The Go! Team's Ian Parton on Hipsters, Indie-Pop, and 20 Years of Thunder, Lightning, Strike

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The Go! Team have never stopped kicking thanks to the endlessly whirring brain of mastermind Ian Parton, and this fall the long-running project celebrated the 20th anniversary of its seismic debut LP Thunder, Lightning, Strike. I'd already been trying to line up a chat with Ian for a minute before the occasion rolled around, so this was the perfect time to reflect on a perfect record, as well as to delve into his unique creative POV and process. Check it out, and make sure to catch them on tour in the U.S. later this month if you can:

Tell me about your memories of making Thunder, Lightning, Strike.
It was years in the making, really, this aesthetic sense I had. I wanted to do something trashy, colorful, feminine, schizophrenic, and Technicolor. I had a vague idea of what I wanted, and I knew I didn't want it to be a bunch of skinny blokes in skinny jeans with guitars, thinking they were fucking cool. I wanted to take that NME bullshit idea of what being in a band was and blow it out of the water. So I was fucking around with a four-track and samples, and these ideas evolved over months and years of trying things next to each other until they worked. The mindset was, could I have a Sonic Youth-y section next to a blaring car-chase horn section? Could I have electro next to some '70s kids theme tune? Why can't you do this? Why can't I just please myself and create my dream band?

For me, when the record came out, I was already wondering if we'd ever hear from the Avalanches again, because that sampledelic approach made such a mark on me as a young listener.
The truthful answer is that the Avalanches weren't an influence for me. It was a kind of coincidence, I think. In fact, I don't think I'd heard that album when I made Thunder Lightning Strike, believe it or not. The big difference for me is that, because I'm from a noise guitar background, aesthetically I was making different decisions. I wanted it to be an absolute mess, basically—to sound thrown together. The Avalanches are quite produced and clearly from a clubby, DJing background. My approach was much more made in the garage, and I wanted it to sound like it was made in the garage.

For me, samples weren't a dance music thing. It was more a way of Sellotapeing sounds together and jumping ahead in time—from second to second, decade to decade. When I was in university, I made a student film called Channel Hopping because I was clearly obsessed with this idea of flipping channels. I don't know what it is about me, but there's something I love about that clash of things next to each other. That's what was guiding me—that pick-and-mix, grabbing-your-favorite-things mindset. Whether it's Ennio Morricone or the Monkees, why can't I just fucking slam them together and please myself, you know?

Tell me more about your pop cultural diet when you were younger, and how that guided the Go! Team aesthetic.
I took the usual indie route into music—Pixies, MBV, all of them—and then I added to it with soundtracks, easy listening, soul, and electro, and I grew out from there. The fact that I had this noise mindset informed everything. There wasn't just recorders—it was distorted recorders, and that was a crucial dimension for me.

I think I'm unusual, because I love noise but I also love the really cute stuff as well—the '60s girl groups, Charlie Brown, Sesame Street, the feel of Saturday morning TV, some Technicolor stuff. I used to keep VHS tapes of old episodes of Sesame Street—not for Big Bird or any of that, but for the little films in it about the seasons, or a trip to the peanut butter factory or something like that. I remember watching that and thinking, "Is there a way you could go from this to white noise? Is there a world where these two things can coexist?"

The feel of New York was actually an influence, too—Woody Allen, Midnight Cowboy, electro, Roxanne Shanté, Glenn Branca, the Velvet Underground. New York seems to be a link between between them, so subconsciously that was another link in my head.

Do you remember the first time you ever went to New York?
Yeah, I was probably about 19 or something.

What was your impression of the city?
I mean, this is the thing about the Go! Team: So much of it is about second-hand memories. The normal approach to songwriting is picking up an acoustic guitar and saying, "Let me sing about my life." I was much more interested in grabbing references—second-hand memories, things you've seen on a documentary or a film. So my sense of a place isn't my own—it's a product of TV shows, movies, and documentaries, as well as my own thing. I've always thought the Go! Team isn't about literal memories: It's about grabbing the favorite things you've ever loved over your whole life.

When you mention the notion of noise paired with more cute aesthetics, it makes me think about indie-pop in its infancy—I'm thinking Sarah Records and Slumberland.
It seems to be a British preoccupation as well—the idea of taking a Brill Building pop song and then putting a wall around it so your mom and dad won't like it.

I also think a lot about St. Etienne when I listen to your music. Even some of the Creation-era My Bloody Valentine counts as indie-pop to me, a little bit. I'm curious kind of what your relationship was with indie pop as a listener.
I could pick and choose it. There's lots of it that I don't like. The Sarah Records stuff would've probably been a bit too safe for me. My Bloody Valentine's my favorite group of all time, so that was the side of it I could buy into. I'm guessing we would all share a love of the classic kind of '60s pop song and easy listening. I'm sure there'd be loads of crossovers with those lot.

As far as your inner circle, what was the reaction to Thunder Lightning Strike when you started playing it for people?
I kept it pretty close to my chest, to be honest. Me and my brother worked on it together—he was my partner in crime in the mixing stage, and we used lots of tricks to distort things and stuff like that. I didn't have any massive plans for the record. I just remember at the end of it thinking, "Fucking hell, this is pretty original. I can't think of another band like this"—and maybe I still can't, really.

When it started going mental with Pitchfork and the hipsters, I thought it was quite funny. We'd literally be followed around by VICE. I'm quite level-headed, and I know that if you're a hipster, then in a month's time you're not going to be, you know what I mean? So I shrugged it off. I was 30 at that point, so I wasn't some kid, and I knew how the hipster world worked. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say we were one of the most hyped bands in the world for a minute, certainly in the blogosphere world. I didn't take it seriously at all—I knew it was a dangerous game to play—but it was quite entertaining.

Were there any ridiculous offers from the music industry or other capitalistic entities around the time that you had to consider or turn down?
It was certainly fast-tracked—it happened too quickly, in a way. We were playing pretty high up in the bill in Coachella before we should've been, no question. The set was only half an hour long because we only had one album, so we'd leave people disappointed. We'd be like, "Thank you, good night!" and they'd be like, "You haven't got any more songs to play?"

I wish it had slowed down a bit. We probably got offers to play some Hollywood parties or something like that. I'm a bit funny about bands doing adverts, so I turned down things like that. I might've even been offered a McDonald's advert at one point. But I was pretty militant. If someone would say, "We'll come and pick you up in a limo," I'd be really arse-y about it—like, "I don't want any limos." I had my old-school indie purist thing going on.

What are some changes you've witnessed when it comes to the music industry in general over the last 20 years?
It's hard to talk about without dipping into grumpy old man territory, you know what I mean? If you ask anyone what music they're into now—certainly a millennial—they'll say, "Oh, I like a bit of everything," unquestionably. That wasn't so much the case back in the 2000s It was a lot more tribal. I always liked the idea of being into everything, and maybe the band anticipated that everything-goes mindset.

Obviously the music world is a lot vaguer now. I always think of the brown plasticine—how you start the week with all these different color plasticine, and by the end, when you finish playing with it, it's become this massive brown plasticine. That feels a bit like the music industry now. It's not as urgent or passionate—but, at the same time, you can listen to the best song ever made in 10 seconds time, so I try to program my brain to think of it like that.

Tell me more about translating the sound of Thunder Lightning Strike into a live setting at the time.
I knew the key was to have lots of instruments, so that was always going to be the name of the game—a fairly big band. For me, playing live is just about jumping around—an assault, rather than the precision of making a record. You could literally go on forever with us—you could have a strings section, a choir, dancers—so I was kind of frustrated about what we could do with the money. But I didn't want to just be another indie band. It had to be multi-genre people from different backgrounds, and lots of swapping instruments.

When Thunder Lightning Strike was re-released on a major, you had to eventually re-record it due to sample clearance issues. That was a bit of a new issue at the time, but it's far more common now. Tell me about dealing with that.
After having already put this record together, it was really fucking painful. The thing that jarred me most was that, aesthetically, I wanted people to be thinking of dusty, fucked-up records—I didn't want them to be thinking of sample recreations or anything like that. You've got to be imagining the real thing, otherwise it just doesn't make any sense.

I would've been quite willing to pay whatever it took to keep it as it was. We went down some horrible routes with so-called sample re0creation people who would do these laughable attempts that would sound like ringtones, and we'd be pissing ourselves about these attempts people made. So we'd just shelve all this stuff and I'd just pay whatever it took. Lots of the songs are relatively unchanged. With some of them, it hurt, because we knew that particular people wouldn't ever clear the samples, so we had to head that off and try to get in there before anything happened. But it came out pretty pretty much unscathed. We kept the trashiness, the Technicolor messiness. I'd literally have a musicologist on my shoulder telling me when something was safe. legal, or illegal—and you don't want to be thinking about this stuff. You can't un-hear something when you've heard it. You can't retrain your ear to do so—it's just impossible—so it's a really unnatural process.

Morally, I've got no issue with sampling at all—particularly in the way that I do it, in that it's re-contextualized, which is an art form in itself. You reappropriate this stuff and change it, reverse it, put different chords on it, fuck it up, whatever. It's always the obscure stuff that I sample, anyway.

The live lineup of the band has changed over the years, and you've brought new people into the mix across your records too. Tell me about what it takes to bring voices into the Go! Team's world.
They've always been two different things, the records and the live show. I've tried to keep the band as a core unit—we've had some lineup changes over the years—but the albums are more about traveling the world. "I'd like a French singer on this song, or an African choir on that song, a Japanese girl on that song." I love different accents, and different places.

I've always had a thing about anti-professionalism when it comes to singing. I don't like people that over-sing or go through the motions—this modern way of singing, I've always had a bit of a thing about that. So I just work backwards from the song and wrap my brains on it. A couple of albums back, I went over to Detroit and worked with a teenage choir over there, because that was what I was imagining—but on the last record, I worked with a Bollywood singer and a teenager from Dallas. It's all about what the song needs and bringing it out of the band as much as I can, while also treating it as this standalone art form.

Tell me about the evolution of your creative process. What's changed, and what's stayed the same?
The process isn't radically different. I hoard ideas—I'm a big hoarder. I sing into my phone. I've probably got, like, 2,000 ideas on there at the minute. There's a process of listening back and working them up a little bit—putting them in my pile of "maybe"s, or "yes defo'"s, or "this is a good chorus." It's a filtering process where the good rises to the top.

I think I'm more melody-orientated now than I was with Thunder Lightning Strike, and I'm probably a better songwriter. I know the party line is that the band hasn't really changed, but I always get annoyed with that. There's certain songs which I could've never written back in the day, like "A Bee Without Its Sting." I'm interested in melody, then grooviness, then how experimental and weird it is. I'm trying to satisfy all these things at the same time while making it a classic song, but a bit fucked-up as well. It's a real balancing act. I want it to have real personality and be unmistakably original. Being unmistakably "you" is a massive deal as well, and even though "Everyone's a VIP" and "Mayday" are completely different, hopefully there's some kind of Go! Team-iness that flows through all of it.

Touring for UK acts has become more complicated than ever these days. How is it for you at this point?
I love it, and I think we're better than ever. It's a little bit precarious. We toured the West Coast of America earlier in the year, and we walked away with a debt of £18,000, if you can believe that. We did take lots of family members, so it was kind of expected. But it's just about manageable, and the visas just take the piss. We don't help ourselves by having seven people in the band—with the trumpet players, it's always going to be hard, so I can't really complain. But we get by. We're one of those cult bands that kind of hopefully will always get by, but I think it is getting harder.

I still can't get any sense of how big a band we are. Some days I think we're pretty underground, and others I think we're all right, but God knows. I think we're kind of in the nostalgia circuit now, I suppose.

I mean, I think that's a decent place to be, given how everything is going. When I talk to people about making music these days, a lot of them are like, "I can't imagine what it's like for a new band to try and get any level of attention"—and when I talk to younger people, they're like, "Yeah, it sucks, I hate this."
Well, it's just how fucking sloggy it is with the endless postings on Instagram and blah blah blah. Everyone's clamoring to be heard, and everyone's doing the same thing. It'd be more radical just to not be on Instagram.