All Systems Are Go!

"And I am Ninja!" proclaims Nkechi Ka with a high kick and a karate chop, "and we are the Go! Team!" Her energy and the dizzying, euphoric music of the six-piece band galvanizes the capacity crowd at the Astoria. The central London venue regularly welcomes world-class performers, but few appear to inspire such kinetic joy in their audiences. The lights refract off toothy grins and illuminate a sea of enthusiasts bouncing up and down as the band crank back up to the strains of Ladyflash, the Go! Team's set closer.

Earnest and angular rock may be all the rage, but the Go! Team's angst-free confections make you dance and wave your arms. Last year, though, the Go! Team could have played in one of London's narrow red phone booths and still had room to spare. Literally. Ian Parton — who performs like a one-man band on the Astoria's stage, playing guitar, keyboard, recorder, drums, melodica, harmonica and various percussion instruments — used to do everything solo. The former documentary filmmaker wrote, recorded, mixed samples and produced the band's Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike. "I would just monkey around after work," explains 32-year-old Parton, nursing a pint of lager outside his local pub in the English seaside resort of Brighton. "It was made in my folks' kitchen and the basement with my grandma coming in interrupting my takes with cups of tea and stuff."

The result of his labors weaves together the comfortable sounds of 1970s and '80s kids' TV shows — ambling Charlie Brown-style piano and cop-show car-chase music — with more conventional pop influences. Guitars owe a debt to U.S. alternative legends Sonic Youth, the strings to Bollywood, and rhythms recall Motown and break beats. "I've always quite liked that [retro kids' TV] feel, but I'd always want to make it more dirty in some way," says Parton. "If you are going to have recorders, make them distorted." It's a potentially disastrous mix, but one that somehow ends up triumphant every time.

Parton assembled his team after small independent label Memphis Industries picked up the album in September of last year for release. He was offered a date at a Swedish festival called Accelerator (he's still wearing the T shirt) and was spurred to action. "It was always a plan to be live; it was never meant to be a solo project," says Parton. "I pulled in all the people I'd spoken to about it vaguely over the years." Guitarist Sam Dook and bassist Jamie Bell both lived nearby in Brighton, Japanese drummer Chi Fukami "was a friend of someone in my work." Then came German drummer Silke Steidinger (since replaced by Kaori from Japan) and Londoner (Ninja) Ka, who sings, raps and leads the cheerleader chants. The members are multi-instrumentalists who seamlessly swap tools throughout the show.

The band was tasked with bringing to life an eclectic mix of instruments and samples buried in the album tracks, including snippets Parton had taken from charity shop cassettes and old documentaries and borrowed string parts "because I didn't have access to an orchestra." The production is deliberately dirty. "Hopefully, it sounds spontaneous, as if it's just been knocked together," says Parton, "but in reality, it was painstaking, over months."

Missed by much of the mainstream press on release, a few small reviews — and electrifying festival sets rapturously described by bloggers — sent music fans in search of downloads and won more press coverage, culminating in sales of 100,000 worldwide so far. "We haven't had to do it by throwing money at it," says Parton. "People in the business just assume that there was some hot-shot crack p.r. team spreading the word."

The U.S. too succumbed to the Go! Team's charms with glowing reviews and sold-out shows on their first ever U.S. tour in March — despite the album not yet being released there. Copyright for most of the samples on the album had not been cleared for use. "If we wanted to actually release it in America," says Parton, "then we really had to have somebody that could clear it for us." So despite Parton's "healthy suspicion" of major labels, Memphis struck a deal with Sony BMG, and this month, Thunder, Lightning, Strike was reissued with extra tracks in Europe and released, via Columbia, in the U.S.

So has life changed for Parton and his bandmates? Well, they've given up their day jobs to concentrate on teamwork. "We were all running out of days off," says Bell, the laconic bassist, a former draftsman for an engineering firm. "We were turning down shows and just doing ones at weekends." Now they are touring North America again before traversing Europe. But don't expect big-budget perfection. "I want to keep that shambolic edge to things," says Parton. Do expect to grin and dance along with the hyperactive Ninja.

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