Music

‘I dig the sound of scratchin’… chuukka, chuukka, chuukka!’ A fuse ignites behind Ian Parton’s eyes while he ‘air-scratches’ the bench outside the Coopers Cask pub in Brighton as we tuck into some chips.

I can see a chemical reaction explode its way, cartoon-style, through his cerebral cortex, whacking a hit of dopamine to his membrane. The mild-mannered ‘collector of sounds’ and creator of genre-Houdinis The Go! Team beams with pleasure: ‘It’s one of my favourite things.’

Welcome to the supersonic world of Ian Parton; like an American theme park without the cheese, not so much a world as a universe unto itself, with its own lexicon, soundtrack and finely tuned taste-o-meter. Here, Parton’s Favourite Things roll by on a high-speed conveyor belt: crash helmets, ‘Midnight Cowboy’, easy listening, ‘Sesame Street’ snippets, feedback, Super-8, double Dutch, horns and a schizophrenic archive of beats and samples from across the decades. ‘I’ve always had a strong sense of what I like,’ he says. ‘To me if something’s good then it’s always good. The Go! Team is all my favourite things – from ’60s girl groups to art-rock to electro – rammed together to make something new… It’s about the way you accumulate things.’ This accumulation has certainly paid off, as 2005 Mercury Prize-nominated ‘Thunder Lightning Strike’ and The Go! Team’s latest album ‘Proof Of Youth’ show. Many music fans now know Ian Parton’s head is a pretty creative place to be. I though, was aware of this a long while before anyone…
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Let me take you back – way back – to a lonesome building on the windswept tarmac of Meridian TV, Southampton, January ’99. Here the 25-year-old Parton and I researched a documentary called ‘Sex In The Classroom’, hunting down sexually errant teachers to put on Channel Five. Vexed by the ‘trashiness’ of our task we wandered the corridors of Evil Edna tellydom together, two misfits among the bouffant brigade.

Back then I was slowly initiated into Parton’s trademark ways: his whizz-kid ideas, his charity shop T-shirts, his understated Charlie Brown charm and own special lingo: ‘That’s pretty hot!’, ‘I’m a sucker for it!’. To me he was an eponymous hero in his own cartoon; I often imagined what the thought bubbles coming out of his head might say… We placed ads and wrote letters to sex offenders but predictably the phone never rang. Instead our days were filled with ennui, paper aeroplanes (me), and pencil drumming and beatboxing (him). Parton had been a drummer in an indie band called Slot Jockey and ‘monkeyed around’ with samples and easy listening tracks after work. He brought in tapes
of Ennio Morricone or his lo-fi bedroom recordings: SK20 samples, guitar and spaghetti western harmonica. At the time, I thought the sound quality was pretty ropey. But I didn’t really ‘get it’. Little did I know that these were the first embryonic sounds of Go!

After ‘the Merdian months’ ended, Parton went back to Brighton to work on archaeological documentaries (‘Secrets Of The Bog Bodies’) and at the same time kept digging up buried sounds. I moved back to London and, after a year, we lost touch. Then, in 2005, I bought ‘Thunder Lightning Strike’, fiddled with my bass settings and bedroom-boogied to a chop-suey of Wichita, Jackson 5 and Vince Guaraldi piano, still somehow oblivious to the identity of the man behind the 'Team. It was only when I opened a paper and recognised a pair of ’70s moon boots that the penny whistle finally dropped. ‘It’s fucking Ian Parton!’ I screamed.

Today, now 33, Parton laughs at the apparent consistency of his vision all these years. Morricone’s widescreen feel is back on the new album, this time riding into the streets of Brooklyn on ‘Keys To The City’. ‘Are you saying I need to move on?’ he smiles, breaking into a tootling mouth trumpet. Ian Parton is so modest and unchanged that it’s as if he’s been cut out of 1999 and pasted straight into 2007. He wears the same puffer-hoodie-sneaker combo from back in the day. In fact, as long as he can remember, Parton has always been ‘into’ the same things.
At 15, at home near Reading, he drummed in a My Bloody Valentine-type band called Right Sister! who de-tuned their guitars Sonic Youth-style, and at Leicester Uni he mixed Herb Alpert loops with ‘noisy shit’.

Fast-forward your cassettes to August 2007. The Go! Team burst on stage at Loop festival in Brighton like a teen karate chop of feedback, B-girl power and knee-high socks, smacking you in the gob with their newest single ‘Doing It Right’. Watching from the crowd, it’s like other members of the Team have exploded like superheroes out of Parton’s brain; the imaginary world of his thought bubbles made real. The whole thing is… well… so Ian.

‘I like the idea of a band being a way of seeing the world and everything should fall into that… and I’m a sucker for group female vocals,’ says Parton who cracks up when I accuse him of being a ’60s soul diva trapped in the body of an indie kid. ‘I always think about girl gangs when I write a song. Like they’re taking to the streets with baseball bats.’

It should be no surprise that Parton recruited original skipping pioneers the Double Dutch Divas – Smooth, Heart, Sassy, and Lady Di – for ‘Proof Of Youth’, nor that the album plays with overlapping ‘all [my] favourite white and favourite black music’ from early ’80s New York where No Wave art-rock and hip hop were simultaneously born on opposite sides of Brooklyn Bridge; or that it features rhymes from ‘old-skool’ legend Chuck D. ‘Proof Of Youth’ is a more ballsy, more relentless version of Parton World as we know it, with the brief respite of a charming Mo Tucker-style interlude (‘I deliberately put that next to Chuck D,’ he beams. ‘I really like the moment with la, la, la, cheeky piano and then fucking Chuck D comes in like, “Go! Team- Chuck D!”). Parton skips from high-octave innocence to pure ‘in yer face’ Bronx. ‘It’s about taking it down and pushing things back up, making the difference more amplified in a way. White noise means so much more when it’s next to the glockenspiel.’

Is that what all the ‘playground’ vibes are about, or has he still got a thing about classrooms? Or are these subliminal messages designed to trigger childhood memories and release ‘nostalgia’ endorphins? ‘I’m not trying to inspire nostalgia or capture the teen market. To me it’s about the graininess and feel of old archive,’ he smiles. ‘But I knew you’d try and put a filthy spin on things!’ For the finale of the Brighton gig, now, The Go! Team huddle around the banjo and twang out the Harry Nilsson-esque ‘Everyone’s A VIP To Someone’. Suddenly, I’m starting to tingle all over.

‘I didn’t set out on a quest to make music that makes people happy.’ Parton insists. ‘I’m not thinking of the Coke ad where everyone’s linking hands. To me it was about excitement and originality, and I think happiness is a by-product of that. I just wanted to make music that would really kick ass and I could imagine skidding around corners to.’

Whether he’s in a '70s car chase, on a Solex motorbike or his BMX, or in a Channel 5 Portakabin, Ian Parton still knows how to take a left turn.

‘Proof Of Youth’ is released on Monday, and The Go! Team celebrate this with a show at Rough Trade East on Tuesday