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China Dates Added/Irish Rumours Rejected
Friday 9th September 2011

The band have announced a rare return trip to China with dates there on the 2nd and 4th of October. Check out the live dates section on the right hand side of this page for more info.

Sadly, the band also confirmed through its official news letter today that the London Koko gig on the 30th of November will be 'probably be our last for a while'. They also added that reports of the band splitting up, which stemmed from articles published following a press conference in Ireland as part of the Electric Picnic festival last weekend, were 'wide of the mark'. Read a couple of the articles here and here.

Thanks & Things
Monday 12th September 2011

A very big thank you to Chi for some additional pieces of memorabilia she kindly picked up for me recently including a Bingley Music Live Festival T- shirt and laminate and a Highfield Festival poster. Check them out under the relevant pages in the Memorabilia section here. Cheers Chi!

Thanks also  to Jonny Trunk for supplying me with a tracklisting for his OST show on Saturday featuring guest Ian Parton - a really enjoyable two hour's worth of eclectic and engaging TV, movie and other music selected  by Ian himself. The show is due to be repeated this coming Wednesday (14th September) at 3pm UK time on Resonance FM here - and hopefully will be available as a podcast at some point in the future. Check out the playlist here (last entry on the page). 

Further thanks to August Krater for another really nice scan, this time of the reverse of the original 2004 LP release of Thunder, Lightning, Strike. Check it out, along with all of August's other great work, here.

On the subject of record sleeves, if you're wondering about the photos at the top of this entry, it's the sleeve to a limited edition 12" released on Junior Aspirin Records a little while back featuring three bands, one of which was Same Things, Sam Dook's long-running music project with DJ Scotch Egg. I've always been interested in checking out the non-Go! Team activities of the various band members and Sam's work is probably the most extensive, including bands 100 Pets, I'm Being Good, Same Things and Cuz, his   collaboration with Stooges' bassist Mike Watt, who I understand may be releasing something next year. Check out Sam's extra curricular stuff via the Discography here. There were only 100 copies of the above 12" pressed but Junior Aspirin do still have a few copies for sale via their website here and it comes in a fantastically bizarre hand made sleeve as shown above, featuring the police arrest-shots of Nick Nolte and James Brown. 

And lastly just a quick shout-out and thank you  to  www.rarerecords.com.au/ in Australia for some splendid customer service recently. Thanks folks! 

Simian Mobile Disco/Ninja Teenagers Remix
Friday 16th September 2011

Forgive me for banging on recently about the various activities of the band members outside of The Go! Team, but there's not much else going on at the moment so... I have now concluded that that there were 17 different official remixes/versions of Simian Mobile Disco's track 'It's The Beat' featuring Ninja on vocal, released across 30 physical releases. However my favourite version of the track (apart from the original) was always a remix by The Teenagers which weirdly, to my knowledge, was never actually given an official/physical  released by SMD so it ended up all over the internet for a while as an online mp3. However, it has since surfaced on a German CD compilation called 'Atomix'. You can listen to the track on-line here, but if you are of the collecting persuasion there's a few copies of the CD still knocking around at places like Discogs. A nice little anomaly - check out the CD and artwork here.

Back to The Go! Team - has anyone else wondered what happened to the remainder of the Rolling Blackouts videos - Back Like 8 Track, Yosemite Theme, Bust Out Brigade and Lazy Poltergeist - or did I miss them somehow? Somebody let us know please. 

Yuri Landman Workshop/China Dates
29th September 2011

Not much on the news front recently I'm afraid -  but a couple of things to remind you about. Firstly, as previously reported, The Go! Team's Sam Dook is involved in organising a workshop in Brighton on Saturday 22 October where you can build and buy your own amazing 'radical instrument' under the tuition of designer Yuri Landman, who has built guitars for bands such as Sonic Youth and Deerhoof. The deadline for places on the two workshops closes on the 6th of October. Click on the above poster for a better look - and well worth googling for images of some of Yuri's other creations to realise what a fantastic and unique opportunity this is.

Secondly, just worth noting that the band are making a rare return trip to China this weekend for two festival dates. Wishing them - and Chinese Go! Team fans - a great few days.