The Go Team is a six-member band from Brighton, England with a sound that is uniquely created through a mixture of samples and live instrumentation. Their style is so eclectic that even the most steadfast of music publications have had difficulty attempting to explain their sound, let alone ‘genre-ize’ them. Stabs at describing The Go Team’s groundbreaking music have included phrases such as: Sonic Youth-style guitars, garage rock, double Dutch chants, old school hip-hop beats, police show themes, Bollywood soundtracks, and schoolyard pop.

The band’s vocalist, Ninja, gave me a ring from her UK hotel room to discuss the current release “Rolling Blackouts,” as well as important topics like why pregnant Barbie dolls entertain her and how traveling to Russia with an afro can be quite a complicated feat:

I was just checking out your blog, The Little Brown Ninja and I saw a picture of a hamster munching on a cracker, a pregnant Barbie, and a Nutella covered turd. I was just curious what theme you’re going for there?

That’s actually deep friend Nutella. It’s disgusting! I’ve got a blog just to keep me sane while I’m on tour because touring can just turn your brain to mush because you sleep till the afternoon and then you go and find some food, you do soundcheck, and then you do the show and go to bed really late and your entire body clock just shifts a few hours. So it’s just something to keep me sane and it’s just some cool and random stuff that I find on the Internet.

“Rolling Blackouts” was just released in Australia. Tell me a little bit about the project and the guest singers that you had on board.

We had Bethany from Best Coast and we had Satomi from Deerhoof. Those are the people that you would know. There were some people on there that you wouldn’t know. We had an African gospel choir on there. We had Dominique, who is a young MC from Florida. We had Lispector, who is a French singer. It’s still the same influences as the first and second album but almost composed in a slighting different way. There’s a bit more balance to this album, a bit more contrast to the songs. You’ve got the kind of Brooklyn style hip-hop and the chant in and the cheerleader influences and you’ve got something a little bit more laid back, easy going a little breezier. There’s still lots of horns. There’s still lots of guitars and noise and it’s still very different to anything else that’s out there.

Are you guys releasing it in the US as well?
We are. I don’t know when. [Laughs].

The Go Team has toured to some pretty remote countries that aren’t often visited by a lot of bands. What are some of the more obscure places you’ve played?

We’ve played in China, which is amazing because they literally have no exposure whatsoever to Western music. We’ve grown up with your Elvis’s, your Michael Jacksons, your Beatles. People in China have never heard of these people and there have only been a handful of bands that get to play over there and we were lucky enough to be one of them. We went to Russia. That was pretty scary for me because I’ve heard loads of horror stories about bands playing over there because there’s a lot of corruption and police stopping you and taking stuff and you having to pay to get it back even though you haven’t done anything. I had my afro – a huge afro, and everywhere I went people kept touching my head. We played in Korea. That was amazing – obviously the safe part of Korea, not the other one. We played in Brazil. We went to Tasmania as well and New Zealand and Iceland as well. We’ve been lucky enough to go to places that we probably wouldn’t have ever gone to on holiday. That’s the thing that I love because I would have never gone to Russia. I would have been really scared.

You guys have a really unique sound. What genre would you classify your music as?

I wouldn’t put it in any genre actually. I think people would have problems with that. We’re called an indie band because it’s just the easiest thing to do because there’s live drums and there’s guitars so people go, ‘Oh it’s an indie band, it’s a rock band.’ We definitely know how to rock out but it’s definitely not indie music. In fact, the UK Magazine, NME, I think they hate us actually. They wanted to box us in and they can’t because we’ve got three girls and three boys and we’re not slutty girls and they’re not dirty boys and they’re not greasy boys and we don’t kind of fit into everything that they want an indie band to be. I really think that they hate us, which is quite funny. We’re the rebels at school wearing our uniforms kind of inside out or back in front is that it feels like.

We get asked that all the time and I really really can’t tell because there’s rapping, there’s singing, I love to dance… I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t get to dance. The boys love to rock out. There’s tons of guitars. There’s lots of feedback. There’s everything going on so it’s really really difficult to put it into a genre and especially when we come to America, that’s the worst thing because we go through customs and they always say, ‘So uh what are you doing here?” and we say, “Oh we’re in a band.’ ‘What kind of band?’ We say, ‘Oh it’s a bit like this there’s singing and guitars’ – this is what I used to say and we’d get this side eyed look. Now I have to say it’s a rock band and they just let us through.

It is true that you guys were formed out of Ian’s love for Sonic Youth-style guitar playing? Are you big Sonic Youth fans? Were they a big influence on your sound?

Ian is a massive fan of Sonic Youth. We’ve done a massive tour with them and I still don’t really know who they are to be honest with you. They’re quite an underground band and I think that’s something that he really loves about them is they never really sold out and they’ve kind of kept a really good fanbase without ever going mainstream. He’s a massive fan so yeah they were a really big influence on The Go Team’s sound- not on me personally because I don’t really know what they are. They’re not my kind of genre but that’s something else that makes us a really unique band is that there are six of us all into really different types of music and if you were to raid our music collections you’d wonder how we all get on in the tour bus. We’d just be wrestling, fighting, over who is going to play what. We’re all into really different stuff. We did get to tour with them and get to meet them – that’s when we toured with The Flaming Lips and I think he was too shy to ask for a photo. He didn’t say anything but I asked if he could get a photo with him. I’m sure he didn’t want to be a proper fan boy, ‘Can I have a photo please?’ so that is why I asked.

You guys are going to Australia in April/May for a festival called The Groovin’ The Moo Festival. What’s that all about? I’ve never heard of it. It sounds fun.

I don’t know too much about it but we have played Australia festivals before and they basically tour the entire country so all of the bands fly from city to city to city along the coast of Australia so you get to tour the whole country but it’s a traveling festival. I’m really excited to do one of those again because it means that everybody gets to see you and it’s such a huge country. I almost feel bad when someone has to travel so far just to see us play in one show when you’ve come from the other side of the world so it’s really great that they actually take the festival around the country.

Your songs are a mix of live instrumentation and samples from various sources. Is it hard to recreate all that live?

It is quite hard but luckily for this album, we actually had a live brass band – there were some teenagers from Brighton where half the band was from, that Ian was actually conducting and got to score music for them and everything. That was actually very exciting for us to have the live brass and not to have to worry about sampled horns there and we’ve got loads of stuff on stage. Along with our two drum kits and guitars, we’ve now got a typewriter, we’ve got a steel drum, we’ve got the keyboard, and we’ve got very different pieces on a song. There’s one song with four people on it, including Ian, which I’d like to point out because I think it’s really funny so yeah we do as much as we can – lot of chopping and changing, swapping of instruments in between songs sometimes, in the middle of a song swapping instruments. We do our best to bring it to life but we don’t just play a carbon copy of the album.

For more information on The Go Team, visit: http://www.thegoteam.co.uk/

Words and interview by Nicole Pajer