On the tattered carpet of an upstairs rehearsal room in east London, Sports Team are making a glorious racket. Lead singer Alex Rice, a leonine figure in black vest and baggy cream trousers, waggles a tambourine as the band plough through their latest single The Game. “The night was rustling like an empty bag of crisps,” Rice sing-speaks in his elastic baritone. Lyricist Rob Knaggs grins at him over his glasses, strumming along on guitar. A few minutes later, they’re told the building is closing and are booted out.
Sports Team are a band on the rise – already big enough to sell out 5,000-head venues, not yet big enough to have roadies to carry their kit. The lift is broken, so I’m soon helping them lug metal cases down three flights of stairs before we retire to a nearby pub. Over a few pints, they paint a chaotic picture of what it’s really like to be in a rock band in the 2020s, ricocheting between the sublime and the absurd. “We got interviewed by a chicken the other day,” says Rice. Knaggs rolls his eyes: “Our manager had arranged some ‘wonderful press’ for us in New York…”
Next Sunday, they play Glastonbury, and Worthy Farm is in for a treat. Last summer, the band were a last-minute booking for the first proper post-lockdown festival, Latitude, covering for an act who had dropped out with Covid. They stole the weekend. Good on record, Sports Team are an electrifying live act. Rice makes a supremely charismatic frontman, dancing with a swagger, half Jagger, half Iggy Pop. Drummer Al Greenwood bashes her cymbals as if she’s trying to break them, while Ben Mack (keys, percussion, thousand-yard stare) acts like Happy Mondays’ Bez as written by Samuel Beckett.
They played to perhaps 20,000 people, mounting the main stage immediately after Supergrass, which felt like a baton being passed: Sports Team’s unashamedly upbeat, mischievous rock harks back to Supergrass’s Britpop heyday. Their shows, says Rice, have the mood of “a carnival”. One gig memorably involved a papier-mâché shark.
“I don’t think we’re ever likely to walk on stage all dressed in black and pout for an hour. I think sometimes that means people could write you off,” says Oli Dewdney, the bassist with the peroxide fringe, who is (by his own account) the only one who did the washing-up when the band were living together in south London. But the tide seems to be turning for “lighter, poppier guitar bands” with a sense of the absurd. “When we started, no one was really doing things the way we do,” says Rice. “Now, a whole group of bands coming through – like Wet Leg, and Courting – seem to be doing something similar, something more uplifting, joyous.”
Their first album, Deep Down Happy, came within a hair’s breadth of reaching number one, beaten to the top spot by Lady Gaga. “There was an interview where we said ‘Lady Gaga’s cool, just a class act, she sent flowers to our house in Camberwell!’ She hadn’t done it. It’s amazing what people believe,” Rice tells me. It was a surreal experience, scaling the charts when the “rule of six” meant the band could only see each other. “Our celebration for getting to number two was we sat in a graveyard, just us round a bench. We had cans from the off-licence.”
More lockdown-diluted glamour came when the album was nominated for the Mercury Prize. A big Mercury-branded car showed up outside their house. People emerged from it, pulled a consolation prize from the boot, then drove off. “We’d watched it [the televised award show] as kids,” says Rice. “Usually, there’s a party with big names! The Mercury Prize the year we had it was on The One Show. They had a segment about bowel cancer, and then ‘over to the Mercury Prize’. That was it.”
It was a moment of poetic bathos that could have appeared in one of their songs; the first track on Deep Down Happy begins with Knaggs singing about arthritis, Wetherspoons and Aldershot Municipal Gardens. Knaggs grew up in Aldershot, and the band retain a soft spot for the sort of town rarely name-checked in pop.
The day before Latitude, they were hosting a bus trip to Margate, where half the band now live, an annual fixture that began with 30 fans in an overheated coach and has evolved into a mini-festival. A few weeks after that, I watched them playing in the rain on a rooftop in Bexhill-on-Sea. “We had the ill-fated idea to do a commuter-belt tour,” says Knaggs. “We went to Bishop’s Stortford.” Rice explains: “A few of us grew up in towns where you don’t really get much live music. So, to break that cycle, we went, ‘We’ll come to you!’” At one show, there were more people on stage than in the crowd.
But their desire to connect with fans paid dividends. Deep Down Happy sold more copies in a week than any other British band’s debut had managed in four years, thanks to a concerted push from their (mostly female, largely teenage) fanbase. At one early gig, the band shared their phone numbers with a few fans so they could start a WhatsApp group, which soon swelled to hundreds of members – many of whom cheerfully dismiss the band as “idiots”.
“Our fans have always been quite cruel to us, in the same way we’re cruel to each other,” says Rice. “I’ve cried through some nights!” I can see what he means. They’re constantly teasing each other, or interrupting to finish one another’s sentences. “It’s quite hard to keep six people going,” says Rice. Knaggs: “Maybe knock a few off next year?” Rice: “We need decreasing numbers!” Dewdney: “That’s my nightmare, being the bassist for the Alex Rice Solo Project.”
Sports Team met in Cambridge, while studying at Homerton College – except Dewdney (who studied at Bristol, but grew up near Rice in Kent). “We were all on the same corridor, listening to Pavement records,” says Knaggs. “I’m a bit sheepish about saying we met in Cambridge,” says Rice, “because of people having certain misconceptions about what it says about a person’s background… We’re all from very different backgrounds, different parts of the country, different schools of thought.”
With six strong personalities, the odd squabble is natural. “It’s like siblings,” says Greenwood, who has a strong Leeds accent, a dry sense of humour, and – unlike the rest of the band – actual sporting talent. (She’s a keen footballer, and runs an organisation promoting women’s sport.) “You love and hate the group in equal measure. There’s a bond that’s horrible and quite special.”
“Living with you is making me sick,” Rice sings on Cool It Kid, the standout track from their second album, Gulp!, out next month. That song, says Greenwood, feels like “group therapy” after being locked down together. In early 2020, the six of them moved into a house that was only supposed to hold five. “One morning, we had to rush out to rehearse, and the council came round, and we had a front room just strewn with mattresses, clearly 30-odd people staying there,” says Rice. They got a letter threatening to install “listening devices” in their rooms, “like The Lives of Others!” says Dewdney.
To escape from London, Knaggs and Rice would go on “pretty huge walks”. There’s a philosophy to it, explains Rice. “You can’t set out… you can’t be like, ‘I’m a walker, I’m going on a walk, I’m going to put my walking gear on.’ You have to wake up at a party like ‘This is hell! How do we get out?’ Pick a direction, just keep going.” One such spontaneous zen-hangover trek took them almost 30 miles in a day, from south London to St Albans.
Another time, they had a recording session booked in Bath – and decided to walk there from London. After trudging for two days and 70 miles in torrential rain, Rice woke on the third morning to find his legs wouldn’t work. Recalling this, he goes all misty-eyed. “Walking feels really meditative, a lot of people never quite walk far enough to get into that state. Once you get to about 20 miles, it’s such a heartbeat, to stop feels really jarring. You just keep… running from something.” What’s he running from? “Lagers.” And with that, he orders another round.
Sports Team will play Glastonbury on June 26; Gulp! is out on July 22
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