Biography
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Years Active
2000 – present (24 years)
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Founded In
Brighton, Brighton and Hove, England, United Kingdom
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Members
- Chi Fukami Taylor
- Ian Parton
- Jamie Bell
- Kaori Tsuchida (2005 – present)
- Ninja
The Go! Team are a Brighton, United Kingdom-based six piece band (with two drummers) whose songs are a mixture of action theme songs, cheerleader chants, noise pop guitars and early hip-hop, with a hint of '70s funk. On record their songs are often pieced together largely from samples, although live the songs are performed mostly with live instruments. The band also combines indie rock and garage rock with a mixture of funk and Bollywood soundtracks, double Dutch chants, old school hip-hop and distorted guitars. While live vocals are handled mostly by lead vocalist Ninja, vocals on record also feature sampled and guest voices.
Founder Ian Parton, born in Wales, was previously involved in a band called Dig The Slowness. The band is split 50/50 by gender, with a female frontwoman Ninja, drummer (Chi Fukami Taylor), and multi-instrumentalist (Kaori Tsuchida, who replaced Steidinger in Autumn 2005).
Initially The Go! Team was ostensibly a solo project for documentary film director Ian Parton, whose debut release was the "Get It Together EP", released in 2000 by Leicester-based Pickled Egg Records. This received airplay from legendary DJ John Peel, but following this, legal wrangles meant that it would be another three years before their next release, the "Junior Kickstart" EP in 2003.
Their album "Thunder, Lightning, Strike" was released on the Memphis Industries label in September 2004, and has received widespread critical acclaim. In 2005 it was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, which coincided with the international release of a "legal" version of the album wherein samples which could not be cleared for use had to be removed. The album was co-produced and mixed by Ian's brother Gareth Parton at The Fortress Studios and Bluestone in London. Prior to the album's release, Ian Parton had failed to clear any of the samples used in the album, believing it wouldn't attract much attention. However, the album received widespread critical acclaim upon release. Following the album's unexpected success, the Parton brothers later had to work with a musicologist to write around or recreate samples they could not use. The revised album was reissued with two additional bonus tracks in the United Kingdom and the United States the following year. The album peaked at number 48 on the UK Albums Chart in February 2006.
Their song "Bottle Rocket" was used as the theme on an advertising campaign for RTÉ Sport in 2005 on the Irish TV channels RTÉ One and RTÉ Two. Another of their songs, "Huddle Formation" is currently being used in an advertising campaign for the Honda Civic, "We Just Won't Be Defeated" is also being used in current Target commercials, and "Get It Together" is the title song of the official soundtrack for 'LittleBigPlanet' which is a PlayStation 3 game.
Album discography:
* Thunder, Lightning, Strike (2004)
* Proof of Youth (2007)
* Rolling Blackouts (2011)
* The Scene Between (2015)
* SEMICIRCLE (2018)
* Get Up Sequences Part One (2021)
* Get Up Sequences Part Two (2023)
The Go! Team is not to be confused with Calvin Johnson's (Beat Happening, co-founder of K Records) and Tobi Vail's (Bikini Kill, Spider and the Webs) 1980's band, The Go Team. For information on The Go Team, see the Wikipedia entry. Last.fm currently redirects scrobbled tracks for The Go Team to this page (assuming that users omit the exclamation point by accident).
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