It seemed like everyone adores sample-happy Brighton brigade The Go! Team-even though their effervescent Thunder, Lightning, Strike album was only available as a (pricey) import on this side of the pond for over a year. And what’s not to like? Judging by their sweat-drenched (both the band and the crowd) gig at the beyond-packed Lee’s Palace last July, enough folks had loaded the Team’s cheerleader indie-pop tunes into their iPods to fuel a full-on dance party.

The band has since gone on to sign with the Sony/BMG juggernaut (who recorded the Lee’s show for a future live DVD), which finally put out the record here this month. The Varsity caught up with Go!Team frontman Ian Parton earlier this summer while he was in London remixing the album for its North American release.

Tabassum Siddiqui: So even though The Go! Team is this madcap collective, the record is actually your brainchild, isn’t it?

Ian Parton: I wrote all the songs, but I got people to chip in here and there, so it wasn’t exactly a solitary project or anything like that. Some of those have gone on to be in the live thing, but others are new to the band.

I really wanted to bring together people who wouldn’t normally be in bands together-like me and Sam the guitarist are from an experimental, noisy guitar background, and then you’ve got Ninja, who’s from a hip-hop background, North London sort of girl, and then you’ve got Chi the drummer who’s from Japan, and Silke who’s from Germany… And we’ve all got sort of different musical tastes and such. I didn’t really consciously set out to do that, but it’s turned out quite nicely, and we all kind of bring different stuff to the music.

TS: So how did you find all these different musicians, then?

IP: Kind of just luck, really. Asking around, asking in the market if anyone knew of any great drummers and found Chi, and the two lads in the group live in Brighton where I live, and Sam used to be on this label called Pickled Egg which I was on in about 2000…

Ninja was the hard one to find-I checked out ladies’ nights where people go up on the mic and stuff, but I didn’t really find the right people from that, because it was all R&B and the kind of stuff I wanted to get away from. Ninja just kind of found out about the music through the Internet, and I sent her a CD and she dug it-one of the few female rappers who kind of got it and wanted to do something different.

I think we’re kind of unusual-it’s kind of almost a social experiment, in how different we are as people. Most bands are kind of born out of a group of lads who’ve been mates in school, maybe, and want to sound like someone, so they form a band. Most of the bands in Britain at the moment kind of sound the same and look the same, and swagger around in a ‘how they think a band should act’-type way. You know, dress in a certain way, have your hair a certain way… I wanted to try to get away from that kind of stuff, really.

TS: Thunder, Lightning, Strike is an intricate web of spliced-together samples-what was your process in putting the record together?

IP: It’s a combination of traditional songwriting and welding together my ideas with samples from hundreds of tapes I’ve collected over the years, and layering the samples with different chords over them to make them new. I wasn’t content with just having one sample and looping it, so I kind of crammed together as many ideas without hopefully getting too confusing.

So it’s a combination of live and found sounds, and blurring it so you couldn’t really tell the difference. It’s sort of a punk production style meets dance music technology, I suppose. But I tried to get away from the digital sound by fucking it up a bit so it’s not too clean and coffeetable-esque.

I wasn’t really trying to make it sound old or anything-I think things sound more exciting when you can hear the cracks, and the drums are kind of breaking up and the brass is kind of breaking up… just so it’s not too safe, and there’s a bit of an edge to it-that’s what the Go! Team sound is all about, really.

TS: It seems what listeners are really connecting with is the palpable energy and infectiousness of the music.

IP: I wanted it to be action-packed, but I didn’t want it to be super-happy-I could have gone a lot happier, but I do want to try and get away from the sort of kiddie associations that the music tends to be associated with. People sort of think of cartoons or Saturday-morning TV and stuff like that-which is fine, but I wanted it to be action-packed and not sort of just ‘happy.’ I don’t want to make out like it’s vacuous music or anything, because I think some people associate anything upbeat and joyous with being vacuous and disposable, and I don’t think that should be the case, really. I don’t think pouring your heart out and doing power ballads and being all earnest necessarily makes it good music, y’know? (laughs)

TS: It’s taking the record some time to finally be released in North America thanks to sampling issues (Ed: It finally arrived in stores this month. See sidebar review). I hear that even though you had half a dozen major record labels courting the band in the U.S., many were concerned about dealing with sample clearance.

IP: I think it’s probably easier to get away with in England. I think a lot of the people I’ve sampled actually live in America, or there’s more likelihood of it getting picked up. There’s also this suing culture over there, where people are suing each other every second, y’know? Basically, you can’t release a record in America with dodgy samples on it; so people won’t do it, they’re so paranoid.

TS: Even though the record isn’t even available domestically yet, The Go! Team still has this rabid following in North America-how do you think that’s come about?

IP: The record isn’t out over there, it’s all import, so I just keep thinking, ‘How the fuck do people know about this?’ and I really don’t know… I think it’s Pitchfork, blogging, word of mouth… I think in Toronto there seems to be a lot of word of mouth-once a certain amount of people have heard it, they kind of play it to each other and tip each other off, and I think that’s been happening in Toronto and the big cities, with pockets of music fans getting it. We’re lucky as to how it’s happened.

The Go! Team plays the Phoenix this Sunday (Oct. 30).
Sold out.