The Go! Team

Emily Lloyd-Tait talks to Team Captain Ian Parton to find out if this is indeed the band's last hurrah.

So what have you been up to for the last four years?
Well, I had a kid about two years ago, so that took up some time, but also lots of touring still. We went to China, the Ukraine, and Brazil, and then I was writing this album.

You wrote your first album Thunder, Lightning, Strike solo and then created a band after the fact. Do you still write on your own?
Yeah, I do actually. I'm definitely not a jammer, I'm much more of a planner and a hoarder – I write the songs and then at some stage I'll take it to the band. It was quite a lengthy affair, I don't really make life easy for myself.

Your new album is a lot more pop than your earlier work. Was that intentional?
If it is more pop it's certainly not motivated by any commercial yearnings. I'm definitely interested in poppiness but as a listening experience rather than it being about success. The last album we did, Proof of Youth, might have been quite abrasive, a bit like someone shouting at you for half an hour, so I definitely wanted this one to have more light and shade in it.

The title track from Rolling Blackouts features vocals from Best Coast's Bethany Consentino. How did that come about?
I always work backwards from the melody. I come up with a melody and I think "OK, that's a pretty nice little song, what can I do to bring it to life?" For 'Rolling Blackouts' I was imagining a kind of 60s Californian girl group sound and that was a real headache trying to find the right voice. I found Bethany on MySpace a couple of years ago and it really worked out well. She had the sun-drenched voice that I'd been looking for.

Are there any plans for a fourth album?
Well there's actually talk of this year being the last year, as a live band at any rate. This may be our last Australian tour ever. But who knows, everyone fucking reunites at some point these days… but really, you just can't be playing ‘Lady Flash' forever.

So are you pumped to be heading back to Australia?
Yeah, I've always thought that the Aussies got it. Triple J started playing ‘Lady Flash' really early on, way before anyone else, before the UK. I was still at my job on the other side of the world thinking, "how did that happen?", so I always felt a connection there.

What can we expect from the Australian tour?
One thing I can say about us, we never let up, we never phone it in. We are 30 or 40 dates into our tour already and we were going for it as much two nights ago as we were two months ago. There's a real urgency to the show that kind of takes over and basically it's just more fun to jump around and thrash than it is not to, so we always do.