The Go! Team
Melkweg, Amsterdam
14/01/2005
I’m getting old. By now there’s really no denying it. The signs were there, of course. Early last year I started to take earplugs to concerts due to my old ears not being able to handle the sonic onslaughts of the clubs anymore. My daily life kept me so busy that I hardly had time to check out any music, let alone have time to separate the terrible from the downright brilliant. It really hit home at the end of the year when people starting putting their top ten lists together and I realized I wouldn’t be able to form a top ten at all, having already forgotten about any revelations I’d had earlier in the year. In the end I resorted to upgrading my ancient copy of Soulseek to check out some of the oft-mentioned bands in the top lists. One of these was The Go! Team, and what a pleasant surprise they were.
When I was just a wee lad I would sit around on Saturdays watching cartoons and assorted old TV shows that the networks used to fill up the early afternoon slot. The Streets of San Francisco, Batman, The Green Hornet – top quality stuff. The slightly chubby Adam West didn’t exactly trigger my crime-fighting fantasies, but Kato, the karate-skilled sidekick of the Green Hornet, he was something else. I would play the theme of the Green Hornet (recently revived on the Kill Bill soundtrack, proving its durability as a soundtrack to action moves) in my head and chop imaginary enemies to bits.
‘How is this relevant to The Go! Team?’ I hear you wonder. Well, they happen to bring back the music from those old action shows in an updated version so that the kids of today can enjoy it. Friday night in the Melkweg was the place to be if you were wanting to shake that funky groove thing to some new but somehow already classic beats. With less than half of the Max hall being filled, The Team managed to play to and with the crowd with surprising success and displayed the energy you would expect from listening to their record.
Led by the self-proclaimed ‘Ninja’, a pint-size ball of energy who continually insisted the band were there just to give the crowd a good time, the band raced through almost all their songs in about 40 minutes flat. While it’s unfortunate they couldn’t get a small brass band to play with them to fill out the sound (a taped band played instead), the energy coming from the stage more than made up for it.
Besides Ninja there were two guitarists, one bass player who (judging from his Starsky & Hutch hairdo) was pulled straight from the '70s, and two chick drummers in the back. Though Ninja is the obvious eye-catcher with her funky dance moves and stage presence, the star of the show for some of us in the crowd was the one slightly androgynous-looking drummer who would come out to play a variety of instruments during different songs. Flute, recorder, guitar, keyboards, nothing was too crazy for her.
The Go! Team have been hyped to hell and back, all too often a kiss of death for the band involved. It’s good to see that in a half-filled Melkweg the band can stand up to scrutiny and prove that regardless of what anyone says, they’re just here to have a good time. With the inevitable second record coming out soon and the expanded repertoire that will offer, The Go! Team are definitely a band you’ll want to catch in a live setting.
Onno Siemens
Photo: Peter Larsson
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