Ian Parton, mastermind behind the uber-eclectic Go! Team, began with a relatively monochromatic musical palette—“I grew up with noisy guitar bands like My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Fugazi,” Parton said when asked about his musical roots in Brighton, England—but somewhere along the line he became bored of “blokes with guitars striking poses.” And although Parton still enjoys the music he was weaned on, he feels that “you can be cool in other ways.” By combining the spice of noise rock with cool pop hooks, he has done just that.

             The Go! Team’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike is genuinely inventive. Combining lo-fi guitar fuzz, 80s hip-hop scratches, DJ-Shadow-ish drum meltdowns, Morricone harmonica leads, 70s cop show funk horns, and smooth Guaraldi piano vamps, Thunder delivers with both saccharine and enough flair to make John Darnielle’s 4-track player blush (or even to make the original Go Team leader, Calvin Johnson, take notice). And with good hooks veering through the hissing and buzzing, Thunder’s taste becomes more than palatable.

             “I’m interested in what makes things catchy—if they’re not good songs and there is no melody to grab onto, it just becomes a gimmick,” Parton said. "I'm not interested at all in going down the usual pop route ... the noisiness was a way of making it sound more exciting for me, and a way of putting a barrier up against all that other pop bollocks on the radio."

             Parton began creating the first Go! Team tapes by himself in his basement years ago. He knew the final result would be a combination of his different musical loves, but he didn’t foresee how it would all turn out. “I always had this vague idea of mixing all my favorite kinds of stuff together—I went through a phase of doing stuff like spaghetti westerns, but I got bored of that.”  Eventually he would settle on his signature style. “‘Get it Together’ was the first song that sounded like the Go! Team, and I liked the schizo lo-fi sounds where electro, the Jackson Five, and maybe a kind of country hoe-down met. I wanted to do more stuff along these lines.”

             John Peel eventually heard some of these early Go! tapes, and began to play them on his radio program. As the Go! Team’s popularity began to grow, the “band,” which was still just Parton, began to get invitations to play large music festivals. It was time for the Team to move out of the basement and expand its membership— Friends were called. Friends of friends were signed up. One member even answered an ad in the paper. Eventually the entire lineup would come together.

             Although Parton is still the principle sample-collector and songwriter, the rest of the band is essentially a live component, and in concert songs take on different forms. “Ninja does vocals on some songs which are instrumental, or sampled on the album,” Parton explained, “but the structure of the songs is the same, and we still use samples live. If anything, we are noisier and more guitar-heavy live. It’s all about swapping instruments.”

             Live performances aren’t the only reason, however, that you’ll hear songs from Thunder, Lightning, Strike evolving from Parton’s original design. Unless you manage to obtain the first British pressing, you are going to hear the re-mixed version of the album. Many of the original samples were not cleared under either U.S. or European copyright laws, and so the album had to be re-recorded.

             When asked which version he preferred, Parton said, “There are a couple of songs that aren’t as good on the new version, but a few have been improved by the re-mix—obviously still as lo-fi, but more bottom end. I think the original is still the real deal.”

             While listening to the Go! Team it can be easy to forget just how raw the sound is. Especially the hummable “We Just Won’t Be Defeated,” or the equally catchy “Huddle Formation.” And when fast food giant McDonald’s approached Parton to write a jingle for them, they must have been blinded by the hooks as well.

             When asked if he felt like some people were focusing only on the poppier aspects of the Go! Team, and missing the big picture, Parton responded, “Yeah. It’s a careful line to tread and so many bands these days are prepared to get big by any means necessary. [They] won’t think twice about putting their name to anything. I’m frightened of the mainstream. There is pressure everyday to do things you’re not that happy with, like going on dodgy TV programs. I think if you keep fucking around, and don’t be too careerist about it all, you’ll be okay.”

             One other potential pitfall for the band is getting pigeonholed in what they do. While Go! Team songs are all quite different from most anything else out there, they are still very similar to each other. Parton seems to recognize this fact, though, and he promises they’ll have some new surprises the next time around.

             “I think a more violent sound is in order,” he mused. “People think we’re cutesy, which I never really intended, so I want to go a bit more aggro—a kind of mix between Sonic Youth and Public Enemy.”