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The Go! Team

ABC, Glasgow
4 stars
There’s a school disco feel to The Go! Team’s headlining show on the back of their just released second album, Proof Of Youth. The ABC’s muddy gym hall acoustic is part of it, as is its 14s and over clientele who irrepressible front-woman Ninja, sporting vest, shorts and knee bandage, welcomes as “Young mature adults.” Mainly, though, it’s the sheer exuberance of the hyper-active Brighton sextet dreamt up in guitarist Ian Parton’s mum’s kitchen, and only made flesh after he’d already recorded the cut and paste masterpiece, Thunder, Lightning, Strike.

Three years on, and The Go! Team are a force of nature, whose mixing and matching of kindergarten hip-hop, sampled horn wig-outs and Sesame Street grooving by numbers taps into a low-attention-span nostalgia for an unspecified pan-generational past somewhere between 1971 and 1981. Illustrated by a splice and dice video back-drop, such legitimised infantilism may sound like some Stuart Maconie spacehopper fantasy. In actual fact, its amps-to-the-max infectiousness is an unadulterated joy.

The rafter-bending bounce-along on Bottle Rocket is as unforced as the banjo that’s brought out for Everyone’s A V.I.P. To Someone, while Parton’s harmonica wails out all his fantasy-wish-fulfilments come true. At times as punk as Iggy Pop, like The Harlem Globetrotters, the basketball legends who make an onscreen appearance during a triumphal Doing It Right, The Go! Team put on such an entertaining show you forget what great players they are.

With their three boy/three-girl split, The Go! Team are the breathless epitome of multi-cultural Britain now, a confident, sassy melting pot of absorbed hand-me-down influences perfectly in tune with where they’re coming from. More importantly, The Go! Team know exactly where they’re at. What a way for term to start.

The Herald, Septermber 17th 2007

ends

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