The Go! Team

The Go! Team
The Go! Team playing in , 2004
Background information
Origin	Brighton, East Sussex, England
Genres	Indie rock, indie pop, alternative hip hop, alternative dance, instrumental, plunderphonics
Years active	2000–present
Labels	current: Memphis Industries, Beatball, Shock, Tearbridge/Avex previous: Columbia Records, Pickled Egg Records, , Cooperative, Sub Pop, Secret City
Website	thegoteam.co.uk
Members	Ian Parton Ninja Sam Dook Angela "Maki" Won-Yin Mak Cheryl Pinero Simone Odaranile
Past members	Jamie Bell Silke Steidinger Chi Fukami Taylor Kaori Tsuchida

The Go! Team are a six-piece band from Brighton, England. They combine indie rock and garage rock with a mixture of blaxploitation and Bollywood soundtracks, double Dutch chants, old school hip hop and distorted guitars. Their songs are a mix of live instrumentation and samples from various sources. The band's vocals vary between performances: while live vocals are handled mostly by Ninja (with Angela Won-Yin Mak also singing some solos), vocals on record also feature sampled and guest voices.

Ian Parton conceived the project after wanting to create music incorporating Sonic Youth-style guitars, double Dutch chants, Bollywood soundtracks, old school hip hop and electro. These ideas led towards the recording of Thunder, Lightning, Strike in his parents' kitchen.

The Go! Team's first full-length album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, was released in the UK and Europe on the Memphis Industries label in September 2004, to widespread critical acclaim. The album was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2005.

The album was recorded at Parton's parents' house and co-produced and mixed by Ian's brother Gareth Parton at The Fortress Studios, London.

In June 2004, Ian Parton recruited a band to play the Accelerator Festival in Sweden after having been asked to play when no band existed. The live band is a "separate entity" to the original studio vision, as the performances became radically different from the recordings, particularly due to vocalist Ninja's freestyled vocals over what had been instrumental studio tracks.

The band's popularity increased with the re-issue of "Ladyflash" in the UK, resulting in national primetime airplay on radio stations such as BBC Radio 1, Xfm and the Atlanta, US based 99X. They achieved further popularity when their song "Get It Together" from Thunder, Lightning, Strike was featured in trailers for the video game LittleBigPlanet, with the song eventually becoming identified with the game.