Dots: Afternoon Ian, have you recovered from ATP yet..? And how was your weekend?
Ian Parton: It was really good actually, although I didn't stay for long - I had my kiddie with me so it wasn't really a "rocking" situation but a number of the rest of the band hung about. We had a really cool slot pretty late on. If somebody had asked me when I wanted to play it'd have been then, half 10 on a Friday night with everyone having just got there.
Dashes: Are you perhaps accustomed to playing slightly earlier on in the evening?
Ian: Well if I had my way, we'd always play after midnight on a weekend. I've never wanted to play Sundays, that was my policy when we started out. We're a pretty rowdy bunch really...
Dots: Having had a brief break from Britain and its entangled music scenes, how does it feel to finally return, and do you feel that you're entirely in the swing of things yet?
Ian: We never really felt as though we'd gone away; we were playing endless shows around the world, in the Ukraine and Singapore, over to Russia and China, all sorts of ridiculous places so we haven't played in the UK deliberately for a while. It doesn't feel as though we're rusty or anything, and we're probably tighter as a band than ever before. It's all interesting, what with everything kicking off so quickly these days, with almost everything revolving around hype and the next big thing etc. but I don't think you factor any of that in when you're writing music, or at least we don't... We just get on with it.
Dashes: How conscious an effort have you made to attempt to remain relevant in amongst all these fleeting swathes of hype?
Ian: I don't know how I'd define relevant, but I definitely feel frustrated and annoyed with many aspects of indie music. I don't think we feel particularly integrated into any given scene, and I think since we started out music has become more eclectic, and it's not all too unfathomable to come across someone into both Le Tigre and Lady Gaga for example. So the idea of straddling genres, being into loads of different kinds of things is pretty common nowadays.
Dots: And presumably from your perspective, that's a particularly positive shift in contemporary music...
Ian: Yeah, I mean I've never seen any reason not to incorporate all the different genres we've managed to weave into our records, but at the same time, for us it's all in the intricate detail. It's not as though we're saying "we like soul", we just pick and choose bits and bobs from various songs, artists, genres, whatever. We're not saying "we like funk" either, as funk can be just about the worst music that you've absolutely ever heard so I'm never really comfortable with any description anyone ever gives us.
Dashes: The way in which your music's compiled, splicing together samples with live instrumentation, do things sometimes seem quite schizophrenic?
Ian: Everything feels relatively natural to me, I never really subconsciously thought, particularly with this record which may be more eclectic than the previous two, about exactly what I was aiming to achieve musically. Conversely, I kind of get pushed and pulled about between my favourite music from day to day really, whether I'm going through an Ennio Morricone period, or revisiting early hip hop, or going to a gig and stumbling upon whatever's in vogue at that particular moment in time, or watching some blaxploitation movie... It's quite a genuine cohesion, without deliberately crowbaring it into any pigeonholes. Traditionally if you were in the indie camp, you'd be quite elitist regarding what you professed to like (Fugazi, Jesus Lizard etc.), kind of saying "this is my thing, and everything else is shit", but I've always flittered between that sort of thing and Sesame Street songs about the seasons or the Jackson 5 cartoon, or public information sounds, girl groups, and the interest for me is the way in which you can somehow get these worlds to collide. And black and white music are usually quite segregated so I was intrigued as to how the two could potentially come together.
Dots: So when stitching the patchwork quilt of sorts, how meticulously do you have to trawl through things, ironing it out? When listening to a Go! Team record quite often it's tricky differentiating between samples and original material...
Ian: Well quite often it's all original, particularly with this record. I think people have always assumed with us that more things are sampled than they really are... I think people have maybe put a little too much emphasis on the whole sampling thing with us, assuming we just nick someone else's track and put a beat under it. But this LP's more about songwriting, seeing how the songs can stand up on their own, maybe played acoustically. It's much more about melody with this record, making things catchy but in a slightly less obvious way...
Dashes: The Go! Team has always been something of a collaborative effort, and Rolling Blackouts perhaps accentuates such perception. Do you see yourself personally as The Go! Team, a one-man team as it were?
Ian: Not really, I mean loads of bands have one songwriter, whilst the rest play on it and it's sort of like that with us. I don't think the rest of the band have the patience to trawl through all these records, all day every day so I write the songs, before getting on the blower to the rest of the band, asking if they want to come down and do some bass or banjo, and then we've obviously got the collaborators from further afield, dotted all over the world so I think the live thing and the recorded thing have always basically been two mutually exclusive entities. It's different people from different musical backgrounds rubbing shoulders and these things wouldn't normally happen as most bands have one singer throughout the album. I think we stand out in that respect...
Dots: Having recently worked with Deerhoof and Best Coast, augmenting your ATP affiliation I suppose, are proceedings becoming more collaborative?
Ian: I think everything changes from track to track; you write a song and then you ask yourself "what am I imagining?" For example for Secretary Song, the collaboration with Satomi Matsuzaki from Deerhoof, when I heard the song my mind was whisked off to offices in Tokyo, with people all lined up symmetrically in this office in the 60s. That, and the melody was quite Deerhoof-esque in places too so the need for Satomi's vocal revealed itself as it were. And then with Beth Cosentino, the sound was already rooted in California, very Pacific Coast Highway with waves and shades of sound, so it's a topsy-turvy way of making songs, and it's a pain in the ass occasionally roping people in but I don't know I'd want to do it any other way...
Dashes: Do you think that as a result your records have a tendency to sound a little more like compilation albums?
Ian: I like to think there is something Go! Team-ish flowing through every one of them, and I think that has been achieved, and that's facilitated by the fact that there are so many different sides to the band but I think we're in that position where I don't know what it is about the sound, whether it's the sound of a really compressed cymbal, or a frequency that's slightly trashier than you may normally hear and expect, or a melody, or a combination of all of those things... Being so close to it, I can't really tell but I'm pretty convinced there is something that sets us apart, that means that our albums don't sound like the product of thirteen different bands...
Dots: Ahead of the latest record, Rolling Blackouts, was its conception something of a continual work, permeating your far-reaching world tours, or did you get together and lay it down in its entirety?
Ian: It's a bit of a blur to be honest..! I can't really remember when I started this one as it's not as though I'm ever not doing it... I always find myself singing samples into my phone, whilst my ears prick up whenever I hear something that grabs me on the radio but it definitely was a pristine, blank canvas that we started from this time around, there were no hangover songs so it was all refreshingly "new". But it was quite "bitty" in that we tried things that didn't work, there were a load of songs that didn't make it, and the whole process was quite time-consuming as we were doing things effectively by trial and error...
Dashes: Finally, given the catchy tendencies of Go! Team material, and having been licensed on a slew of promo ads and interestingly games (Get It Together notably featuring on Little Big Planet), having primarily written these songs, do you feel quite precious about their exploitation or their use to sell products of others, about handing them over to others to do what they will with?
Ian: It depends on what it's for really... I don't mind video games, I think they're pretty fair game, especially if they're decent like Little Big Planet, that was pretty cool, but I've turned down a fair few adverts. The other day that horrible Gala Bingo wanted to use a track for a link sponsoring Emmerdale and there was absolutely zero chance of that ever happening. I have turned down quite a lot, sacrificed a shedload of money, but I've agreed to a few little things here and there. We're on this NFL ad over in America at the minute, perhaps surprisingly. Looking at me, I'm not really all that much of a sporty guy, and there's this ad with these American Football players sitting on a bus, The Go! Team blaring down their headphones. It's soundtracked the odd film, stuff like that, but it's the adverts that I'm really funny about but it's just the way things are going now though. The line between brand and band in the background is wearing pretty thin and bands have to survive, so I can see the reasoning behind it, reality getting in the way of integrity. Fortunately I guess the X Factor can't really come knocking.
Rolling Blackouts is released Monday, 31st January. Our review can be found here.
