Sports Team: ‘They pointed the gun at our tour manager... we took cover'
Many UK bands have broken America; few have seen its civilised facade so quickly shattered. No sooner had Sports Team landed in the US last December to start a tour prepping their third album Boys These Days than their first breakfast at a Californian gas station was interrupted by a concerned citizen rushing in to tell them their van was being broken into.
Intrepid drummer Al Greenwood was halfway across the forecourt, filming the robber as evidence, before she realised she'd brought an iPhone to a Glock fight. 'Our tour manager [Lauren Troutman] was ahead of me, running towards them and shouting, asking them to stop,' she recalls, clearly shaken at the memory. 'I saw quite immediately that they were carrying something that Lauren hadn't seen.'
Like the more crossfire-savvy Americans on the scene, Greenwood took cover behind a car, hysterically screaming for her tour manager to get down. 'Eventually they pointed the gun at her,' she says. 'She backed away, and we took cover in Starbucks, and they proceeded to load out all of our personal belongings, which was very upsetting to watch.'
For fans back home watching one of rock's most dramatic ever TikToks – an acoustic album showcase in an unkempt kitchenette this was not – Greenwood's post provided hard-hitting evidence that US gun crime could affect anybody. This was a devil-may-care art rock six-piece from London and Margate (via Cambridge University), famed for performing lighthearted tunes referencing Ashton Kutcher and the M5 motorway while dressed in toreador outfits, Eighties pop garb or psychedelic tank tops. Over seven years as one of indie rock's great rising hopes, in songs slathered in literate wit and comedic metaphor, they've wryly dissected the modern British malaise on two Top 3 albums – the Mercury-shortlisted Deep Down Happy (pipped to No 1 by Lady Gaga in 2020) and Gulp! (2022). Now here they were, this most harmless, middle-class and English of bands, dropped slap bang in the middle of NCIS: Los Angeles.
For the band itself, though, the experience rammed home the vast gulf in attitude towards guns at home and abroad. 'You could just be in a hold-up and the Starbucks staff were so chill about it,' Greenwood says. An emergency call to the police resulted not in a screaming cavalcade of squad cars to the rescue but a referral to an online report form; within days their ordeal was being commandeered by the right-wing US media to attack California governor Gavin Newsom, an early proponent of defunding the police. 'Fox News were going to send a Foxmobile to pick me up and take me to LA to do the Martha MacCallum show [ The Story with Martha MacCallum ],' says singer Alex Rice, now safely ensconced with his jovial bandmates in a pub in the relatively crime-free utopia of Clapton, east London. But when the band posted their video to US gun-control website Everytown, creating a risk of them espousing some anti-gun sense and decency on-air, the interview was pulled, even as the Foxmobile was on its way.
The robbers took personal belongings, passports and laptops but the band's instruments were secure in the back of the van, so Sports Team were able to complete the tour as planned. But as their story spread, the illogic of the USA's gun religion bewildered them. 'People, in all seriousness, would be like, 'if only someone else in that petrol station had another gun. We could have solved this issue',' says guitarist Rob Knaggs. 'You're like, 'that would not have solved anything! A gunfight in a petrol station?'' 'It would have been amazing to pull an assault rifle,' says Rice, a bass-voiced man who lives permanently on the tipping point between informed contemplation and uproarious laughter. 'We should have an armoury in the splitter van, A Team sort of stuff.'
With supernatural serendipity, Sports Team were held up while preparing the release of their latest single 'Bang Bang Bang'. Drilling down into US gun culture, it casts a withering eye over the nation's racially motivated killings, incel acts of revenge, gun shows, assault weapon open-carriers and crazed mall shooters. Although Rice argues that the song captures the intricacies and juxtapositions of the issue, rather than engaging in knee-jerk European condemnation.
'You can't judge it the same way you would here,' he says, '[it's so] embroiled in the culture.' Knaggs agrees. 'It's almost seen as like the printing press there in a bizarre way, this accessory of freedom, free speech and democracy … With the assault weapon stuff, though, you are an idiot if you think there's any real need for domestic [use]. An AR-15 isn't a hunting rifle – you're a moron. It's a weapon designed for Vietnam conflict, it's designed to basically stop loads of people at the same time.'
Boys These Days was recorded a world away from America's hot mess, in the 'insanely beautiful' coastal city of Bergen in Norway, a town surrounded by Cold War nuclear bunkers which the band duly broke into during downtime. 'They used to paint the walls fluorescent but it's all radium paint, I guess,' says Knaggs. 'Our producer was like, 'Did you touch the wall? It's covered in highly radioactive stuff, very dangerous'.' Yet Boys These Days is a record steeped in the culture and politics of America. 'It's the most relevant thing in the world at the moment,' Rice argues, likening the US to a new, all-pervasive Roman empire. '[Britain is] a pretty middling power now, I don't think there's much cultural potency in the UK any more. You've got to engage with [American issues] if you want to try and make culturally important music.'
Where once they might have satirised the boy racers skirting Aldershot on 'M5', here they ridicule the anti-woke boomer/Maga mindset on the title track, and Elon Musk directly on 'Head for Space'. 'It's not really a surprise that Elon Musk has become this person,' says Knaggs. 'I don't think it's shocking. The Mars thing throughout history has been a slightly far-right utopian thing. It's like Star Wars. The space colonisers are always slightly sus.' He believes Musk's ultimate aim is techno feudalism. 'That idea that you essentially get people on board with your vision, and then you slowly take away their rights and things, but it's all towards these big goals like going to Mars. That control is probably what's most appealing to him. That's why they're all against regulations. They want to strip away all that stuff because it gives you pure power.'
What would life be like on Musk's Marstopia X? 'It'd be awful,' Knaggs grimaces. 'They talk about it like, 'we can probably have a few pods with, like, 50 people on this barren planet', and that's much better than just coming up with some solutions to the catastrophic global situations that they're developing.'
On Trump, Rice is 'obviously anti' but isn't prepared to give up hope amid the global lurch to the far right. 'Hopefully, it's a rallying call for the left to get their act together a bit more, talk to themselves a bit less, try and come up with a proper counternarrative that feels emotionally appealing to people.'
In song, Rice prefers to flay open and expose the rotting heart of the beast rather than throw blunt sticks at its impenetrable hide. 'Boys these days look like girls,' moans the decrepit blue-tick wokephobe of the title track, for instance, 'Maybe what they need is a war…/ Now it's all f***ing on drugs/ Whatever happened to not making love?' 'You can make them seem like ridiculous people,' Rice says. 'That's your power, if you use the language rather than just saying you don't like it. If you're in Idles, you do like, 'F*** Trump', which seems less effective to us … Us saying we disagree with him isn't powerful in any sense, [but] someone's who's making him look ridiculous, that can catch on, that can spread like a fire.'
The album's other running theme is that of ageing into premature, planned obsolescence. Rice calls it 'a journey into jadedness', rushing from 'I'm in Love (Subaru)' – a slab of sax-laden Eighties soft rock hymning the band's teenage obsessions with fast cars, movie starlets and Prefab Sprout – towards the gym, supplements and 'sensibly numb' lifestyle portrayed on the barnstorming Dexys-like cracker 'Sensible'. It closes with new single 'Maybe When We're Thirty', a song that sounds culled from some unreleased Kraftwerk Play Pulp album, which has Rice dreaming about settling down to bland, homeowning family conformity: the 'happy days on Facebook' reading about David Beckham's children, and the one night out a year when 'we'll watch The War on Drugs'.
That trope of the sell-out life is now the absolute aspirational dream
Sports Team guitarist Rob Knaggs
'It's definitely us,' says Rice, currently expecting his first child at the age of 31. 'For our generation, the social contract is broken. If you live in London and you do get yourself a decent job, go to university, you're probably not gonna be able to buy yourself a house by the time you're 30. You're not gonna be able to start a family or whatever. And I think that's led to a group of people in their thirties who feel a bit like they've drifted, like they've lost a stage.' Knaggs describes it as an enforced ultra-teenage period. 'It's like, 'OK, well, I guess drinking is my thing now'. All you want is that terraced house, stable office job, a mortgage would be amazing. That trope of the sell-out life is now the absolute aspirational dream.'
Hang on… Kraftwerk? Dexys? Prefab Sprout? That's barely the half of it. Like recent, fantastic genre-hopping exploits from Fontaines DC and Wolf Alice, Boys These Days is a gloriously eclectic record. There are moments of junky Stones groove, ELO's symphonic funk, Talking Heads art pop, fuzz folk and, on 'Bang Bang Bang', what sounds like Ennio Morricone soundtracking a gunfight between Morrissey and Marr. One track, 'Moving Together', opens with an acid dub take on the Coronation Street theme and closes with an operatic jazz flute solo. Genre, they say, is dead; the new alternative has no stylistic rules.
'Those categorisations have kind of disappeared from how you would discover music,' says Knaggs. 'So maybe there's less pressure to be a 'rock band' purist. You watch the Bob Dylan film [ A Complete Unknown ], it's hilarious when they have those scenes where someone's shouting 'Judas' because he's going electric.'
'Indie', it seems, is now short for 'individualism', and Sports Team led the charge. Rice recently declared himself the inspiration for alt-rock's new embrace of onstage character and flamboyance, as well as for some mainstream pop acts. 'I know I was on Louis Tomlinson's styling board. Someone sent me that who was in his team. I was part of the PowerPoint.' Sports Team's zeitgeist appeal, he argues, is that of the rock gang that looks fun to be in. 'We didn't want to be the band that's, like, sunglasses inside, 'I'm miserable about being in a band and I'm a poet',' he says. 'That would seem like the least appealing thing in the world to us. People like that sentiment that a live gig isn't a recital, it's a show, it's carnival. On TikTok and stuff, you have to be out there and engaging. You can't be a reserved figure in the music industry these days, or an introvert. It doesn't work.'
You can't be a reserved figure in the music industry these days, or an introvert. It doesn't work
Alex Rice
Excitable and intelligent company, Sports Team are certainly a riot to be around. As the pints stack up, they hold forth on their oddest onstage attire (one festival provided Rice 'literally a Burger King outfit'). The heroism of Kate Nash, James Blake and Chappell Roan calling out today's rigged and exploitative music industry: 'They sign up loads of hungry young kids for ten grand for the rest of their lives,' Rice says, fresh from ditching the band's major label Island over its unviable advance for a six-piece band, 'you couldn't do that in any company.' And their love of the lost art of the rock'n'roll beef.
'The 1975, we'd take pops at them and it was so clear that Matty [Healy] is so into that stuff,' says Knaggs. 'He'd absolutely love it. We'd get into these really personal attacks going back and forth. Then you'd meet him at an award show and he'd be really into it, big hugs. He understands the joy of that kind of thing.' Friendly fire in the name of rock culture, then, is much more their kind of stand-off. Such good Sports.
'Maybe When We're Thirty' is out on 28 February; the album 'Boys These Days' is out on 23 May
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