Sports Team are a band who take music seriously – and always have fun with it. Famous for headline-grabbing stunts, which have led to a feud with Matty Healy and a chart battle with Lady Gaga, the English alt-rockers are determined to keep making waves. Before their big headline show at rescue Rooms next week, Ali Glen caught up with the band...
Sports Team’s notoriety has been built on provocation: by their own admission, the biggest turning point in their careers was when they got a rise out of The 1975’s Matty Healy in the run-up to the release of their debut album, Deep Down Happy.
“We had been lightly prodding him for a little while,” songwriter Rob Knaggs recounts, “and then suddenly we woke up one morning and he’d really gone off on one on his Instagram, and we were like ‘this is incredible!’. It was like a miracle had happened!”
Four years on, the group have refused to become more subdued as they’ve aged, in both their sound as well as their promotion. Subaru (I’m In Love), the lead single to their upcoming third album Boys These Days, is deliberately the most different song on the album to anything they’ve done before, with the explicit intention of challenging their existing audience.
“There was a part of me, when it was released, that found it quite exciting to see what the people who loved Here’s The Thing and nothing else would think!” Knaggs explains.
The track is explicitly an homage to the 80s, but unlike many of their contemporaries, it draws from a less explored strand of alternative influences, chiefly bands such as The House of Love and Prefab Sprout.
“It might have been more commercially viable to take influences from The Cure or Joy Division,” Knaggs muses, “but we’re just playing the music we like. [Prefab Sprout’s] Paddy McAloon is such a great lyricist, with a great knack of balancing these hyper-specific references with quite big concepts. It’s also interesting because if you listen to their early EPs, they wanted to sound more like Television, so when they came out with these slick soul jazz music, it must have been quite a confrontational thing to do as a punk band, quite a 'f***-you' to how predictable the alternative music had actually become when they were making music.”
Is it surprising, given this reverence and understanding of their forefathers’ appeal, that the debut single is a lush, maximalist, saxophone-laden love song to a rally car, from a band who have often been compared to Pavement and The Buzzcocks? Regardless of changes to sound, one thing in Sports Team’s ethos remains unchanged: the importance of the live show.
“It’s the best part!” frontman Alex Rice states. “Piling in a bus and going to every single pub in Britain five times a year is genuinely brilliant. I cannot recommend that lifestyle enough if you are ever lucky enough to be able to do it.”
Indeed, as with most other towns in the UK, Sports Team are no strangers to Nottingham, headlining Dot To Dot in 2021 as part of a mammoth string of dates across the country.
We got our legs cut out from under us just as we were getting started
“That run of shows came off the back of COVID,” Rice remembers, “and we were just ready to get touring as soon as we could. I feel like it was always going to be the only way for us, because we got our legs cut out from under us just as we were getting started.”
With the new album, a UK tour including a date at Rescue Rooms looms for the five-piece, but combining the new more expansive sound with their devotion to the stage has been no easy feat, as Knaggs conveys.
“Oh, we’re f**ked! We played [Subaru (I’m In Love)] for the first time in London the other day, and management called us afterwards and were like ‘yeah, it sounded amazing, but it might be a good idea to spend a week or two thinking about how you do that live’. So we all looked at each other and went ‘wow, it must have been really bad!’. So at the moment we’re figuring out how we play that.”
This sense of flying by the seat of their pants has long been in the Sports Team playbook, but work is being done to ensure this new direction gets the treatment it deserves.
“We’ve got a saxophonist in to play on the tour and she’s incredible. We’ve been a band for six years, and can only now just about play our instruments!” Knaggs jokes, “But then she comes in and is genuinely really good, so we all sit there whilst she’s playing and go ‘how is she doing that?’”.
Inevitably with Sports Team, the question comes back to what un-ignorable stunt will propel them to music magazine’s front pages up and down the country. It never escapes my mind that I am speaking to a band who, along with the aforementioned Matty Healy mini-feud, have driven a beaten up van adorned with their album art up and down the country, as well as sparking a chart battle with Lady Gaga.
There might be an internationally famous drinks mogul and much loved singer appearing on stage alongside us...
“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!” Rice exclaims, “there’s so much you don’t see. We were sent out to Lanzarote for two weeks to try and make this Mad Max style music video. It was supposed to be this desert epic, to show that we weren’t just going to be the suburban band anymore, and in the end you didn’t see a single bit of content from that!”
With this fury road to nowhere in mind, it could mean nothing that the band’s Instagram page has been smattered with adoration for YouTuber turned rapper, KSI, across the past few weeks. However, as Rice reminds me, “[their previous stunts] always started as a bit of a p***-take, but there’s always been a kernel of truth in these things.” Knaggs interjects: “I can’t say too much, but when we play the Kentish Town Forum in November, who knows? There might be an internationally famous drinks mogul and much loved singer appearing on stage alongside us.”
Whether or not the band are, as I suspect, gently pulling my leg, remains to be seen. Regardless, it seems certain that Sports Team are once again in prime position to make waves across the alternative music world.
Sports Team will perform at Rescue Rooms on 22nd November 2024.
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