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The BBC’s Maida Vale studios feel as if they were built for the big-band era. The walls are panelled wood, the recording spaces huge; vast mixing desks spread behind panes of glass, with engineers beavering at the controls. They are an anachronism in these days of albums made on laptops, yet, watching one of these laptop artists – the fizzy, blaxploitation-meets-Rip Rig + Panic act the Go! Team, from Brighton – working the old-school valve amps during a session for Radio 1 seems the most natural thing in the world. They play with 1950s kit like children in a toy shop.

Afterwards, the guitarist Sam Dook, rapper Ninja and the band’s mastermind, Ian Parton, gather in a rehearsal room and enthuse. “There’s a thing that looks like the Batphone,” Dook bubbles. “Yeah, I thought it was Stingray,” Ninja adds. Parton loves the microphones. “Always opt for old-school kit, and use tape compression so things are pushed up into the red,” he instructs me. “Mangled is good.”

Parton oversees the band’s explosive sound. “I wanted it to sound like a clashing-together of all my favourite music,” he says. “Noisy stuff like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth, breakbeats, Bollywood soundtracks, 1970s film scores, 1960s girl groups, old-school hip-hop with double-dutch girlie rappers – all slammed together. It all adds up to a picture in your mind where you’re speeding through New York or you’re at a block party. I want to create images in your head.”

On his first album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, Parton achieved this effect in his bedroom with compressed samples, putting it together while working as a documentary director for Channel 4. He then put it out without clearing all the samples – “And he would have gone to jail for it, too,” Ninja says. The resulting wall of sound was picked up by the Memphis Industries label, which legalled the recording and reissued it – creating so much interest that Parton was invited to support Franz Ferdinand at a festival in Sweden in 2004.

Realising he needed more than an iMac on stage, he used a combination of word of mouth, ads and contacts to put together a live band almost overnight: Kaori Tsuchida, a multi-instrumentalist; the Japanese drummer Chi Fukami Taylor; tall, skinny whiteboy bassist Jamie Bell; and Dook, who looks and sounds like Graham Coxon jamming in Haircut 100. Ninja came last. Aged 19, she had served time in a pop act with ambitions of becoming the next Mis-Teeq. Aged 22, she heard Parton’s demo and was blown away.

“At first, I thought, ‘What is going on?’” she bubbles. “I was trying to think where I fitted in. It’s like fireworks, and you want me to dance under the fireworks?”

The first time I saw the band play live, it felt like a scene from a corny rock’n’roll movie. It was Valentine’s Day, and the Astoria was hosting an NME “best newcomers” gig, so the indie boys who made up the audience were of a particular breed of trainspotter – and it was only 7.30pm when the Go! Team came on stage. But within seconds of the first song, Ninja was scaring the bejesus out of the audience – berating them for not partying properly. “The Go! Team don’t like to see no stush crowds,” she warned, and had the rapidly filling dancefloor throw their hands in the air like Saturday night at the Apollo. Soon the place was in uproar, and the fey shoegazers were rolling like pimps. “Go!” shouted the right side, “Team!” shouted the left, and the headliners quaked backstage.

An appearance at the hip South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, brought America onside and attracted celebrity fans. The Flaming Lips took them on tour, Dennis Hopper keeps inviting them to art shows and Chloë Sevigny tried to fly them over for her birthday party. Davids Bowie and Schwimmer turn up to their gigs, and Public Enemy’s Chuck D is so enthusiastic, he appears on their new album, Proof of Youth, rapping on Flashlight Fight.

The band’s second album – with Parton at the helm, but the others throwing in suggestions – has enthused reviewers, but left them stumbling for comparisons, resigning themselves to a list of chaotic influences. It’s because this mishmash of joyful noise is so insanely eclectic – one track, My World, is a cover of the theme tune to a 1970s ITV schools programme of the same name – that the Go! Team’s live crowd stretches from kids to baby-boomers. They’re even planning a kids-only show for parents and younger fans, after a stage invasion by a bunch of 10-year-olds.

They look like Jamie Hewlett’s Gorillaz sketches made flesh, and their mix of races, sexes and attitudes is so life-affirming, in a cultural landscape that divides and defines, that their very existence is almost a political act. “I don’t like to think of us as a political band, in that we make any statements,” Parton says warily when I raise this point. “There is a political dimension to us in the choices we make. We try to turn down adverts whenever possible. For the second album, we needed a publishing company to clear the samples before release, to avoid the mistake of the first album, so we’ve had tunes on an ad for Honda Civic, for instance. But we don’t go on shit TV programmes and we don’t represent clothing brands.”

The band’s only mission is to fill the floor. “I can always see the one guy at the gig who’s refusing to dance,” Ninja snarls. “He’s always really tall, standing at the back, catching the light. I can see it in his face – ‘You’re not going to make me move, you’re not going to make me dance’ – and, by the end, he’s in the middle of the room, going mental.”

Dook cracks up. “You see, I’m always that bloke myself,” he says. “So I need a Go! Team to bully me into dancing.”

Proof of Youth is out now; for live dates, visit www.thegoteam.co.uk

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