The A-Team. CHiPS. The Great American Hero. Hunter. Riptide. Magnum P.I. Hardcastle and McCormick. For an all-too-brief moment in the early 1980s, network television seemed to cater almost exclusively to boys aged 7-15. I was lucky to be a member of this elite class, amongst the target demo of these kid-tested/mother-denied telecasts. But for all the hours I spent admiring Lee Majors' proto-MacGyver ingenuity and B.A. Baracus' oppressive unsilliness, I have no distinct visual memories of these shows; just a vague montage of military-grade explosives, dirt mounds, and white limousines.
The only thing I remember with any clarity at all is the music-- those awesome, supercharged theme songs that outblasted any onscreen artillery and promised more stunt-powered glory than Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon jump. And most of them were written by one man: the cruelly unsung Mike Post, stateside television's own Ennio Morricone. The breadth of Post's stylistic range and uncanny knack for visceral impact have made him one of very few television composers worth remembering, and I guarantee you know more of his work than you think.
I can't pretend to know which brilliantly Post-themed programs were broadcast in the UK (although many were), but six-strong Brighton brigade The Go! Team are clearly just as familiar with his work as any American my age. Their debut album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, is a hazy blend of nostalgia, evoking that period through a melange of action hero theme songs, early hip-hop (from 1979-82, in particular), and traces of 70s sunshine funk.
In a contemporary context, The Go! Team-- not to be confused with Calvin Johnson's highly inferior 1980s collective of the same name-- could be shelved alongside The Avalanches and Rjd2, as all three share a party aesthetic whose reflection of bygone eras is just slightly wistful. But one immediately striking difference between them is The Go! Team's reliance on live instrumentation. Though they certainly do their fair share of sampling, they tend to use fragments as a means of fleshing out the battling, overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barreling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men.
Thunder, Lightning, Strike's opener, "Panther Dash", wastes no time establishing the band's modus operandi: Its "Hawaii Five-O" crash-in mates with an open-range harmonica to evoke some lost Sergio Leone-directed "Speed Racer" showdown. "The Power Is On" pops like puffy rainbow stickers, rubbing determined piano chords against surly trumpets and cheerleader chants. "Junior Kickstart" is BMX banditos navigating mud-caked spokes and handlebars through flagged-off terrain. "Bottle Rocket" throws back to Saturday morning cartoons and Brooklyn b-girl breakdowns, with female rapper Ninja lunging from dusk-cast shadows to conjure a katana-wielding Sha Rock.
This record recalls, with striking exactness, a very specific time and place that The Go! Team could only have experienced second-hand, through imported television and culture. But then, it was vicarious for us all: Thunder, Lightning, Strike aspires to recapture the imaginary good-natured competitiveness of a period before realism dominated prime-time TV, when cars and helicopters could talk, and good guys always wore pleather. It's all dusky reds and yellows, shag-headed battle royales, exploding tanks, and getting up the next day to relive it on the playground.
