100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #62 The Go! Team – Ladyflash

Released: 2006

Go! Team erm..leader, Ian Parton was quite sanguine when explaining what he felt were the reasons for the band’s “Overnight” success, telling Penny Black Music when interviewed in 2006 “I don’t think ‘Ladyflash’ did that well but I think most people who liked it bought the album rather the single, which may have put a name to the bit of music that you may have heard on shitty TV programmes, like ‘Match of the Day.’

Initially his lo-fi solo project and set up at a time when sampling was benchmarked by The Avalanches Since I Left You, four years then elapsed before Parton recorded the material that would eventually make up the first Go! Team album Thunder, Lighting, Strike in his parent’s kitchen whilst they were on holiday. Eventually was the operative word, as neither he nor the label that released it bothered to clear anything first, necessitating the making of a second and heavily reworked version which was duly nominated for the Mercury Prize.

There was something particularly fresh and original about Thunder, Lighting, Strike that resonated; in a market now utterly choked with home recording DJ this or that, it’s pan owed as much to Talking Heads, Broadcast or Stereolab. Ladyflash was a block party takeaway though, dappled with soul, strings and summer. As is the culturally transient way with licensing music it probably end did up on a few shitty tv programmes, but it will almost always have made them better.