For a band of none musicians, Sports Team are killing the indie scene. We sat down with eccentric frontman Alex Rice for a catch-up.
After going through your Instagram, I have one main question for you: how and when did Princess Diana become your muse?
It’s just great isn’t it! Well, a lot of our songs are about different characters, some of whom might still be obsessed with Diana. We used to live in a house in Harlesden together, and one of the items of furniture the previous owners had left behind was this plaster-cast bust of Charles and Diana over the fireplace. And it’s so funny to look back on, just kitsch memorabilia and things like that. You can just imagine the type of character who would own that type of thing –we even mention it in one of the new songs we recorded for our album. So, I think it comes from this character, easily.
You’ve been quite busy recently, especially with the Margate All Dayer, an event that you started! Could you tell me where that all began?
We have this community of fans, I suppose, who are based around this WhatsApp group – it’s so wholesome. It’s mostly 17 or 18 year-old kids talking about their A-Level results, and meet-ups at our gigs. They were strangers at first, but now they’re all mates, and we wanted to do something like that for them. So, on the hottest day of the year last year, we took a little bus to a small venue called Tom Thumb, and it went really well – everyone loved it! This time we had slightly different weather, horizontal rain on the beach, and we doubled the size of it. It was just to get our mates down, get people who we have on our record label, Holm Front, down, like Walt Disco. It felt organic, rather than something like a line-up or a show: it’s just there for a laugh. We’re going to try and do it every year, and every year try and make it just a little bit bigger, and eventually get to Dreamland.
What was it like to road trip down with fans?
I feel like we’ve always made ourselves accessible to fans, whether it be through social media or something else. We don’t do fan meet-ups, but we’re always keen to go out and grab a drink with fans after the show, especially for the London shows – they put on afterparties. I think the people who are coming feel like they know us, really, and I don’t think we’ve ever valorised ourselves or made ourselves untouchable heroes that people couldn’t chat to, so it felt like a natural progression. I feel, if anything, like they give us more stick than anyone else about the band.
Some artists want to keep that gap between the fan and the bands…
For us, it feels like a decent thing to do: they’ve paid money to see your gigs, so you want to make it more than just one show; you want to give the people yourselves to buy into. We’re still excited about everything we do, because it’s coming so quickly, but I think it’s important, and the distance thing comes in to play quite a bit. I think there are two ways you can perform on stage: one is like the lead singer of Hinds, Carlotta Cosials, who is very accessible and is always in the crowd or chatting. I think the other one is to be a bit more heroic on stage, and so people want to keep that distance. They want this sense of performance, so that it’s just a show and people see it as something they couldn’t necessarily attain. A proper spectacle. And that’s where performance and distance are really important.
We are not really musicians.
At the Margate All Dayer, you also gave fans T-shirts with a cool design of a bus on the front: who designed those?
It was Ben, our keys player. He’s very into his fashion and has these high-concept ideas which, sadly, you can never enact on a T-shirt. He’ll send in a drawing, and you know, there’ll be silk tassels all down the right, three badges on the left. He wants it made out of linen, but not the back – that has to be leather – and so on. So we have to turn around and say we can’t make it: ultimately you have to put something in the middle of a white Gildan tee. I think there’s rarely a band that doesn’t have the aspirations to make their merch range a cool fashion line, and in the future, we are going to try and have one or two high-end items that cost around £200 and get five made, like beautiful coats or something.
Well, you heard it here first: Sports Team Sweatshirts! But you’re also touring the States soon, have you played there before?
Yeah, we’ve been out there touring recently, we’ve been there a couple of times this year. We’ve played at SXSW, which was our first time going to Austin. I missed the first show of the last tour because I couldn’t get a Visa, it got refused! We love going out there, though, people seem to get us.
I’ve heard through the grapevine that American audiences are actually different to British audiences, is that true?
I’ve never noticed that you know. But the one thing I do notice is that we play a lot in Belgium, which is where our tracks seem to get bit more radio airplay, but they’re a sombre crowd. They genuinely love it, but you have to remind them that they can clap at the end. I think the music we play, like a lot of the bands musically, has quite an American sound. Like Parquet Courts or Modern Lovers, whoever it is. We’ve got that visceral driving American sound, but with English content, lyrics and performance layered on top; I don’t think it seems that alien to them. I don’t think we’ve ever seen ourselves as just an English band. I think a lot of bands get small-minded about where they want to perform, and that they want to do very well in London, but we want to be the ones with universal appeal.
With the American sound, you’re also preparing a Stateside-only CD, where did that come from?
We’ve got a label out there called Bright Antenna, and they’re putting out music for us, so we’ve already recorded that track and now we’re here to repackage it. There’s no point in just touring: touring with no music out just seems weird. But it is our first EP we’re releasing over there, which should be exciting. There’s a single we’re bringing out about fishing, and the rest are sort of a greatest hits style. We’re filming a video for it next week, so keep your eyes out.
As a kid I lived in Cameroon, and Holland and then the North and then London.
In a band with six members, what’s it like to see everyone’s music tastes blend together?
Rob is the main songwriter, so it spirals around him. But, we’re all very different, which is why we’re a band. We would all go to gigs together before doing gigs together. When we first started, we really just fell into it: most bands genuinely do, which I know is a quite fashionable thing to say. We are really not musicians – we couldn’t really play anything and would do pretend guitar solos because we all wanted to play the guitar. Ollie had been in different bands before, and we would get other drummers in and be like, “you’re going to look good on stage”, and then we just didn’t rehearse at all. And then I suppose, you get the odd gig. We didn’t take it seriously for the first year or so because we were all graduating at different times and were playing at different mate’s parties, it became kind of a cult thing at the university. But then we got to London and quite quickly a lot of people got in touch and asked if we wanted to make an EP with Dave McCracken. He had worked with Depeche Mode, Ian Brown and the greats like that, so we did work with him, and you just fall into it. All of a sudden you wake up and there’s this team around you, I think we had 70 people working on our first album. It drives itself from that point.
When it comes to performing, you do have such a unique voice, where did that come from?
I have a horrible voice! I don’t think I’m trying, I just sing. I think it comes from the fact I have quite a mixed-up accent. As a kid I lived in Cameroon, and Holland and then the North and then London. I think for us, the performance side all comes through originally playing with mates. Like, we get that guitar music isn’t a popular genre at the minute, it’s quite nerdy, so you have to make it a bit more interesting and try a bit harder. You have to do more than just be a bunch of people playing guitar on stage and looking entitled doing it. You have to perform, and tell jokes, and wear a matador outfit, and offer after-parties. That’s why we engage with the merch and the trips, so there’s a whole new world you can buy into, not just a T-shirt.
When we win, everyone involved wins too.
You guys really do, you find a way to inject comedy into Sports Team and not take yourself too seriously!
I love that it is really silly when you look at it objectively, and that’s where a lot of songwriting and ideas come from: getting caught up in that position of looking in from the perspective of our mates that don’t want to see us. Most our mates don’t fancy coming down to see it, so if we can convince them to come, we can convince anyone. Also, it kind of stems from how we live – I don’t think many bands are long-time friends before they get involved. We’ve always lived together, and yes, we fight sometimes, but we tour the world together and it is just brilliant.
Finally, we want to know what other bands you’re listening to at the minute.
We like Working Men’s Club, they’re full of charisma. Sorry have always been our favourite band: they make music for musicians. Walt Disco are also great, and we’re going to try and put their EP out soon which is something to look forward to! I think, everyone realises that you win as a group and not as individuals, and there’s a split in the scene with who’s in what mould. We’ve always been into the new romantic type of music and we always say that we want to romanticise stuff that is mundane. I don’t think we’re a subgroup, we are in the scene, and when we win, everyone involved wins too.
Sports Team’s new EP, ‘Making Hay’ comes out on October 18th. They also head out on tour with Two Door Cinema Club in October, tickets are on sale, available here. You can find them on Spotify and Apple Music.
