Following the releases of Rolling Blackouts in 2011, Ian Parton, founder and the main creative force behind The Go! Team, speculated that it may be the last album. Of course, in the heat of the moment things often get said that aren’t quite meant, and lo and behold, The Go! Team are back with a new album, The Scene Between, and it seems a new impetus, as Parton sets about organising their first lives shows for a couple of years.

It’s the fourth album for this one-of-a-kind band, an idea that germinated itself within the mind of Parton, culminating in the release of the debut album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, back in 2004, an album that was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, thrusting Ian and co. into the limelight… “Yeah, it was super lo-fi,” says Ian, who has been based in Brighton for 20 years. “It was literally recorded in my Mum and Dad’s kitchen, three mics on the drum kit, just thrown together. Quite painstaking, but quite spontaneous sounding, and deliberately really lo-fi. The ambitions weren’t grand at all. It definitely steamrollered, everything that came from it, supporting the Flaming Lips, Kevin Shields (of My Bloody Valentine) remixing it, Chuck D on a song, all these things I couldn’t have dreamed of. Travelling the world; China, Brazil, Australia, blah, blah.”

This idea of mixing up different kinds of music was something Parton had been interested in from an early age. “The idea for the Go! Team has been in the making since I was 20 really. At university I used to make loops out of easy listening records and put white noise over the top. I’ve always been interested in the idea of clashing different kinds of music.

Thunder, Lightning, Strike was the work of a fertile imagination of someone who knew how to mash things up, to make them exciting and palatable, by incorporating many of things he had experienced and witnessed as a child and a teenager, mainly via the TV and radio. Blaxploitation, Double Dutch, marching bands, Charlie Brown, early hip hop, and TV theme tunes were fused with a distorted indie garage rock backbone, and in doing so somehow managed to create something that spoke of a personal nostalgia whilst inhabiting a contemporary musical space. “I always described it as your life flashing before your eyes. It’s like your grabbing all these favourite things from your life. It could be a movie soundtrack, or a Charlie Brown cartoon soundtrack, or distortion, or My Bloody Valentine. It’s almost seeing no reason why you can’t combine all these random things. I was always frustrated by the way indie music would always stay within its world. You know, it was four blokes with guitars and I was trying to get anti-that, mix up girls and boys, and confusing the indie kids. Basically, annoy them!”

Not that he didn’t like indie music; he has expressed a love affair with Sonic Youth, and of course My Bloody Valentine remains very influential on Parton. “The first decent music I got into was the usual indie stuff, I guess; Pixies, Sonic Youth, who were my favourite group since I was 16. I don’t quite love them as much anymore, but still a fair bit… But then I got into Easy Listening (here he mimics a stereotypical easy listening trumpet line), and hip hop, like Public Enemy, and experimental music, people like Glenn Branca. And I definitely had a love of theme tunes more than your average person. As a kid my ears would prick up when the Charlie’s Angels theme tune came on. I don’t know what it is, there’s something about me that likes that stuff.

“The idea was to chuck loads of stuff on top of samples so you didn’t know what was what, and change the notes around it, so it became completely different, using distortion, distorting samples, and reversing them, and getting things from random places. So, you’d have a Northern soul sample next to a hip hop thing.”

Lest we forget, the internet was a very undeveloped tool back in the early noughties; often slow, unreliable, and certainly much much smaller, as a resource. Many samples had to be got the old-fashioned way… “I just spent stupid money on records that were rubbish, come home, put it on, there’s nothing on it… Lots of charity shop stuff. I like the idea of salvaging bad records sometimes. I like the idea of giving it a new home, re-contextualising it, and actually making something good out of it.

“Now, it’s a dream for samplers. You can go on a Bollywood blog and listen to every Bollywood song ever made, and then track it down when you’ve picked the one you want… That’s what I’ve been doing recently; I’ve been listening to more psychedelic, 60s stuff. Sometimes I’ll grab just a chord from a song, and actually build the song out of chords from loads of different places.”

With the use of so many samples did he have copyright issues? “The first album was a nightmare. I had a musicologist sitting over my shoulder, telling me what I could and couldn’t use. I had to reproduce things that were atrocious. The thing about samples is there is something x factor about them; there’s something about it, the way it was recorded or played. You can’t put your finger on what you like about it, but you realise it as soon as you try and reproduce it. Basically, I don’t even worry about that stuff anymore. I’m changing it so much it’s fair game, it’s not a blurred line situation. Although, I have actually been sued before; I had a scary letter from a solicitor demanding 100k. Yeah…” Parton winces at the memory of it. “You think I would’ve have learned, but I’ve got no interest in that stuff, the legal side of it.”

Back then, it was the quintessential ‘bedroom’ project, where more than dreams are made. But, performing this stuff live hadn’t really entered the equation. Until… “We basically agreed to headline a Swedish festival without having a band, and we had a few weeks to get it together. So, I asked around… I knew I wanted it to be a mixture of boys and girls, I knew I needed a rapper, and that’s where Ninja came in. When we first played we were pretty shonky, but by the second night I thought ‘we’re onto something here’. And as we played more and more we got more aggro, and it became more lairy; the double drum kits, running around the stage, the distorted guitar. The album is one thing, but the live show is more full on, it just takes your head off.”

Much like how Joseph Mount’s Metronomy became a long-term musical force when they finally hit the stage, without taking the music in to the live arena could have meant the disintegration of Ian Parton’s dream, The Go! Team remaining a studio-only project, unlikely to remain viable in this advancing age of decreasing physical sales, and increasing reliance on playing live to keep the music afloat. With rapper Ninja, fellow Brightonian Sam Dook, Jamie Bell, Chi Fukami Taylor, Kaori Tsuchida, and Ian himself – three parts male to three parts female – the band quickly became a formidable live outfit, easily translating the energy of the recordings into something even more powerful, and fun, on stage. “When Ninja comes off stage it’s like she has run a marathon, she can’t speak for half an hour,” Ian has said about his mainstay, who once again contributes to the new album. And their internationalist sound on record, is replicated by the internationalist look of the band on stage, helping them to win fans from around the globe.