“We have got a ridiculous amount of gear now,” he offers, “because we’ve got two drum kits, and we keep adding instruments. For instance, on top of banjos, glockenspiels, keyboards, two drum kits, two guitars, a bass, three singers, I’ve just added a steel drum and, erm…” he pauses, “a typewriter.” It’s hard not to laugh. Does he lie awake at night, wondering specifically if the typewriter is absolutely necessary? “It is getting a bit daft now,” he acknowledges. “We try to strip it back as much as we can, but with our music, it’s easy just to keep adding and adding and adding. We could travel with a 10-piece brass band and still not quite feel we’d captured it.”
Sometimes, of course, this elaborate set-up means that things can go wrong. “We let our sampler pick up the slack sometimes,” Parton explains, “and it fucked up once, so we had to run the show off an iPod instead. Thankfully, we had that. We would have had to pull the gig, otherwise. We’re not an unplugged operation,” he acknowledges, “we need to have the samples. There are only a few times when things have fucked up like that. The first time we played Glastonbury, the whole sound desk blew up – like, literally blew up – so we were playing and the crowd were shouting at us,” he grins. “We were thinking, ‘what are they shouting about?’ We’ve had a few horror stories, but nothing major.”
With that in mind, one would assume that The Go! Team may have picked up some sort of obtuse wisdom or some life lessons from their years of playing gigs and festivals. “I wouldn’t say wisdom,” Parton says with a sardonic laugh. “I think our philosophy, even though we’ve never articulated it, is that unless you go for it yourself as a band, you can’t expect the audience to be into it.
“We live by example in a way,” he continues, “and we hope that our energy will translate to the crowd. If I saw a band who were just standing there looking bored, I’d think, ‘fuck em, I’m not getting into this’. We try and do the opposite.
“The live thing is almost about release in a way – when you’re making a record, you’re constantly asking questions, like ‘is this right, can we do this differently?’, but playing live puts you in the moment. You can just say ‘fuck it’ and go with it.”
There are moments when their energy translates, and moments when it does not. Parton counts a Glasgow gig from a few years ago as a highlight. “It was absolute mayhem,” he recalls. “I don’t know what it was, but the crowd were just screaming. It’s the nearest we’ll come to Beatlemania or something.”
There are, however, also moments when The Go! Team haven’t connected so well with audiences, including a gig alongside Basement Jaxx that Parton is somewhat reluctant to talk about. “We’ve made some bad support band choices over the years,” he concedes, “and that one with Basement Jaxx wasn’t a particularly good idea.” When asked why, he hesitates. “The crowd were a bit too dance-y, I guess,” he shrugs. “And we were a bit too noisy.”
While To Go! Team and Basement Jaxx are not a million miles apart in terms of their cut-and-paste approach to music, The Go! Team’s uncompromising approach means that mega-commercial success on the level of Basement Jaxx has, thus far, eluded them. Parton seems a little bit down when discussing this. “We could have possibly been a bigger band if we’d mixed things a bit ‘nicer’, so they’d played better on the radio,” he says with a sigh.
“That’s never been a priority for us, though. It’s always been quite important to me to have that distorted, noisy dimension to The Go! Team.” Have the band’s label ever pushed them to take their music in a more commercial direction? “No,” Parton laughs, “historically, they’ve told me to go ahead and rough it up even more!”
Take their latest album, Rolling Blackouts as an example of this approach. “I definitely like to mess around with things,” Parton affirms. “For example, we spent thousands of pounds on recording and mixing this album, then at the very last stage, we put the whole thing on cassette, so we could then record it back, and that’s the version we released,” he laughs. “Anything you hear on the finished album that sounds like old-fashioned tape hiss – that’s actually tape hiss. It was commercial suicide, in a way.
“I like the idea of taking the edge off things, making it clear that we’re not trying to have number one singles or anything here. I think that makes it more exciting, to take the sheen off things. I’ve kind of got a paranoia about hi-fi.”
The album features a variety of guest vocalists, from Bethany of nouveau surf pop group Best Coasts, to Satomi of avant-garde oddballs Deerhoof. Getting them involved, Parton explains was a natural process. “Well, it really just comes from the song,” he figures. “I write a melody and them imagine what kind of voice will bring it to life.
“In the case of Secretary Song, I thought, ‘well, this definitely has a Japanese flavour, and it’s about an office girl’. I could imagine Satomi’s voice on it, and it was quite easy to arrange, because we actually do know Deerhoof. With Bethany’s song, I knew it had a very West Coast, girls-in-the-garage kind of feel to it, and I just wanted to find a voice that fit. I ended up finding Bethany on MySpace, which was ages ago now.”
The Go! Team return to Australia for a series of shows in May, and Parton is excited to be making the trip back. “Australian crowds have this really cool, ‘fuck it’ mentality of just being in the moment and not worrying too much about the hipsters, you know what I mean?” he says.
“Australia was, bizarrely, one of the first places to pick up on us – really early, at the demo stage. I found out that Triple J were playing the demo of Ladyflash, and I couldn’t believe it. I still had my old job at the time. But yeah, you got onto us really early.”
Ladyflash was indeed quite big down here. “Yeah,” he says, sighing again, “it’s still our biggest hit, unfortunately…”
