Deer Shed Preview: Interview with The Go! Team

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of their pivotal debut album Thunder, Lightning, Strike this year, The Go! Team are set to bring their joyous energy and fizzing genre-defying sounds to the main stage of Deer Shed festival on Sunday 28th July. With seven albums under their belts, their live shows are a pretty uniquely euphoric experience to be a part of; so prepare to be swept up in gleeful ecstasy by their soaring funk-fused cacophonies and swirling sunny charisma.

We caught up with the band, fresh from their set at Glastonbury last weekend, to find out more about their live shows, kids on tour and the challenges of the industry today… Have a read, then check out our playlist of bands and artists – including The Go! Team – that we’re most looking forward to checking out at Deer Shed Festival at the end of this month.

You’ve just played Glasto, for the the fourth time! How was that for you? 
Yeah, it went like a dream! We were up against Shania Twain, I believe – clash of the titans.  

And how did the experience compare to the other times you’ve played the festival? 
The first time we played in 2005 the PA died, so that was a disaster, so anything is an improvement after that… We have seven albums of songs to pull from, so we can kinda do a “greatest hits” set!

As a band known for the joyous energy of your live sets, how do you normally prepare for your performances? Do you have any sort of special routine that you do together before playing? 
Well, we don’t do a Madonna-style prayer circle or anything! It’s always been an unspoken thing that we bring it in the live shows – it was never discussed really. Ninja can be asleep five minutes before show time and the next moment she’s doing cartwheels. 

I was lucky enough to see you live back in 2018 at Electric Ballroom in Camden, after having been a massive fan as a teen in the early noughties, and it was such an uplifting experience! Is there a particular show you’ve played over the last twenty years that stands out as a highlight or especially memorable for you?
Selling out the Roundhouse in Camden was a big one for me. We still feel like a cult band to me – a well kept secret. So, that was a big deal.  

And you have a few more festivals coming up this summer, including lovely Deer Shed Festival at the end of this month – are there any particular festival essentials that you like to take with you to get through a weekend of camping? 
Just an olympic weight frisbee. 

As I’m sure you’ve seen, Deer Shed Festival places a particular focus on being as family friendly as possible, with loads of amazing activities for children, and just a really lovely intimate and safe vibe. With some of you being parents of small children, is this something you think is important for festivals to try to embrace? 
Yes, Ninja and Nia in the band have young kids. They actually both took them on a West Coast USA tour recently – from Vancouver down to LA. Touring and kids aren’t really supposed to go together so I can’t believe how they made it happen! As you can imagine, we come off stage late, but the kids will still be up at the crack of dawn, so it pushes you to the limit. So, respect to them.

For children and young people who want to get into playing music or start a band, what advice would you give? 
Less shredding – more angle. It doesn’t matter about being the best player, but bands should take an approach and decide what they are. I love the idea that bands exist in their own unique universe. 

And what is your opinion of the opportunities that are on offer for young people in the arts at the moment? Would you say it’s got any easier or more difficult to get involved, and be heard, in the music industry now than when you started out? 
It’s kind of mixed. The barriers to making music are down in some ways, as you can record at home cheaply and stick it up on streaming, but it’s easy to get lost and it can feel like everyone is clambering to be heard. For a minute it looked like the majors were fucked, but they were shrewd enough to just own the streaming world… 

As we’re an organisation with a focus on supporting women and queer people in music, I just wondered how you feel the industry is for them today? Do you feel much has changed over the years in its treatment of them, and other marginalised groups? 
When we started in the mid noughties it did feel more like a ‘boys club’ to me, and The Go Team was a kind of response to the bullshit NME ‘lads-on-tour’ fantasy they were peddling. I’ve always loved bands with mixed genders, and am always a bit put off by bands that are just full of blokes.

And are there any new artists or bands that you’ve come across recently that you’d recommend we check out? 
I really like a fella called Charif Megarbane – he does amazing kinda library inspired groovy instrumentals 

Finally, in addition to playing lots of live dates, what else does the rest of 2024 have in store for The Go! Team?
We’re heading back to East Coast USA. We’ll be there around election time, ending up in Washington DC the day before, which will be terrifying but pretty interesting! Will be steering clear of the Proud Boys, but apart from that I will be continuing my life long mission of trying to make schizo channel hopping sounds – I really want to push harder with wildly different genres sellotaped into the same song. 


Massive thanks to The Go! Team for answering our questions! Check out their special 20th Anniversary edition of Thunder, Lightning, Strike, which is out now on translucent red vinyl via Memphis Industries. We can’t wait to see their set at Deer Shed Festival, along with an eclectic range of other awesome bands and artists that we’re excited to be seeing, including CMAT, Los Bitchos, Liz Lawrence, Personal Trainer, Jessica Winter, Cerys Hafana, Nana Benz Du Togo and Picture Parlour. In addition to loads of lovely music, Deer Shed also prides itself on its family friendly focus, hosting a variety of activities such as kayaking, skateboarding, tree climbing and a ‘nurf gun arena’! There’ll also be some great literary voices featuring at the festival, including John Niven, Simon Armitage and Vanessa Kisuule. Something for everyone, basically. Plus Get In Her Ears will be DJ-ing at the In The Dock stage on Friday night, treating y’all to some of our favourite danceable tunes by women and queer artists – not to be missed! 

Deer Shed is just a few weeks away – from Friday 26th July to Sunday 28th July – and tickets are running very low, so nab yours here now! And listen to our playlist of bands and artists that we’re most excited about seeing at the festival to get you in the mood here.

Photo Credit: David Richardson

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LISTEN: LIINES – ‘Holding On’

The first new single from Manchester’s LIINES since 2021, ‘Holding On‘ blends the post-punk grit that they are known for with a raw emotional depth that draws you into the vulnerability of the track. A song about hope and desperation, the ache in the delivery makes it impossible to ignore how those two sensations can often be two sides of the same coin.

The song broadly centres on a connection that has shifted into dissatisfaction; not going into specifics, the lyrics focus on feelings of anguish. The verses are simple and direct, narrowing in on the physical sensations that go hand-in-hand with the emotions at the core of the song, leaving them at the forefront of your mind as it leaps back into the powerful choruses. Zoe McVeigh’s vocals ache with the emotion of the song, as the repeated lines “… and I’ll wait for you” are delivered with a tone that shifts as the feelings behind them shift with the passage of time. It starts out confident that the wait won’t be too long or arduous, then becomes increasingly forlorn as that confidence wavers, until it is finally belted out in a desperate plea for that confidence to return; clinging to the last of the hope as desperation takes over.

Throbbing bass and drums create the foundation for the track. Combined, they create a heartbeat that begins with a consistent but fairly gentle rhythm, then ramps up to with a fierce energy as the song reaches its most intense moments. Wailing guitars match the intensity in the vocals perfectly, until at last the instruments fade away allowing the vocal cry to ring profoundly out into the silence.

Keep your eyes and ears peeled for more from LIINES throughout 2024!

Kirstie Summers
@ActuallyKurt

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LISTEN: GIHE on Soho Radio (24.06.24)

Resident “Gloomy Grrrl” Kate took the lead for the June edition of Get In Her Ears’ Soho Radio show, spinning loads of new music from some of the team’s favourite female, non-binary and LGBTQIA+ artists. She played a string of queer anthems to acknowledge Pride month, gave a shout out to the incredible success of the Bands Boycott Barclays initiative, and enthusiastically spoke about GIHE being mentioned in the same news article as Taylor Swift.

Mari offered some of her “musical musings” too, and Producer Noémi recommended listeners check out Mannequin Pussy and Taqbir. Artists featured on the eclectic playlist included ARXX, The Menstrual Cramps, Fraulein, Julia-Sophie, Hot Wife, Fightmilk, Ethel Cain, Midwife, LIINES, MilkMaiden, SASAMI, Seraphina Simone, House Of Women, Jaz Leon x BUKKY, Alien Chicks, Gazelle Twin, pink suits and more!

Listen to the show below:

 

We’ll be back on Soho Radio on Monday 22nd July from 12-2pm
 Make sure you tune in via www.sohoradiolondon.com

Tracklist
Jackie Shane – Sticks and Stones
ARXX – Good Boy
Ethel Cain – American Teenager
Taylor Swift ft. Post Malone – Fortnight
The Menstrual Cramps – Antagonistic
Fraulein – In The Living Room
LIINES – Holding On
SASAMI – Honeycrash
Midwife – Killdozer
Chelsea Wolfe – House Of Self Undoing (Boy Harsher Remix)
Julia-Sophie – numb
Seraphina Simone – Wild
mayday mae! – girls into music
Beauty Sleep – BIG + BAD
Alien Chicks – Qwerty
House Of Women – Overgrown
Belmondo – Getting Closer
Hinako Omori – stillness, softness (kloxii li remix)
Gazelle Twin – Walk Through Walls
Yaz Leon ft. BUKKY – 4th Wall
PostLast – Scavenge
piglet ft. Jemima Coulter – Panic
Hot Wife – Buffy Summers
Fightmilk – Darkness On The Edge Of Town
Taqbir – Sma3
Mannequin Pussy – Sometimes
Okay, Bye – The Fun Is Over
MilkMaiden – Murder Of Crows
pink suits – Refuse The Rules
Dolly Parton – Dumb Blonde

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ALBUM: Mammoth Penguins – ‘Here’

There’s a cliché that, as bands mature, they tend to drift away from something essential into experimentation. For Cambridge’s Mammoth Penguins – made up of Emma Kupa (vocals, guitars), Mark Boxall (bass, keys, vocals), and Tom Barden (drums, percussion, vocals) – their fourth album – Here – takes things way, way back. To such an extent that, though largely recorded at Norfolk’s Sickroom Studios, the band decided to make additions to the album in the simpler environment of a garden shed belonging to Tom.

It’s not surprising then, that the album blends some of the rawer elements of garage or US college rock, and smatters of math-rock, alt-country and post-punk, with the more whimsical instrumentation of British indie-pop. The lyrical approach of the latter, open-hearted and often confessional, is present throughout with narratives that appear to be drawn directly from songwriter Emma’s life. In that way, and especially given the album’s title, the whole appears to be an attempt to define where, in 2024, Here is.

The dozen songs on the album zip by, despite frequent switch-ups of pace. Structurally, the songs are mostly grouped thematically in pairs; this is most clearly demonstrated in the titles of consecutive songs ‘Old Friends’ (a lilt full of jaunty strums which has both bleeps and a full-on rock guitar solo in its middle eight and lyrics expounding on the positivity of reuniting), and ‘Lost Friends’, which is acoustic guitar led and brief (coming in at less than two minutes) but as poignant as its title suggests. Elsewhere, Emma’s lyrics discuss the relative ups and downs of being in bands – ‘Flyers’ with its bouncy bass, and ‘Blue Plaque’, with its overdriven lead guitar. She reflects on surviving the days in ‘Help Yourself’ (whose Camera Obscura style opener, blends into guitars full of whammy) and the gentler sound of ‘Success’, which opens with birdsong but still contains biting lyrics in its final chorus: “Fuck success, fuck expectation”.  

There are bops, in the shape of the album’s second single ‘Everything That I Write‘, where spiky guitar flecks and power chords belie lyrical discussion of someone dedicated to a band. Similarly, ‘Nothing and Everything’ is a full-on stomper, with spectral guitar and interwoven backing vocals, while lead single and album opener ‘Species‘ discusses Emma’s relative unimportance against the “between two-hundred and two-thousand species that go extinct each year”, as a flurry of percussion explodes beneath the vocal line.  

What the album really leaves you with, though, is the sense that there is an emotional core underneath the rock stylings. ‘I Know The Signs’ is alt-country (with shades of Courtney Barnett), and reflects on a relationship going south. ‘Here’ sits Emma’s yearning vocals prominently alongside acoustic guitar, with lyrics about waiting for an unknown person who will partner you in adventures. Album closer ‘A Plea for Kindness’ is the nearest to an outright political statement, as its title suggests. Its opening lines “I don’t care what’s in your pants, I care what comes out of your mouth” begin against a downbeat bass, but as the song progresses, with the same lyrics repeated throughout, it turns musically into a garage stramash, clocking in at five minutes ten. Directed at the completely ill-founded and unnecessary hatred and prejudice that transphobic people insist on sharing, it offers  a heartfelt message of solidarity with our trans and gender non-conforming siblings. A fitting summary of the album that has preceded it.  

For Mammoth Penguins then, Here is where you were, where you are, and where you’ll be, with someone new but thinking about those that have gone; not getting what you want, but striving for more anyway. And, in another year of social and political upheaval, what better directions could there be?

Here, the new album from Mammoth Penguins, is out now via Fika Recordings. Find it on bandcamp.

John McGovern
@etinsuburbiaego

Photo Credit: Gavin Singleton

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