The Go! Team are a Brighton, United Kingdom-based six piece band (with two drummers) whose songs are a mixture of action theme songs, cheerleader chants, noise-pop guitars and early hip-hop, with a hint of ’70s funk. On record their songs are often pieced together largely from samples, although live the songs are performed mostly with live instruments.

Founder Ian Parton, born in wales, was previously involved in a band called dig the slowness. The band is split 50/50 by gender, with a female frontwoman (Ninja), drummer (Taylor), and multi-instrumentalist (Kaori Tsuchida, who replaced Steidinger in Autumn 2005).

Initially The Go! Team was ostensibly a solo project for documentary film director Parton, whose debut release was the “Get It Together EP”, released in 2000 by Brighton-based pickled egg Records. This received airplay from legendary DJ John Peel, but following this, legal wrangles meant that it would be another three years before their next release, the “Junior Kickstart” EP in 2003.

Their album “Thunder, Lightning, Strike” was released on the memphis industries label in September 2004, and has received widespread critical acclaim. In 2005 it was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, which coincided with the international release of a “legal” version of the album wherein samples which could not be cleared for use had to be removed.

Their song “Bottle Rocket” was used as the theme on an advertising campaign for RTÉ Sport in 2005 on the Irish TV channels RTÉ One and RTÉ Two. Another of their songs, “Huddle Formation” is currently being used in an advertising campaign for the Honda Civic, “We Just Won’t Be Defeated” is also being used in current Target commercials, and “Get It Together” has been used in the trailer for an upcoming Playstation 3 game, LittleBigPlanet.

The Go! Team is not to be confused with Calvin Johnson’s (Beat Happening, co-founder of K Records) and Tobi Vail’s (Bikini Kill, Spider and the webs) 1980’s band, The Go Team. For information on The Go Team, see the Wikipedia entry. Last.fm currently redirects scrobbled tracks for The Go Team to this page (assuming that users omit the exclamation point by accident).