The Go! Team ‎– Proof Of Youth CD

The Go! Team are smart cookies. This second album from the Brighton sextet wasn't a record I was especially gagging to hear, what with their 2004 debut, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, striking me basically as 11 trebley intros in search of a song ... or, as it turned out, any commercial that needed a soundtrack. But leader/producer Ian Parton is that key mixture of obsessive junk shop record collector and talented thirtysomething with A Good Idea, and, for the third track on the significantly titled Proof of Youth, the bugger found an old tune that got me.

Entitled 'My World', it's a cover of the theme to the Seventies ITV schools programme of the same name. That tells you plenty about the Go! Team, but what it doesn't is that the original tune is actually called 'The Free Life', and was previously used as another theme tune for an early Seventies ITV comedy-drama called Moody and Pegg. The Go! Team's note-for-note version of this cute instrumental sent me on a long trip down memory lane; one of those where all the shite things about your childhood are buried under an avalanche of warm, glowy feelings about how simple things were when you watched cuddly-wuddly telly with your mum and a packet of Spangles. And therein lies the sinister magic of the Go! Team.

It's very Brighton, too, this band's friendly, fizzy, cool-kitsch chaos of children's choirs, female rapping, horny Seventies movie themes, very early hip hop, Eighties Sonic Youth/My Bloody Valentine art-noise, skipping songs and funky break beats played by two drummers. It sometimes feels like everyone in Brighton is a student till they die, and Proof of Youth is exactly what they're striving for.

Label: Memphis Industries

Country: Europe

Media Condition: Near Mint (NM or M-)
Sleeve Condition: Near Mint (NM or M-)