The Go! Team

In her shorts, knee-socks and retro Pumas, the London-bred martial-arts fanatic who’s dubbed herself MC Ninja is jumping up and down, eager to race into the San Francisco night and watch the city’s fabled fog creep in at sundown. But Ian Parton—her partner in Brighton, England’s colorful new combo The Go! Team—merely shrugs. The Bay Area is no big deal to this skinny mastermind/multi-instrumentalist; he spent a good deal of time here on assignment during his other career as a documentary filmmaker/researcher for Discovery Channel, National Geographic and the Learning Channel.

But Parton’s job certainly had some interesting moments. “I met some guy who had stabbed his girlfriend in his sleep, and they were still together afterwards,” he says. “So we set up a camera in serial-sleep-terror-man’s bedroom for a couple of weeks, until one night it just happened. He screamed and ran around the bedroom, and it was horrifying.”

Now, both Ninja and Parton are currently on employment furlough (Ninja from her social-worker gig), pending the potential breakthrough success of Thunder, Lightning, Strike, The Go! Team’s debut. Parton wrote the songs, then advertised for members to complete his sextet vision, and—via samples, live guitar, bass and drums, and Ninja’s soulful vocals—committed that concept to tape. The results, in feel-good, Up With People-ish cuts like “Panther Dash,” “Huddle Formation” and “The Power Is On,” sound like a cheerleading squad chanting from a distant mountaintop while a scratch mixer bulldozes through an adjacent Stax Volt valley.

Parton lured an intrigued Ninja from London, he says, “because I knew I had to have a female rapper for the kind of music I wanted to make—well-mixed, double-dutch chanty stuff with a ’60s Phil Spector feel. That’s what I was trying to nail. Then I set about turning it into a live thing.” And the name? That was the easiest part, Ninja says. “The Go Team are the people who clean up plane wreckage after the crash.”

And Parton can’t help it, he says. Thanks to all those nature shows, he now composes with images in mind. “I like a windswept feel, like the end of ‘Wichita Lineman,’” he concludes. “Or a block party-ish sound, or a good car chase. The Go! Team isn’t supposed to be soundtrack-y, but our music definitely puts pictures in your mind.”