The Go! Team @ The Roxy

Jueves 26/06, 19hs.

The Go! Team, Proof of Youth

5 stars

Garry Mulholland finds that the spirited Brighton sextet evoke everything that's pleasurable from your childhood

Garry Mulholland
Sunday August 12, 2007

Observer Music Monthly

The Go! Team are smart cookies. This second album from the Brighton sextet wasn't a record I was especially gagging to hear, what with their 2004 debut, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, striking me basically as 11 trebley intros in search of a song ... or, as it turned out, any commercial that needed a soundtrack. But leader/producer Ian Parton is that key mixture of obsessive junk shop record collector and talented thirtysomething with A Good Idea, and, for the third track on the significantly titled Proof of Youth, the bugger found an old tune that got me.

Entitled 'My World', it's a cover of the theme to the Seventies ITV schools programme of the same name. That tells you plenty about the Go! Team, but what it doesn't is that the original tune is actually called 'The Free Life', and was previously used as another theme tune for an early Seventies ITV comedy-drama called Moody and Pegg. The Go! Team's note-for-note version of this cute instrumental sent me on a long trip down memory lane; one of those where all the shite things about your childhood are buried under an avalanche of warm, glowy feelings about how simple things were when you watched cuddly-wuddly telly with your mum and a packet of Spangles. And therein lies the sinister magic of the Go! Team.

It's very Brighton, too, this band's friendly, fizzy, cool-kitsch chaos of children's choirs, female rapping, horny Seventies movie themes, very early hip hop, Eighties Sonic Youth/My Bloody Valentine art-noise, skipping songs and funky break beats played by two drummers. It sometimes feels like everyone in Brighton is a student till they die, and Proof of Youth is exactly what they're striving for.

If you were one of the 250,000 buyers of the Mercury-nominated Thunder, Lightning, Strike then Proof of Youth is exactly the same but better, because 'Grip Like a Vice', 'Doing it Right', 'Keys to the City' and 'Fake ID' are almost like songs, yet it all still sounds like it's coming out of an old-school transistor radio, no matter how high you turn the bass up on your grown-up hi-fi stereo.

If you don't possess Thunder, Lightning, Strike then how much you'll like this will almost certainly depend on how much you like, for example, hair grips, Graham Coxon, Manga comics, and Ghost World. Go! world is a remaining-childlike-as-a-radical-statement kind of place. But what lends Proof of Youth a whiff of genius is its ability to evoke exuberant innocence without making your teeth ache. Like I said, smart cookies.