Interview Place Your Bets: Sports Team

The flamboyant singer is doing himself a disservice; if there’s one thing the band have nailed, it’s their live show. But for all Alex’s outrageous dance moves and audience engagement, the culture Sports Team have generated among their fanbase is something that goes a lot deeper than the hour or so they spend up on stage. In the group’s eyes, it’s something that's absolutely necessary in order to succeed as a guitar band.

“It feels amazing to announce a show 12 hours before you play and have 500 people turn up to the pub the next day,” says the singer, referring to the band’s surprise performance earlier this year at The Nag’s Head in Camberwell. It was a show that harked back to the heady days of The Libertines, who would famously invite fans from internet forums into their homes for secret living room shows, or bring whole venues to the pub with them in what was a warmly inclusive scene. Sports Team have done well to imitate this culture themselves in 2020. Annual bus trips to Margate, where fans, bands and booze collide for unscripted antics, have helped cultivate a dedicated fanbase who all interact through the band’s infamous WhatsApp group, which features hundreds of fans as well as every member of the group themselves.

“It’s really important, especially for guitar music, because you really want it to mean something to people,” says drummer Al Greenwood. “It should be about more than just music. Thinking back to when I grew up, your week revolved around the next gig you’ve got a ticket for, and you’re all talking about it on Myspace and it becomes a big event. That’s where you see your mates and have a night out. How else do you recapture that?”

“It feels like it’s just as much about them as it is about us,” says Alex, likening the band’s social media output to the fanzines and music weeklies of the early ‘90s. “The tropes are exactly the same, all the gags and the humour, the in-jokes and weird, edited photos of people. It’s basically the same as the meme culture we have nowadays. A lot of it is just people ripping the shit out of us. It all feels like traditional fandom, still alive today.

“It feels satisfying to know that we’ve got that immediate sense of connection with people,” he continues. “We’re not just trying to sell a one-hour gig of Sports Team playing their back catalogue. I wouldn’t buy a ticket for that. It’s everything else around it, and that’s what I want people to think about when they think of us.”

So do the band still have something to prove with their debut album? They certainly think so. “It’s not necessarily fashionable to be in an indie band in 2020,” says Rob. Alex offers his own take: “No-one’s gonna be sitting around waiting for a second Sports Team album, let's be real. The novelty of us has a massive appeal, we know it already. But that’s where our ambition is and that's why we want to keep the drive going. You’ve got to be constantly entertaining.”

“When we started about two years ago, our biggest dream was to play at the Old Blue Last to 20 people,” continues Rob. “But then these bands like Shame, IDLES and Fontaines DC came through and proved that guitar music can be cool. At the end of the day, you’ve got to have the view that your work is a part of something important. We’re trying to make a great piece of music for the people who want to hear it. We’re not trying to sell snake oil here.”

“We did do that though, actually,” interrupts Alex. “I was reading about this thing called pheromone dating, which is where you smell someone’s sweat and agree on meeting them based on the smell. So we made a pheromone spray when we lived in Westbourne Park. We bought a pot of eugenical snake oil from a local shop, and I was sweating into a load of T-shirts and mixing it in with that. We tried to sell it as merch, but then eBay pulled it.”

Creative merchandising opportunities aside, Sports Team, like any band, are likely to be judged in time on the quality of their debut. And ‘Deep Down Happy’ is a fitting title in their eyes, one that sums up their journey of “moving to London, sleeping on a rehearsal room floor for a year, and questioning whether we’re all still mates through all the ups and downs,” in Alex’s words. He sums it up better on ‘Stations of the Cross’, a song the band are all particularly excited to share with the world: “It’s not that you’re unhappy, you’re just happy on and off,” he yelps on the album’s closing track.

In spite of Alex’s claim that he “hated every minute of being in the studio” (“I just watched The Ashes and Saturday Kitchen instead. I’d rather be in the pub with the producer than behind the sound desk”), he, along with the rest of Sports Team, are quite certain that ‘Deep Down Happy’ is the best album of the year. And for all their ruminations on the benchmarks set by bands like Pavement and Franz Ferdinand before them (the latter’s first album, they agree, set the bar for indie debuts), they’ve got a chance at making a real impact.

On their first LP, Sports Team prove they’ve got the goods to back up their talk - and with a dedicated fanbase behind them, they’re hoping to storm the charts, too.

“I’m pretty confident it will do alright,” concludes Alex. “Even if it doesn’t end up being a Number One, it still feels like one.”

‘Deep Down Happy’ is released 5th June via Island.

Tags: Sports Team, Features, Interviews