Institute of Contemporary Arts

DAY SIX : Good Shoes and The Go! Team

Date: 6 July 2007

Ninja - The Go Team

Last night's gig was a fantastically energetic one, with high kicks, strobe lights, doubled up drums kits (for extra beats baby), and lots of rocket fuelled a-woohaa singing! High octane, up-tempo bands pumped energy and excitement into the ICA theatre with a mixture of young and not so young fans receiving this ‘GO-GOOD’ gig with glee. .. The energy exuding from some members of The Go! Team, including the simply effervescent lead singer Ninja, had the whole room jumping up and down, arms flailing about the place and as instructed, some proper DANCING was going on. This gig wasn’t about being well behaved and understated, everyone was letting it go and having fun.

It all started with Good Shoes. The young fans were excited about this set and the front few rows of the theatre were filled with anxiously excited teens, some hysterical to be just metres away from their favourite new indie icons. It all proved too much for two young girls; the excitable pair incessantly yelled out, ‘I LOVE YOU!’ ‘I LOVE YOU!’ for pretty much the entire show. When the cheeky things happily dismissed the Go! Team, ‘they’re not as good as you – we love YOU’, I realised they were prepared to say just about anything to get the four young guys on stage to notice them. They were praying, crying, yelling, jumping, whooping and screaming  - a mass of hormonal hullabaloo creating a vibe of bubbling excitement akin to an early Elvis or Beatles gig. The front man Rhys finally relented and dedicated Small Town Girl to the two young ladies. Hooray, private treatment from the band! Smiles all round. But it wasn’t just teenybopper girls getting into Good Shoes – several young boys were relating to the sounds and lyrics of the band as well. At the end, mad scrabbles occurred to get hold of the play list or a guitar pick if you were lucky. Several fans knew the words to every song from their first album Think Before You Speak, and tracks like Morden were being belted out by all the crowd members. People can relate to what this group are singing about, the highs and lows of growing up in London’s urban landscape, and their punchy indie pop-rock charm had the crowds crying out for more.

I managed to have a quick chat with three of the four band members before they went on stage. The fourth was rambling around Green Park apparently, (I didn’t ask two many questions) and I learned a lesson for all boys in young groups of any kind. Do not go walking off when your fellow crew are being asked questions backstage. When I asked Rhys, Joel and Tom how they would describe themselves using the letters ICA, they went with (after some deliberation) Incredible, Contagious and... A-sexual. The a-sexual part being attributed to the missing Steve. Best to stay indoors in the future honey, and then I could have got a picture too damn it! I did get a few of the band reading about themselves at Glastonbury this year (nice) and knocking back the beers with friends in the dressing room. All the pictures from the night are in the ITUNES picture gallery by the way, so after this take a look there.

Next up the go-go-go-GO! TEAM. This was the best bundle of electric eclectic I’ve seen in a while. I left the hall with, ooh where to start, a whole load of different musical genres uplifting and grabbing my soul. With the Go! Team you get a bit of hip hop, funk, Sly and The Family Stone, The Beastie Boys, Soul II soul, Marlena Shaw (yes there is definitely that old school California sunshine thing going on there somewhere), 80s TV theme tunes, Charlie Brown, Rap, CSS, beautiful sunny flute, Arcade Fire in some revolutionary sounding instrumentals and a pinch of rock and roll too. Phew! And even that description hasn’t fully illustrated the palette of wonderful musical colours that the band painted last night.

Ultimately, they like to make noise, (the double drum kit helping that side of things), to have fun, (great outfits including heavy prints and hot pants – yeehaa) and to get people dancing. ‘Ok guys I know you think you’ve been dancing, but you haven’t –in this one you are going to be DANCING’ Ninja shouted out before an energetic performance of ‘Ladyflash’. This group like to get people involved and from the very beginning the crowds were made to shout ‘Go! Team’ ‘Go! Team’ in unison and join in for chorus chants throughout. The Go! Team are an active, chaotic team, and let's not forget, nice too. Ninja thanked everyone for coming on numerous occasions, applauding the audience for not being put off by all the Tour De France road diversions, (and for not getting diverted by the ‘lean muscled cyclists’ at the same time, she joked.) The band were on such smiling form, the audience forgave the frequent orders to buy the band's newly released track Flashlight Fire and forthcoming album. Ninja giggled at one stage, apologizing for sounding like a Go! Team sales lady, and a friendly audience member shouted out, ‘we love all your albums!’  No forgiveness needed at this gig. The Go! Team were in adoring hands..

And rightly so. Amongst the superb frenzy of upbeat songs including tracks from Estuary English (the fans cheered lots for this stuff) and more recent releases like Grip Like A Vice and Huddle Formation, we also had a quiet moment from the drummer Fuji. She came on to sing Hold Your Terror Close, a melancholy little number that she was genuinely a bit nervous to sing. This young lady, who just moments before had been letting it rip on the drums was suddenly standing in front of the crowd looking vulnerable and innocent. It was an endearing number and set apart the rest of the tracks nicely. You needed the moment of calm before a song storm that took us all the way to the end; Bottle Rocket had the whole crowd singing and dancing - happy smiling faces all round. 

Torie Speyer