At home with Sports Team: the band making indie cool again
Alex Rice, lead singer of Sports Team, is sitting in front of me in The Churchill Arms in Kensington wearing his dad’s navy fishing jumper and nursing a pint.
His tousled mop of dark hair is slick from the rain, having walked two hours from the band’s new house share in Camberwell to meet me (along with bespectacled lead guitarist and songwriter, Robb Knaggs).
‘People want you to be a hero on stage. They don’t want to feel like they could meet you down the pub,’ says this man I have met down the pub.
Onstage, though, hero is definitely a more apt description of Rice and his band. To see Sports Team play is to be transported — and possibly quite confused. One minute they’re dressed as matadors, next pairing Man from Del Monte linen suits with your dad’s most worn-out gym trainers. Rice’s bombastic energy when performing channels eclectic shades of Talking Heads’ David Byrne, Jarvis Cocker and, in his poutier moments, Mick Jagger. Their insidiously catchy indie has caught the eyes and ears of Iggy Pop (who stole into one of their gigs undercover) and Noel Gallagher (who has enlisted them as support for some upcoming shows). Sports Team are helping inject fun back into guitar music, something decidedly lacking in recent years, possibly decades.
‘If you’re a band with a young fan base and you want things to be fun, you get a bit of cynicism about it,’ says Rice. ‘It’s “silly”. We get called “the crazy capesters” or “the wacky funsters”. Not really, we’re just a band who do fun gigs for young fans.’ They’re protective of these dedicated teenagers, who follow them from gig to gig and with whom they have a 200-strong WhatsApp group, called STC (‘Sports Team Community’). ‘It’s far more berating us and taking the piss out of us than it is traditional fandom, but it’s really cool.’ There are ‘thousands’ of messages a day in which they discuss everything from their favourite band’s music, to their GCSE coursework.
The six-piece — Rice, 26, and Knaggs, 25, joined by drummer Al Greenwood, keyboardist Ben Mack (both 24), guitarist Henry Young and Oli Dewdney on bass (25) — met at Homerton College, Cambridge, which is the newest college of the university (‘yeah, I bet you haven’t heard of that one, have ya?’ jokes Rice). They hail from varying parts of the country including Cheshire, Kent, Leeds and Cornwall, united by a shared suburban upbringing that filters through to their quintessentially English lyricism. Frames of reference range from hanging out with friends by the Thames (‘Fishing’), barrelling down the ‘open wide motorway’ (‘M5’) and sustaining some light sunburn at the Great British seaside (‘Margate’). They’re not simply nostalgia-inducing vignettes, but also just plain great indie pop tunes. Their newest offering, ‘Here’s The Thing’, is a joyous ode to telling it how it is: a sort of millennial Parklife sardonically bemoaning Baby Boomers and the gig economy.
Their quirky guitar pop recalls Blur (‘I pretend I’m too young to know who Blur are,’ laughs Knaggs), and also Pulp. There’s the shared unisex dynamic, distinctive small-town Englishness and charity-shop chic. Plus, peacocking, opulent frontmen. ‘Oh, opulent am I? Quite the gourmand!’ laughs Rice, now tucking into a Thai curry. ‘I think our lyricism is quite Pulp... but our guitar stuff is quite American: that driving guitar sound. It’s quite scrappy.’ They bonded at university over a love of bands such as Pavement and Parquet Courts and a desire to do something different with guitar music. None of them was a professional musician. ‘Not by a long shot,’ laughs drummer Al Greenwood when I catch up with her a week later, as she sits signing piles of the band’s limited-edition vinyl at their record company’s office. ‘I played the drums solely for my own stress relief as an angsty teenager.’
‘Most of my childhood I’ve lived in very, very boring suburban places and that’s sort of my experience,’ says Knaggs. ‘But I don’t feel like we want to be a voice of anything. I think you sometimes wind up talking about what your music’s about, where you’re from and suddenly you’re being talked about like “Sports Team.”’
‘Middle Class Heroes!’ jumps in Rice, ‘I think because we went to Cambridge a lot of people want to put that narrative on us, which doesn’t really feel right.’
In the past few years since Sports Team ditched their day jobs (CVs include: social media, social work and for Knaggs, music journalism), they’ve mainly been kipping in sleeping bags on friends’ floors, in rehearsal rooms, or occasionally piling in to a borrowed studio apartment all together. Finally, last month they got the keys to a band house-share in Camberwell. Knaggs admits ‘it feels luxurious’ for the band to finally have their own rooms, just as we realise it is literally raining on his head through the leaky pub roof. It’s a stark reminder that indie stardom is no longer an instant ticket to Supernova Heights. ‘We have lived so straggly for so long now,’ he admits. ‘But our live income is paying all of our living costs, all of our bills, because we live together and we share everything that comes in. Genuinely, live shows do pay enough. If you’re playing a lot of festivals — and I mean last year we played like 150 shows — you make enough money to live.’
One such show was an album launch party, a tiny but raucous gig in their Camberwell local, and after-party back at the house, just like the ones they enjoyed best in their teens, says Knagg. ‘We’d go to all these weird London gigs and sneak in and drink underage. The places where we did these things were completely lawless.’ They recreated it beautifully. Fortunately there was only one injury, and it was endured by a member of the band.
‘It all got slightly out of hand,’ laughs Greenwood, describing band mate Dewdney’s dramatic tumble off an amp, and her own head injury—picked up after connecting with Dewdney’s bass. ‘I was so struck by the fact that it was all girls at the front [of the crowd] and they were helping out, patching me up. It’s an amazing and increasingly growing community of really young, really intelligent, empowered women who are interested in this genre not because they’re fulfilling some quota, but because they’re passionate about music.’
‘I think if you’re a female fan you do get misrepresented a lot,’ says Knagg. ‘Like, “Oh, you like bands cause you fancy them.” But I was a 16-year-old kid who was obsessed with bands and wanted photos with them and ’cause I was a guy no one would be like…’ He shrugs. ‘The idea that female fandom is inherently a crushing fandom is so patronising. You just look at it and you’re like, come on, really? In 2020?’
Greenwood sees her role in the band as the perfect platform to help inspire the next generation of female headliners — of which there is still a dearth at festivals including Reading and Leeds. ‘It frustrates me, but what is the tangible thing for an artist like myself? What is the thing that can make that meaningful leap? There’s clearly loads of talented female artists who are making amazing music, there’s clearly loads of young girls at grassroots level who are crowd surfing at The Nags Head on a Monday night. So what is the barrier?’ It’s important to them to have their gigs be a safe space. ‘There’s an organisation called Girls Against that have done a big thing about groping at gigs,’ Greenwood says. ‘It’s one of those things that you don’t think about at the time, but I remember being 15 and crowd surfing at The Strokes, and somebody grabbing my bum,’ says Greenwood. ‘It just mars your whole experience.’
Greenwood describes her band mates as great allies. ‘I love that I get as much s*** from the boys as anyone in the group,’ she says. ‘There’s no sense that I am in any way different because we’re just a gang of mates.’ Occasionally, though, she’ll receive a stark reminder. ‘Like the sounds guy comes over and says, “Oh it’s really nice to see a girl hitting the drums that hard,” and you’re like “What?!” People come up to you and assume you’re somebody’s girlfriend and that you’re not a part of the group.’
These inequalities feel vivid when we first meet. Days before, Rice had Instagram Storied Slowthai’s inappropriate behaviour towards host Katherine Ryan at the NME Awards (‘It seemed a bit creepy, but obviously it’s not for me to say. She said she was fine with it’) and the moment the Northampton rapper ‘glassed’ heckling audience members.
‘For us at least that’s sort of our family,’ says Rice, suddenly ill at ease. ‘That’s the front row, 16-year-olds who’re just there for a good time. And to be like, “F*** you,” and go down and try and smash them and stuff seems horrible.’ He wonders if it’s a rock ’n’ roll affectation that’s long worn thin. ‘Every time he’s won an award he’s jumping on a table,’ he says. ‘It’s like — really? It’s not spontaneous any more. It’s not really that charming any more.’
Fast-forward a few weeks and awards show machismo is far from the band’s thoughts. Coronavirus is gathering momentum and endangering gigs, festivals— and potentially careers. With live revenue essential to artists for survival, are bands on the cusp like Sports Team nervously reassessing their margins? ‘It is pretty terrifying,’ Greenwood says. ‘It’s not only the most fun element of being in a band, but it is the biggest source of income for us. Our agent has just been continuing as usual, though.’ We like that ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude. And if you are facing a spell in self-isolation, may we introduce you to your new favourite band.
Sports Team’s debut album, ‘Deep Down Happy’, is out on Island Records this spring
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