In 2000, Ian Parton was a documentary film director in Brighton, England, who started putting together musical tracks for his films the way he handled visuals, a collage style that created surprising results. Eventually his interest in the musical creations overtook the movies and he released the tracks, cobbled together from old hip hop tracks, cheerleader chants, instrumental fanfare from myriad old records and a big drum sound.
The resulting 2004 Thunder, Lightning, Strike, credited to The Go! Team, became an unlikely hit when DJs like John Peel began playing it. But when requests came to tour, Parton had to quickly assemble an actual band that could play it live. Twenty years and six albums later, The Go! Team is back on tour with the 20th anniversary celebration of that debut. And while the number of band members has fluctuated over the years, it was down to six members (and steady reliance on backing tapes) to replicate it when they played the final US stop at the Black Cat.
Nkechi Ka Egenamba, who calls herself Ninja, has been the group’s frontwoman almost since the beginning (but after the recording of Thunder, Lightning, Strike) and served as ringmaster and lead chanter—there isn’t a lot of singing involved. In the delightfully diverse aggregation, half women and half men, Jaleesa Gemerts played the big main drum kit, an important sound augmented by a second drumset occupied by anyone not playing anything else at the moment.
The newest female member was Kate Walker, who seemed delighted to be there (“I’m a fan myself!”) and played a suspicious trumpet that seemed to double its sound on some tracks, and could be played with any apparent fingering on others. She also sang the tremulous vocal on the ditty “Hold Yr Terror Close,” handled on the record by an uncredited Robin Pridy.
Of the rest of the Team, founder Parton plays guitar mostly, and very expressive harmonica, as Sam Cook handles other guitars, drums, and the banjo that kicks off the album’s closing “Everyone’s a V.I.P. to Someone,” the marvelous mash-up of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” with Laura Nyro’s “Stoned Soul Picnic.” Adam Znaidi handles bass, but other instruments as well. They switch instruments between songs like a lot of D.I.Y. bands do, though this sometimes slows the momentum as they pause.
In one of these breaks, as Ninja addressed the fans, Parton and Znaidi played Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” on a tiny piano. The upbeat anthems were familiar to many through a lot of lucky things in the intervening years—“The Power is On” from an NFL ad, for one; “Get It Together” in the video game LittleBIGPlanet.
The adoring crowd was happy to dance and bop along all night to the infectious sounds, singing or clapping along as needed. And when Ninja divided the crowd for the alternating chants on “Huddle Formation,” they literally parted like the Red Sea. Amused by this unexpected lane opening, Ninja climbed down and traversed it. Perhaps it emboldened her later to celebrate the tour’s end by doing some crowd surfing, albeit one that was preceded by a warning and some coaching.
More than anything else about a night celebrating an album that sounded as fresh and vibrant as it did 20 years back, the surfing effort seemed irrevocably tied to the past. Still, the older crowd didn’t let her fall as she floated by.
Once the 13 tracks of Thunder, Lightning, Strike were triumphantly complete, the encore offered half as many songs from subsequent albums, from their newest “Whammy-O” from last year’s Get Up Sequences, Part Two to a couple from 2007’s Proof of Youth. In many ways, these songs were better than the showcase album because they were devised with a band in mind, and not a studio exercise. One of them, “Mayday,” had its own hand gestures, like a 21st century “Y.M.C.A.”
The Go! Team had a great match in their opening band—a sharp outfit from Montréal called La Sécuritié. With simple, spiky guitar-led songs with punk dance energy, they represented the latest in the tradition of E.S.G., The B 52’s, Franz Ferdinand, or Wet Leg, with lead singer Eliane Viens-Synnott—like Ninja in athletic shorts meant to accommodate movement—deadpanning lyrics on songs mostly in English but with a couple in French. She also occasionally played simile synth, alongside the slashing rifts of Melissa Di MeMenna and terrific drumming by Kenny Smith.
They celebrated the end of their first US tour by doing shots mid-way through the set. It’s certainly a group to keep an eye on next time they’re around.
