With a well-deserved Mercury nomination under their belt, the word is now well and truly out about The Go! Team. Gone are the days when you could slip their name into a conversation and await the inevitable muted response. Gone are the days where you could get a mix of delight/surprise/excitement about actually hearing one of their songs played on the radio. And gone too are the days where they would play to a packed London Astoria, only to receive cold, disinterested faces staring back at them.
For now it seems that people are turning up to their gigs this big for the right reasons, as opposed to acting on a tip off from their clued up mate. The band are up for it tonight, and thank ****, so are the crowd.
Energetic front woman Ninja has honed her performance over the last year, and can’t fail to get everybody moving. Of course, it helps having six musicians and four dancing rappers behind you. For starters, the aggressive intro of ‘Junior Kickstart’ almost rips the roof off, before settling in to something that wouldn’t sound out of place accompanying a Tarantino fight scene. New single ‘Bottle Rocket’ is similarly lapped up, and the inclusion of ‘Ladyflash’ in the encore is (probably) scientifically proven to get people heading home in a glorious frame of mind.
Tracks not featured on the album get a run out, namely ‘Doing It Right’, and the newly titled ‘Titanic Vandalism’ is thrown in the for good measure. Although hardly anybody disputed the decision to award Antony and the Johnsons the Mercury Music Prize, on the basis of tonight alone it’s difficult to imagine many raising too many concerns had it gone to The Go! Team. With a re-released (and legally approved) debut album injecting fresh interest from all corners, it seems they will be rockin’ the microphone for quite a while yet.
Photo by Adam Cooney
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