Ninja and Ian from Brighton’s finest dance mash- up band The Go! Team take some time out at The Electric Picnic to speak to Analogue about their new album, getting old and George Michael.

So Ninja and Ian, what do you think of the Electric Picnic?
Ian: There’s so much detail in it. Like that Body and Soul bit- it’s really cool.

Great. So if we may go way back to the start, to before The Go! Team. Ian, you were making documentaries. What kind of stuff did you do?
Ian: Oh, lots of stuff for American t.v. about mummies and dead bodies and space travel and sleep walking and stuff like that. Nothing great or major.

So did you kind of go to yourself at some point in time “Enough! I want to do something different. I know! I’ll start a band!”?
Ian: Well kinda. Not really. We all had jobs quite well into The Go! Team. Ninja was in university. Everyone else had jobs and we would go off at weekends to do some gigs and come back on Mondays. It got to a certain stage, it got to a point where we were taking the piss too much and had to leave our jobs. So we made our leave.

Were you friends beforehand? Or was it a situation where you started making music and then it developed from there and asked people to come together and make a band?
Ian: Yeah
Ninja: No!
Ian: Oh, I was writing and wrote the music and asked people did they want to be part of it (the band).

So how did you go about putting the band together? Was it like the age-old method of placing a message in a magazine?
Ian: Most of it was that way. Ninja was from a message board off the internet.
Ninja: The message didn’t say or ask if I wanted to be in a band. The message said “Female rapper needed” and it was for this gig in Sweden.
Ian: Oh so that’s how it started, for that gig in Sweden? When we first started it was about getting through our first gig. It was a way to get through this first show. That went ok and we thought “Let’s do another one and another one”. We never even spoke about the future. It was just one week at a time.

I remember an article from the Guardian from over a year ago where you kind of said or at least implied that you were only going to do one album.
Ian: No no. It was more like I didn’t want to be an old man, still making music.
Ninja: You are an old man!
Ian: Ha ha. Yeah.
Ninja: Well it depends on how old old is.
Oh so it’s more like a mental thing?
Ninja: Well what I mean is there’s Iggy old and then there’s Wayne, Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips old. There’s two kinds of old.
Ian: Some people are suited to getting old but I don’t think that being in a band called The Go! Team and in your 40’s or later is suited…
Ninja: But then you can have an album saying “I Told You There’s Proof in Youth!”
Ian: Ha. Yeah. Well we could get plastic surgery.

On that note, your stage presence is very eclectic-it looks like a great workout! Could you see yourself in 30 or 40 years time and then going “Damn! I need a new hip!”?
Ninja: I think I should release an exercise DVD. I’d say there’s good money in that!

So, going back to the music. Your first album Thunder Lightning Strike is full of samples. Did you have problems finding and getting them and getting the rights for them? In fact, where the hell did you find some of them?
Ian: All over the shop really. I’m always on the hunt. My ears prick up when I hear something and when I’m in a club or something…..Like that bit in Battle Rocket, you know “2-4-6-8-10”? I heard that in a club in Brighton one time and I just went up to the Dj and asked him what it was. Some things came from documentaries when I was working on them…a whole bunch of stuff really from all over the place.

Was it hard getting the rights for some of the samples?
Ian: When it was first released it was 100% illegal. It was just out there and when the record companies picked it up and were involved we had to go back and change a few things but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been- but there were some real heartbreakers.

Did you have to leave some stuff and songs on the wayside as you just couldn’t get permission to use them?
Ian: Nah. They all wound up alright. All the original songs wound up but they were slightly different in the end.

Was the process of getting samples easier with the second album?
Ian: Well we had a bit more knowledge on how it works so yeah.

Going back to your stage presence and your future gig here at the Picnic. You all always change positions and instruments. How did that come about? Why the constant changing of roles?
Ninja: There are a lot of instruments and a lot of sound and not enough people so it has to be done really. If we had one person playing what needs to be played we would need like 30 people on stage and it’s bad enough with two drum kits and six people onstage. So it’s kind of necessary really.

Do you ever get sick of it and all the hassle of getting the kits ready and moving around all the time?
Ninja: Nah. But it makes things more exciting on stage as we like the idea that you can watch a song that we do and then you want to watch to see the next one as you don’t know what we are going to do. So it makes you wanna stay.
Ian: There are so many bands around that you go to a gig of theirs and you pretty know what to expect. I even like the idea of swopping instruments in mid song, like, drop your guitar and run to the drum kit.

That must be great for jamming. Do you do a lot of jamming?
Ian: Well…you can’t really jam with samples. I mean, you could jam. Everyone in the band could jam but I’m not a good jammer. We don’t really for that reason but you never know. Good ideas could come out of it in the future.

Two years ago you were nominated for a Mercury Music Award. How did you find out and how did you feel?
Ninja: We were in America at the time and we got a call saying, “You might be nominated for a Mercury”
Ian: It was the day before and we got a text about it.

Were you chuffed? Was it like a milestone in being part of the band?
Ian: I was chuffed, yeah. I mean it was kind of like “if nothing else happens at least I have the award and show it to my grandmother”. In fact, she has it!

And another milestone-you got Kevin Shields of My Bloody valentine to remix one of your songs. How did that come about?
Ian: Em, it just came about. I think he’s a fan really and we have the same booking agent and he came to one of our shows and I met him afterwards and he was bigging us up. I think it was the production that he liked about us. He said he had an idea about making a Jackson 5 kind of band with more of a garage sound but that we had beaten him to it so we kinda went from there to remixing our song.

I was just thinking about side projects some of you guys have been doing. For example, Ninja, you did the song “It’s The Beat” with Simian Mobile Disco. How did you get involved in doing that song?
Ninja: I honestly don’t know. I just kinda ended up in the studio with them and I had never heard of them at that point. I just spent a few hours putting down lyrics and it was just cheeky and cheerful and we had a lot of fun doing that and they didn’t know what they were going to make of it. I didn’t know what they were going to make of it and it was literally a couple of weeks later they sent me an email with two songs for me. One was called “Hot Dog” and the other was “It’s the Beat” and it had really bad dirty basic rap lyrics. “Hot Dog” was made from a song I did in school and it was really fun and they were really fun guys and great fun to work with. They had a room full of gadgets and all!

Could you see yourself doing your own stuff in the future? Recording a solo album possibly?
Ninja: I was writing my own stuff before I was in the band and obviously that’s not going to stop, so maybe sometime in the future, yeah.

Has The Go! Team given you a fresh impetus to do that? A spur perhaps?
Ninja: Not so much a spur but touring has made me listen to stuff that I wouldn’t normally listen to. Just looking for sounds like. Just watching bands I wouldn’t normally watch, and that has been a real influence on me. I think it’s difficult as a normal person watching tv and reading magazines…you’re exposed to only a bit, so being in The Go! Team has exposed me to more.

Have you discovered new bands while touring?
Ninja: Not really. It’s a case of “I like that” and “I definitely don’t like that”. It’s easier for me to pick out the negative points than it is the positive because a lot of people aren’t really doing anything original and the people who are are not really known or are on very early at a festival like this. You have to go out of your way. You have to be told about someone or someone has to give you something specifically. That’s the way it is for me anyway. I won’t go out of my way to find someone. People have to give me pointers otherwise it’s way too hard to look.

There are so many different mediums nowadays that it is almost like a haze out there. You have to search and grope around almost.
Ian: People are drowning in information, aren’t they? Theres waaay too much choice.

So finally, talking about influences and music out there, do you have any musical guilty pleasures?
Ninja: I probably have got loads. Like, I really like George Michael and Ian doesn’t like me saying that in interviews! But it’s out there now and there’s nothing you can do about it Ian!

Conor O'Neill is a winetaster and former Buenos Airen, studying History and Politics in Trinity.
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