Road to SXSW Sports Team talk SXSW: “I think the live show will translate really obviously”

The foundation of Cambridge-formed six-piece Sports Team is built around their live show. A consistent highlight of last year’s festival season, the band then put on a night of uninhibited fun at London’s Scala, bringing balloons, papier mache sharks (!), Robbie Williams classic ‘Let Me Entertain You’ as walk-on music and plenty, plenty more to put their stamp down as one of the country’s best new live prospects. They’re set to go one better at the capital’s Electric Ballroom later this month - on 22nd March, specifically - and as vocalist Alex Rice explains, they’ve already got a fair few ideas up their sleeves.

“A hall of mirrors is one of the ideas that we’re floating at the moment,” he says. “We’re not quite sure how many mirrors we can get hold of yet. I have a vision of it being like that Bond film where he walks out of the sun and has all these beams of light from mirrors and things. Maybe we’ll manage to create a genuinely dangerous beam of light. We just need to go to every charity shop and get as many mirrors as we can.”

Travelling to SXSW for their first shows in the US, all the effort and passion that’s been poured into their live show makes it already pretty much nailed-on that they’ll emerge from the festival as an undeniable highlight.

Though the band’s music is quintessentially British - their new single concerns a road trip on the M5 motorway, jelly bean air fresheners and driving gloves, before an untimely crash just outside the perfectly unglamorous town of Aldershot - there are more than enough touchpoints for an overseas crowd, and a spirit and vigour that breaches cultural boundaries, as Alex explains.

“I think there’s a spirit to the live show, and I’m glad we’re playing [in the States] live,” he says, “because [our live show] feels visceral and erratic and appealing, and we grew up loving American bands like Modern Lovers and Pavement, who’d come out of that school of slightly slacker, disparate music that always feels like it’s slightly falling apart.

“Obviously [SXSW] won’t feel like a ‘homecoming’,” he expands, “but people will think ‘Oh ok, we get that, we understand that.’ I think the live show will translate really obviously. If you set your stall out not to be something niche, and to be something inherently appealing, and to make live [shows] an event again. ‘What are we doing this afternoon? Oh, we’re going to see Sports Team - let’s have a few drinks and make a day of it.’ I think that’ll translate anywhere, and especially Austin.”