You'd Better Watch Out For: goFASTER>>

Its not often that a band can be labelled as a next big thing before they even played live show but that’s exactly what happened to Liverpool’s goFASTER>> earlier this year. Off the back of a mightily impressive two track demo the four piece created a the kind of online chatter most bands who’ve played a year of gigs can only dream of. Four months later and still with only a handful of shows under their belt that chatter has become something of frenzy with the fan base growing by the hour, A&R men falling over themselves to find out more about them and a debut single already in the pipeline. Gigwise has been a fan from the start and so we duly caught with Chris Smith to talk about how they got so far, so fast.

Smith (Who plays guitar, plays synth, sings a bit, has the frizziest hair and doesn't shave yet) plus his other goFASTER>> compatriots Rich (Who sings, plays guitar, writes the words and can't be arsed to carry any gear), Murphy (Who plays bass, has a beard and complains a lot) and Ian (Who drums and sweats bucket loads) have known each other for years through Liverpool’s incestuous music scene but six months ago found themselves without a band to call home. “We sort of just fell together,” explains Smith. “After a couple of months of practising, we'd written loads of songs. So we recorded a couple, stuck them on Myspace, and decided to start looking for gigs. It took off at that point, and hasn't really stopped since.”

Now we can’t go any further into the bands genesis without asking about that name? The story goes that at first the band were to be called Go Faster Stripes but on realising “it’s actually a bit of a shit name” the moniker was shortened to its current form. And what about the punctuation? Adds Smith: “We were going to stick an exclamation mark on the end, but it had already been done by shitloads of bands, so we decided to try and go a bit more extreme with the punctuation and capitalisation of the name. We eventually created goFASTER>>.” Obviously there’s the connotations of the double bracket that ties in with the rest of the name (fast forward arrows on a video player) and the music itself according to Smith: “The name fits the kind of music we make as well, really hectic and up tempo.”

That brings us nicely to the next bullet point on our new band introduction checklist - their sound. We ask Chris to come up with some nice and long descriptive words to encapsulate goFASTER>>’s trademark noise. We get back - Anti-disestablishmentairianist (Which not quite sure which bit this is but we‘ll go along with it for now), annihilating, salubrious, boisterous, non-nonchalant, mischievous, staccato and excitable. And to be honest that’s pretty much spot on, anyone who’s managed to catch one of their breathless live shows will no doubt testify to this.

The sound, elsewhere described brilliantly by the band as "Trailer-trash-trisha-pop", is the culmination of a wide range of influences ranging from the British art-rock brigade (Maximo Park, Bloc Party, Futureheads) to the mid/late-90's Chicago scene (Don Caballero, Joan of Arc, Owls) to epic post-rock (Sigur Ros, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and finally but most importantly cheesy-pop (Urban Cookie Collective, Haddaway, 2Unlimited). Apparently front man Rich has the 2Unlimited album on tape in his car – we pity his passengers. There’s even room for a bit of TV theme tune appreciation with one song containing a riff close to that of a popular kids programme from the 80s and 90s. We’ll let you guess which one it is.