The ! in The Go! Team is very significant… Much more significant than the ! in Hadouken!... Or the ! in Panic! At The Disco for that matter (who dropped their ! earlier this year). And I won’t even mention !!! who are frankly just taking the piss. Sorry… I think I just did!

Marketing tool or not, the ! does put an emphasis on the all guns blazing sonic assault of The Go! Team. With their chaotic mix of retro samples, early hip hop, thrash guitars and cheerleader chants, they’re a cardiac arrest on the senses. And though it sounds like blissful pandemonium on stage, in founder Ian Parton there’s a string puller behind the scenes with a Machiavellian plan.

“I’m always working on stuff,” he says. “I kind of never really switch off. I don’t have an off day. I’m always doing something, even if it’s just a demo.

“I’m an obsessive person really so I’m always kind of hustling for the next sample or the next melody or something. I’m always kind of singing stuff into my phone when I think of it - it’s quite a good little way of doing it - and I’m always kind of scribbling on records and using the internet.”

The Go! Team are back in Britain briefly after sell-out shows in Croatia, Barcelona (Primavera) and Paris – they did Mexico and Australia earlier in the year. After doing the summer festivals in Blighty they hit Korea, Japan, Brazil and Russia, before a short tour of the US with CSS.

It’s been an arresting rise to grandeur considering that in 2004 Parton had just recorded the first album in his parents’ kitchen, and hadn’t even met four of the five other members that would go onto form The Go! Team.

“I knew that there would be a band but it was just kind of early days really,” says Parton, who having made the first record on his own was forced to assemble a band quickly after committing to a gig supporting Franz Ferdinand.

“It was kind of the writing stage for me really and I never dreamt of doing it in a solitary style, like with a laptop or something. I think there were probably lots of ways you probably could have done it on your own.

And did the band come together exactly as you’d envisaged?
“Kind of, yeah,” he says. “There wasn’t any auditions or anything. I wasn’t that ruthless about it. I was just kind of asking around and there were a few adverts and we had to come together really quickly because I’d committed to this gig in London and I only had a few weeks to kind of do it. So it was a bit like, ‘do you want to do it?’… ‘okay, you’re in the band then’ kind of thing.”

Now on their second album – the first, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, attracted a Mercury nomination - The Go! Team are fully established. Parton says that he wrote some of the second record on his own in the same way as with the first - finding the samples himself and using song ideas that he’d had from before the band formed – but that the writing processes changed a lot once he had the other members around him.

“The band all played on it (the second album, Proof of Youth),” he says, “so lots of the detail on it – with the exact ways the instruments are played – are from them. Also Ninja writes lots of the lyrics and there are lots of collaborations and stuff so it was very different from the first time around.

Parton describes his songwriting as “breathing new life into stuff that everybody else has forgotten about”. Constantly on the look out for new sounds and samples, he says every song is formed differently but usually built on one initial idea.

“I’m into catchiness – not in a kind of pop way or ‘hit’ way – but I’m really into melody and tunes that sort of stay in your head and are worth listening to,” he says. “I don’t think things should be avant garde just for the sake of it.

“I think a song should be a song but at the same time I wanna build a bit of weirdness and interestingness around it. I don’t strive to be on Radio One or anything like that you know. I don’t really think in hit terms. But I do kind of like this idea of the classic chorus in a 60s pop kind of a way, in the purest kind of way but not in a ‘hey, we’re gonna have a hit’ kind of way.

“I really want to push forward with the idea of schizophrenic music and make it even more kind of cut n’ pastey, almost as though you’re dipping channels on the radio or something so you get really different drum sounds and really different fidelity you know.

The Go! Team are from a variety of different musical backgrounds, and it is something that was always key to Parton’s vision of what the band should be.

“We generally were and still are quite different musically and in every possible way,” he tells me. “It wasn’t like a worthy sort of ‘hey man... let’s all get together’ kind of thing. It wasn’t trying to be right on. It was mainly frustration with your normal indie band and how the mould seems always to be four lads who went to school together and like the same music – you know ‘we want to be like The Doors’ or ‘we wanna be like so and so’.

“We kind of wanted to get out of that way of doing it, so I didn’t particularly mind that we didn’t all like the same music. I thought it was quite an ambitious and interesting goal to try and weld some kind of noisy feedback and Sonic Youth style wig outs onto some more obviously black music references, with early hip hop and funk and blaxploitation soundtracks and all that kind of stuff. I just wanted to come from some other quarters musically you know – rather than just indie.”

“I think the word ‘indie’ has a terrible image. I hate the word and I think it’s got some terrible connotations – particularly nowadays. It’s kind of a short hand for ‘hey, we write our own music and we’ve got haircuts and guitars… That’s kind of what it means nowadays in the major label sense of the word anyway, and times that by a million for every band that’s out there sort of thing.”

Does it piss you off, then, that you’ve got kind of an ‘indie’ audience? “We have a really mixed crowd to be honest. We’ve got a lot of age groups you know. We have a lot of old punks and stuff and some northern soul fans and we have school kids as well… and we even have kind of office girls and hipsters and stuff so we’re not straight down the line but we certainly haven’t got a kind of hip hop crowd and I don’t think anyone has ever really managed to break that wall down.

“I’d imagine even Santogold is still very much getting an ‘indie’ crowd or even M.I.A… It’s a bit fucking impossible I think. Public Enemy played Brixton the other day and even then 90 per cent of the folks were white thirty-somethings.”