Sports Team are crawling out of their caveslash- studio to deliver to fans a new tour this autumn in the lead-up to their third album, Boys These Days, due early next year.
It’s been two years since they released their last album, Gulp!. When speaking to singer Alex Rice and guitarist Rob Knaggs, they admitted the band has evolved a lot and hope the fans are ready for their new sound.
Congrats on the two new singles! They are so different from what you’ve released before. How has it been, exploring a groovier sound?
Rob Knaggs: When we started, we were kind of trying to do the opposite of what people expected as a band. Originally, when we were starting out in London, everyone was doing this incredibly moody South London ‘I was born wearing sunglasses inside’ aesthetic.
As we’ve become a little more established, we’ve started trying to do something different. Not distancing ourselves from our [original] selves – we just didn’t want to do another song about a roundabout in Milton Keynes, set to 160bmp, with a section where you mosh and throw a beer at your mate in a crowd. Well, there’s still a lot of that on the record, but with the first singles we wanted to throw a real curveball out there.
How does it feel for yous, as a band, to change from that more traditional sound into this new one? You nervous? Excited?
Rob: I feel terrified, to be honest. When you’re making music, it’s always really great. As a band, you’re always just trying to have fun or amuse yourselves. Then you’ve got the three hours before your song is going to be played on the radio and you get this horrible, sinking feeling, like ‘Oh my God, what have we done?’ You always have that terror.
But on the whole, you are excited?
Alex Rice: Oh God, yeah. More than anything I’m excited to play live again. This tour coming up is what we’ve been most excited for for ages.
So you’re looking forward to getting back on the road, seeing what atmosphere the new songs will bring?
Alex: I still want them [our shows] to feel like they’re falling apart a little bit. It’s always creaking at the seams.
This record is more polished, probably more of a studio record. I think it’ll be fun to translate that into something live, a bit jolty and a bit all over the place.
Rob: I feel sometimes when you’re going to see a band it’s like you’re going to see a Powerpoint of their album. It’s like ‘Here you go, here is our album exactly as it sounds on record with some really high production graphics and some really moody looking people on stage not doing very much’.
When you’re playing live, I always think it’s just about the night in the room. It doesn’t really matter if you listen back the next day to your videos and it sounds a bit odd.
For us, it’s about playing the crowd rather than playing a perfect guitar riff.
For people who have tickets for this tour, or are thinking of getting them, what’s the atmosphere they can expect?
Alex: We want you to feel like it could be you on stage right at that moment. We want there to be no sense of divide.
We want to show that everyone has a little bit of something in them, and you can pursue it. You can do it with your mates and you can actually make stuff and it will be appealing. That amateurish feel to it.
Rob: You watch a video from back in the day of Franz Ferdinand at Reading festival and it’s fucking amazing. But that’s not because of how they’re playing ‘Take Me Out’, you know? That’s sort of fine. It’s because there’s 50,000 people in the crowd and they’re all losing their minds.
It’s more about the crowd than it is about the band. Your job as a band is to just provide the right conditions that allow people to neck eight pints and lose themselves.
Are you excited to come back to Glasgow?
Alex: Very genuinely, it is our favourite city to go to in the UK. We still have a lot of mates there. They’ll always come out. It’ll just feel like we’re home for a day, in a way. Seeing your mates, going down The Laurieston with all of them… it just makes our day.
Rob: It’s just a great city. I dunno what it is, when you go there… This sounds unbelievably corny. It’s like going home.
Sports Team play Glasgow’s SWG3 on 19th November. Tickets here.
Main Photo Credit: Bartek Szmigulski
