m an optimist about the future. For me, sampling is a way of ‘spreading’ time. You can have something from the ’50s next to something from the ’80s. It’s almost like a time machine. You get to cherry-pick your favourite things from across the decades. That’s what appeals to me most about sampling. You create something that never existed in the first place. You get to make fantasy music.”

One criticism levelled at the Go! Team in the past is that their songs resemble an (admittedly very endearing) variation on a theme. With Rolling Blackouts, Parton tries to address this complaint with music that relies more on conventional song-writing structures than the band’s trademark mish-mash of samples. He’s even brought in guest-vocalists to support longtime singer Ninja, most notably Bethany Cosentino of cult California outfit Best Coast.

“When I approached her she was unheard of,” he says. “I found her through MySpace. I knew what that particular song really needed was a sort of west coast vibe. She was perfect. I spoke to her on the phone and she did her bit remotely. The album’s been done all around the world. We had contributions from America, France, Florida, a church in Streatham. Everywhere.”

* Rolling Blackouts is out next Friday.