![]() ![]() Once the album was finished, Parton's label kept him on his toes by announcing that they'd fixed up a tour supporting Franz Ferdinand in Sweden. I remember the recording was pretty hectic, everything was slammed to tape with the levels in red." Most of it was played by me, but I pulled in random people to play bits and bobs. "There's lots of live drums, guitar and harmonica. It's not just samples," he stresses, keen to distance the Go! Team from acts whose music is solely built around loops. "Hopefully it all sounds spontaneous, like it was thrown together, but the reality is it was quite anal. And then when the slightly more industrious indie label Memphis Industries added him to their roster he found himself toggling between his day job as a documentary film-maker for Discovery and the National Geographic channel (Sleepwalkers Who Kill and The Secrets Of The Bog Bodies are among his credits) and recording Thunder, Lightning, Strike. Local record company Pickled Egg put out a seven-inch single. Until about two years ago he didn't know where it was going it was just something fun he'd always done. "To begin with, it was a bit soundtracky, but I dumped that." "I've always been interested in putting music that jars next to each other, like car-chase soundtracks with blaring trumpets and Jackson 5 and loud guitars," he says. The feel of the music was always really great and in my early 20s when I just had a Casio keyboard I had this idea of mixing that with breakbeats and guitars."Įventually he got himself a four-track recorder and a prehistoric Akai sampler and started playing bits of live music over the top of it all. "I loved those little bits in the middle of Sesame Street that would be about kids going to the zoo or whatever. A prodigious collector of charity-shop easy listening, US indie rock and old school hip-hop, he'd constantly tape bits off the TV - the sirens in a cop show, a strange bit of recorder on Play Away, public information films - and tool away with a double tape deck, assembling odd sound collages from it all. He spent his school years in Reading, where he pounded the drums in various "noisy guitar bands" before doing a media degree and landing amid the bohemian sprawl of Brighton in the mid-1990s. Parton's journey from nobody to Mercury-nominated somebody began 32 years ago "somewhere up north" (he's light on detail). He surveys the alien ornament that's invaded the tasteful mess of his living room: "The outer bit with the vines? That represents bullshit." ![]() "The middle bit represents music, the strings of a guitar," says its owner and Mercury nominee, Ian Parton - a boyish 32-year-old who looks like he's just stepped out a Charlie Brown cartoon and the maverick music head behind the joyously body-rocking eclectic pop blast that is the Go! Team. It looks like some perverted, ancient Japanese weapon designed to gut the lungs of enemies but a plaque on its base is engraved with the legend: "The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning, Strike - Nationwide Mercury Music Prize - Nominee - 2005". Rising from the base of this odd gong are four aluminium rods around which are tangled two pointed brass spikes. ![]() On a shelf, in a small one-bedroom flat above a supermarket in downtown Hove, a strange and frightening 10-inchhigh sculpture perches haphazardly amid the rubble of falling-down CD piles, junk mail, a Super 8 camera, button badges, flyers, doodles and house keys. ![]()
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