Alex Rice
There’s been an ongoing debate as to the state of UK guitar music for a while now, but Alex Rice is quite firm in his opinion. “Guitar music isn’t cool at the moment,” he laughs. “But that’s brilliant! Anything that stops being cool becomes important again. Like, why do people care about us? Why are you interviewing me?”
He may be questioning it, but as the enigmatic frontman of six-piece indie band Sports Team (completed by guitarist and songwriter Rob Knaggs, guitarist Henry Young, drummer Al Greenwood, bassist Oli Dewdney and keyboardist Ben Mac), the group, who first met while studying at Cambridge University, have been crafting their unique position amongst other upcoming UK guitar bands over the last two years.
At a time when other guitar bands making waves are the likes of post-punk outfits such as Shame and Fontaines DC, Sports Team are offering something a bit different and a whole lot more light-hearted, and it’s an aspect that has seen them penned as the underdogs of the UK guitar scene.
When they booked a headline slot at Scala back in September 2018, a tweet pointing out how they had less Twitter followers than the venue’s capacity launched a huge online campaign spearheaded by the group in which they successfully used gimmicks and huge performance promises to sell the London venue out. But all the pageantry around their first big headline slot has left many writing the group off as an almost kitsch act. “It genuinely worries me,” Alex muses. “Like where is that line? But you never want to lose that, because it’s really fun being in a band with six of your mates!”
Fun is the overwhelming factor of all that Sports Team do. From the music they make to the fan community they’ve cultivated (complete with their own WhatsApp group), they’ve always strived to create a party around whatever they do. “I really think we come from a different place where other bands aren’t coming from,” Alex explains. “Rather than assuming your mates would come down, our mates hate our band. They think we’re shit. They don’t like guitar music. We had to drag them down! We’ve always had to appeal to a crowd that doesn’t like guitar music. It’s made us more ambitious about what we’ve had to do. You have to do a dance, have a joke, have an afterparty, do some weird stunts, to make it more enjoyable!”
It’s a fact that has established Sports Team as beloved to many, but whereas their peers remain stone faced and are vehemently and bluntly addressing the issue modern society faces, their uplifting bops and humour-ridden performances have often seen them branded as “bizzare” or “eccentric”, the sincerity in their messaging overshadowed. “The audience that you’re sing- ing to don’t need to be told that Tories are evil,” Alex states passionately. “I feel patronised when I hear that and I think fans do too! It’s something that is lost with our band. We’ve been knocking on doors for Labour for years, and it’s just so easy to wear a ‘Fuck Boris’ t-shirt. As much as we agree with the sentiment, our fans - by and large - are 16/17 and why you put a subtle message to them, they get it and they thank you for not patronising them. We just talk to them like normal people!”
Instead, Sports Team lace their political and social commentary within their descriptions of the mundane middle England cities they grew up in. Influenced by poets such as John Betjeman, over the handful of singles and two EPs they’ve released - 2018’s “Winter Nets” and this year’s “Keep Walking!” - they romanticise middle Eng- land, glamourising things like seaside towns, flip screen Motorolas and roundabouts on the M5. Upcoming new track “Races”, Alex explains, is about “the kind of guy who has an enamel glass vase of Diana on their mantlepiece. It’s social commentary. It’s Brexit.”
It’s a standpoint that Alex hopes will be more easily seen in their upcoming debut album, set for release in March next year. In comparison to their previous releases - visceral, energetic singles normally released around a performance and pumped up with various bows and whistles to signify this - he’s hopeful that it will show the band’s songwriting MO more clearly to the masses. “It’s the first time we’ve had the opportunity to not go for a single, to put, like, manifesto pieces on there, because I worry that people see it as a bit silly,” he confides. “It always strikes us as odd because we always just assumed that people would get the message. It’s hard because you have to really spell it out sometimes. Blunt messages translate quite well. I think when you hear the album, there’s a lot of tracks that are poetic and more what we’re about.”
“No one quite gets why we need to talk about Sports Team,” he smiles. “No one really gets it. But when the album gets Top 5 that’ll be the ulti- mate thing. But we like being the underdogs!” he assures me, his thoughts flitting to and fro just as energetically as he does on stage. “I always want to be the underdogs, because it means we’re do- ing something different, and if we weren’t doing something different it would be boring.”
Photography - Timo Kerber
Fashion - Doug Broad
Hair - Hiroshi Matsushita
Skin - Theresa Davies
Production - Federica Barletta
Photography Assistant - Elliot Baker
Man About Town
