The Go! Team: Rolling Blackouts are Go!

The Brighton-based sextet's first album, 2004's Thunder, Lightning, Strike was recorded by Parton in his own bedroom and the band was subsequently created to perform it live.

Rolling Blackouts is a much more collaborative affair, with guest appearances from the likes of Deerhoof's Satomi Matsuzaki and Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino. Ian Parton tells us how it took shape.

How has the change in MO impacted on The Go! Team sound?

It's not massively different to be honest. I didn't really want it to be. Lots of it was still done in a bedroom stylee. We started it off in a studio doing drums and loads of brass and stuff like that, but then shrunk it back. I kicked out my girlfriend and little kid – OK, not literally, but they left for a few weeks – and we covered the house in microphones and played until 4 in the morning. I'm a big believer in the psychology of recording as well. I really don't fancy being in a posh studio, watching the clock, panicking. I think it should be quite a leisurely thang.

You're renowned for getting through thousands of samples in an album, and that's evident here. Are they tied together with any specific theme in mind?

It is more eclectic than the other records, but not self-consciously so. On some songs I was trying to get a 'parade' feel going, as if you're actually on a street where there are people with marching drums right in front of you, that ticker tape kind of feeling, or maybe the soundtrack to a Rocky movie.

The melodies were running the show and I was working backwards from there, trying to figure out what the demands of each song would be. One song might be a Radiophonics Workshop interlude or it could be a theme tune to an Open University programme or something. With the track Yosemite for example, I was imagining a scenario where you're discovering an old VHS which is really fucked up, and it could be a documentary about Yosemite Park. For some reason, I'm imaging things like time lapsing through seasons or shots of eagles with a voiceover in the background [adopts exaggerated American Attenborough voice] 'The eagles ride the thermal...'

We actually put the whole album onto cassette at the very last stage, so it's got this grain around it. It's a pretty strange way of doing things. Spend all this money on mixing it and then 'Right, let's stick it on a cassette', but for me that's quite important, psychologically as well as sonically. I like tape hiss. That's all.

There are more lyrics on this album than in previous efforts, why is this?

There are some tunes, like Secretary Song, where it was clearly trying to evoke another world. I was thinking of an office in Tokyo in the 60s, people typing in symmetrical lines and the boredom of the routine of a day's work there, so the lyrics had to be in that style. '11.15, tap on the machine' and all that. A song like Ready to Go Steady is that kind of classic songwriting, the technique where if you know the chorus is going to include the words Ready To Go Steady, the verse has to explain why that is. I'm hoping Ready To Go Steady will be the song you'd sing whenever you wanted to go out with someone. I don't think it will happen, it's just going to disappear into the vaults of musical history, but there you go.

It seems to be energetically giddy and upbeat throughout. Our review of the album summarises it as “a fun note to see a New Year in on.” Would you agree?

I don't know if I would go with that completely. I don't think T.O.R.N.A.D.O. is particularly upbeat, or Rolling Blackouts. A lot of them are minor but you might not notice that. Songs like Bust Out Brigade to me isn't really happy, it's more determined, and about action and relentlessness. I think some of them are knowingly cheeky. [sings the trumpet riff from BOB]. See, that's quite a cheeky melody. Distorting the cute stuff is a vital part of it for me, to take the edge off it.