Sports Team are cruising back in style: “We changed pretty much everything, we even added a sax”

With their brand new single ‘I’m In Love (Subaru)’, Sports Team are shifting gears: bigger sounds, bolder visions, and an unwavering connection to their fanbase.

Words: Jake Hawkes.
Photos: Patrick Gunning.

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A lot has changed for Sports Team since they last spoke to Dork. They took a break from touring, wrote a new album, and are about to return to reclaim their place in the pantheon of ‘bands we interview maybe a bit too much’.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is frontman Alex Rice’s choice of venue and lack of foresight. Long-term readers of the magazine may remember all the way back in 2021, when an interview with Alex took a little bit longer than planned due to him picking The French House, one of the busiest pubs in Soho, for the interview, and nobody remembering to book a table. Well, it’s 2024, and you join us once again at The French House, and once again, no interview is occurring – although this time, guitarist Rob Knaggs is also along for the ride. Tables aren’t the problem on this occasion, but it turns out the pub has a strict ‘no technology’ rule, meaning we can’t record any of the words of wisdom that Alex and Rob are about to spout.

A few minutes later, we’re safely ensconced directly opposite the toilets in a much quieter pub that does allow technology. The glitz and the glamour, it truly never stops. “What have we been up to in the last two years?” Alex puffs on a vape as he thinks (non-disposable, for any environmentally aware fans). “Well, I’ve been running my mouth at pubs across London, we recorded an album, and we moved record label. I can’t remember much before the start of the year when we spent a month and a half in Norway hammering out the album and getting back into the swing of things.”

“We’ve always wanted to make incredible pop music, to have people point to us as a massive culture shift”

Rob Knaggs

Bands taking a break between albums is standard procedure, with things going quiet while they work on whatever’s coming next. What’s different for Sports Team this time around is that they announced they wouldn’t be playing, and they also took a complete break from social media – a big step for a band who have built their reputation on fan interactions and online hijinks (pretending Lady Gaga sent them flowers, anyone?). It was a move partly motivated by a lack of exciting stuff going on but also partly from sheer exhaustion.

“I think, as much as it may seem like they do, people don’t like a constant bombardment of stuff when there’s nothing going on,” says Alex. “I’ve always hated the idea of a band that begins and ends on socials, just the ever-increasing desperation of trying to look like you’re doing something. So it made sense to leave that gap, individually and as a band.”

“It was also just fatigue,” adds Rob. “Being in a band and playing live is really, really fun. But it’s fun in the sense that being at Glastonbury is fun, except instead of being there for five days, you’re there for 500 days in a row. By the end, you look at a picture of yourself at the beginning and the end, and you realise you just need a break. We did three UK tours in a year; it was all just so squished together.”

“That gap was long enough to make the new music feel very different, sonically and stylistically,” says Alex. “We’ve always said the ambition is: if you’re in a band, you want to be the biggest band on the planet. I want to play stadiums – it’s the best thing in the world to spend your early 20s in a glorified pub rock band where it’s just spirit and energy and a gang mentality. But if you’re really ambitious, you want to play stadiums and that kind of sound is what we’ve tried to develop, more unconsciously than consciously, on the new music.”

Read enough interviews with bands, and you’ll soon realise that everyone’s new album is touted as a complete shift in sound or direction. Nobody wants to sit down and tell the world that they’ve just done the same thing they did last time, after all. But forget that cynicism for a moment and wait until you hear the band’s new single ‘I’m In Love (Subaru)’ before passing judgment. A glossy synth and sax-led ode to a lost teenage dream of cruising the highways in a rally car, it’s a far cry even from their other lyrically car-led efforts like ‘M5’. At one point, the band were worried it might be so polished that the BBC could refuse to play it on the grounds that people might think it was an actual advert for a Subaru Impreza. 

“Ultimately, our way of doing things became very influential. People like Wet Leg, who supported us, The Last Dinner Party, who were on the same label as us…”

Alex Rice

It’s still clearly the same band who made ‘Here’s The Thing’ and even first EP’ Winter Nets’ shares the same DNA, but here Sports Team’s constant threats to go full-on Bryan Ferry have finally come to fruition. It’s bold, but it’s also kind of brilliant? (Please don’t tell them we said that – Ed.)

“I’m not sure I ever consciously sit down with an end goal in sight when I write a song,” says Rob, the band’s lyricist. “But looking back at [‘I’m In Love (Subaru)’], I think it comes from this vision of me as a kid. It’s a very teenage song because it’s so lacking in any ironic detachment; it’s literally just about how cool this car is, which I’d only seen in a Colin McRae Rally game on my family PC,” he laughs. “I was a nerdy kid – I basically looked like Anne Robinson from The Weakest Link, and I’d be playing that game hunched over the computer, but in my head, I was a sick drifter with this perfect teenage vision of adulthood. A lot of our songs, especially the first album, are quite cynical, but this one is completely lacking in any cynicism at all; it’s just this wistful teenage memory of what adult life really should be like.

“It’s funny,” he continues. “I think we always thought we were doing this kind of thing. I genuinely remember recording ‘Keep Walking’ in 2018 or 2019 and sitting there going, ‘This is a perfect Radio 2 song; this is like ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’! We’ve always wanted to make incredible pop music, to have people point to us as a massive culture shift. But because this time people keep listening to the new stuff and saying what a big move it is, we’ve become aware that we weren’t actually doing that before.”

That newfound sense of finally doing what they’ve always set out to do has lit a fire under Sports Team, but it also prompts reflection on their earlier efforts. Last album ‘Gulp!’ was named for the Wile E. Coyote moment of running off a cliff with your legs still pedalling hard – a metaphor for second album nerves at the time, but now possibly more of an indication that the band were treading in place without falling and weren’t quite where they wanted to be.

“That album was meant to be a really quick follow-up,” Rob explains. “We started recording it straight away, but then, for all these boring logistical reasons, it became this drawn-out process, and when it did see the light of day, we were two years beyond the point where it made sense. It all had a bit of the feeling of a clown car slowing down and slapping into the domino in front of it. These new songs are really about digging into some of the touchpoints we mentioned around album two and doing something with them, rather than just referencing Bryan Ferry and then getting on with business as usual.”

“I don’t think you’ve lost any of the essence of us in the new ones, but it’s definitely more complex,” adds Alex. “It draws on all these influences we’ve always loved and is probably a bit less Marmite than our previous stuff. What we wanted to avoid was what we did with ‘Gulp!’, which was to make the same album as the first one but with less of a novelty. And to avoid that, we changed pretty much everything, we even added a sax. Not that any of us can play the sax; the plan is to have Ben fake playing it in the video, and get someone who knows what they’re doing to play it when we tour.”

“There’s this weird cult around bands where people think everything needs to be pure,” says Rob. “There’s six of us, so we need to have a bass, two guitars, a keyboard, and vocals. But music is so beyond that point that it just feels like fetishisation – you’re essentially a Luddite if you do that. You’re a person who’s making your clothes on a loom and refusing to engage with modern technology. So stepping away from live meant we could strip ourselves of that and be a bit freer with how we wanted to work.”

“No one lives like The Strokes in 2024! Where’s the grassroots of wearing your sunglasses inside?”

Alex Rice

Stepping back from touring and tweaking levels in the studio might seem a strange direction for a band who pride themselves on giving 110% live, but Sports Team have always been one step ahead of people’s expectations for what an indie band should be. When they first arrived in 2018, they were rubbing shoulders with what was then called the ‘South London Scene’ and soon blossomed into the post-punk juggernaut that, at one point, threatened to swamp everything else. Sports Team took one look at the muted colour palette of the bands around them and promptly decided they’d opt for matador outfits and lyrics about day trips to Margate. With that in mind, maybe it’s not so surprising that now colour has returned to live music, they’re looking for the next way to poke expectations in the eye.

“We won in the end,” says Alex with consummate modesty. “I think, ultimately, our way of doing things became very influential. People like Wet Leg, who supported us, The Last Dinner Party, who were on the same label as us – they took this ethos of going maximalist and trying to create something genuinely unique. We always wanted to make people feel like they were part of our gang and to try and lose this ‘sunglasses indoors, leather jacket, cool band’ ethos, which was everywhere at the time. Being in a band gives you the ability to experiment with how you live. Nobody forces you to walk down any particular lane; you do have a lot more freedom than you would in any other context to dictate how you live and what you do. So why would you do the same as everyone else?

“We always had confidence that it would work because we saw people respond to it. It’s so frustrating when you see musicians behaving like the Strokes – no one lives like The Strokes in 2024! Where’s the grassroots of wearing your sunglasses inside? There’s probably a moment in history where that did reflect what was going on, and that’s what gave it vigour and importance, but nowadays, it’s just cosplay. We’ve always been able to pull the confidence trick and book somewhere like Brixton Academy because we’ve met 5000 of these kids when we tour.”

“I think the past gets reduced to a monoculture, but the reality is a lot broader,” says Rob. “If you look back at the charts in any given year, you never know who half the bands are, but they’re the ones who were playing Brixton back then. There’s so much niche culture out there that I don’t think we were really unique in what we were doing, but we just had these groups of music fans gravitating towards us who wanted something that wasn’t whatever the mainstream subculture was at the time. They wanted to go to a gig with their friends and mosh with each other, rather than taking everything completely seriously all the time.”

This idea of niche cultures and alternative histories is something Sports Team have always touched on throughout their time together, from roping in Extreme Fishing host Robson Green for their chart battle, to parodying Morris Dancing and The Wicker Man in the video for ‘Happy (God’s Own Country)’, to hiring cult British singer John Otway for the video for ‘The Game’. Each of these decisions has tapped into a sense of alternative Britishness, one of eccentric individuals, rural tradition, or just good old-fashioned daytime TV. What unites them all is a peek out of the curtains at a British culture, which is often discarded for lacking the sense of enduring cool or cultural zeitgeist that elevates things into the historical canon.

“The culture isn’t the interesting bit,” explains Alex. “The 60s wasn’t the Beatles to most people, it was the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. Robson Green is probably a more relevant cultural figure to 95% of the population than we are, or any band is.”

“To us, the interesting pockets are the good bit,” says Rob. “The cul-de-sacs that never really bloom into a full tourist industry. There are loads of good bands and musicians out there, like John Otway, who bloom to a certain degree but never become the Covent Garden t-shirt empire that punk has become, so they just get forgotten. That’s why it’s so depressing when you see things like councils cutting arts funding because they’re going bankrupt – you’re going to either lose all of these bizarre corners or turn them into the preserve of wealthy eccentrics who see them as interesting, but ultimately diversionary.”

“As long as you never truly achieve success, you can’t lose touch with your roots”

Alex Rice

It’s a perspective that comes from living in the crumbling infrastructure of UK music and culture funding for most of their adult lives. While Sports Team have always managed to make a living from their music, dreams of beach houses and private jets might still be a little way off yet.

“We’re on album three, but it’s not like we’ve achieved superstardom,” laughs Rob. “Arctic Monkeys were living in massive houses in LA on album three! We’ve never really had that point of going stratospheric, so we’ve always been able to maintain that lyrical theme of satirising ourselves.”

“As long as you never truly achieve success, you can’t lose touch with your roots,” jokes Alex. “Noel Gallagher was saying recently that he would give anything to go back to the point where he naturally dressed like the people he was playing for, that period where you’re into the same things and you go to the same places. By virtue of setting up a band with the worst economic model in the world, we’ve managed to make it so we can never remove ourselves from normal day-to-day life. We sold out Brixton, spent literally all of our money on pyrotechnics, and took home about a fiver each, which financially was… not ideal.”

It might not be good for the bank account, but wherever the relatability comes from, it cuts across generations. Sports Team have consistently maintained a fanbase that’s genuinely all-age, with as many teenagers leaping about down the front as there are BBC Radio 6 Music listeners propping up the bar at the back.

“I’ve always kept in my mind that I first got obsessed with music when I was 15 or 16,” explains Rob. “I started listening to it, playing it, writing about it, trying to get guestlist to gigs – the whole lot. And at that age you could always tell the bands who were just sneeringly dismissive of younger fans and saw them as just dumb consumers, or whatever their issue was. But to me, the gigs we wanted to create are the ones you loved when you were 15, because it was such a sincere time and you were so, so invested in it all. 

“Culturally, the most interesting things are the ones that can appeal to teenagers because they don’t have this massive ironic removal from the culture they consume; it’s just pure enjoyment. You want to make music where the enjoyment isn’t dependent on having knowledge of the last 20 years of post-punk history or the ability to differentiate between different tones of fuzz pedal or whatever it is. Nobody intellectually engages with a band when they’re that age; it physically hits you – obscure bands from when I was 16 still hit harder than some of the best music around because of the age I was when I experienced them. That’s what we want, what every band should want.”

“It all stems from honesty,” adds Alex. “It’s easy to forget how radical it was to come out with our first album, and our first song was about being middle class in Surrey. Or to come out and not try and present ourselves as super cool, or our band as this incredible, aspirational thing. And I think we’ve not really stopped doing any of that. People talk about ego, but I genuinely think the most egotistical thing you can do is to get in the workshop, create a brand, and then try to shove it down people’s throats. That’s the most entitled thing you could ever do.

“In the next ten years, AI will make a lot of music anyway. But we’re AI-proof, because there’s always a slight jarring-ness and humanity to our sound that makes those first-time fans know they’re listening to real people.”

“We’re small-batch guitar music,” grins Rob. “The natural wine of the indie world.” ■

Taken from the August 2024 issue of Dork. Sports Team’s single ‘I’m In Love (Subaru)’ is out soon.