When we first got in touch with Sports Team about an interview, we planned to meet up during their stop in New York on their biggest tour yet. In light of a pandemic, tour was cancelled and we had a zoom session instead.

V chatted with Sports Team members Alex Rice, Robert Knaggs, and Al Greenwood about the current state of their lives post isolation, impulsive hair bleaching, and putting on the greatest show on Earth. 

V How are you coping with social distancing at this moment? 

Rob Knaggs: I think we’re just bored really. I’ve bleached my hair.

Alex Rice: We miss pubs! Coming from thinking we’d have our album out many weeks ago, and thinking we’d be out in the U.S. touring right now. So being at home and in your sister’s room where there’s the best Wifi. 

 

V: Have you been working on any new music to pass the time? 

AR: Yeah, when it [the quarantine] first happened, we got ourselves a studio in rural England and we got a lot of album two done before the counsel shut that down. 

 

V: I saw you guys did a talent show on Instagram, tell us a bit about that.

Al Greenwood: I think we were just trying to come up with a guy to engage with our fans. We generally keep pretty close contact with them, we have a Whatsapp group and there’s quite a nice little community. I think we envisioned a more streamlined, unite the nation talent contest but we had some good highlights. The kid that did a backflip was really good. 

RK: I think we were just trying to entertain ourselves more than anything. You do get quite bored of each other’s company so you turn to the internet and kind of regret it after about ten minutes. 

AG: For Rob’s birthday we had a gigantic zoom party with like two hundred people, and it was the most chaotic thing I’ve ever been involved in. Ended up being a game of who can shout the loudest. But I’ve had a few DM’s asking for another, so maybe we should do that.

 

V: What has been your quarantine soundtrack? 

AR: I got quite obsessed with Art Garfunkel the other day, diving deep into his discography. He is a manic, when you see his hairstyle you kind of think, oh that adds up. There’s a band called Sorry that we also really like who just put an album out.

AG: I went on a very long, rainy walk yesterday and listened to Lou Reed’s album ‘New York’ which was relatively cathartic and quite intense. 

 

V: You are often compared to other British bands such as The 1975 and have been notoriously labelled an indie band. How do you think being labelled so early on and put into a category has affected your band?

AR: We think we’re a rock band. I think at the moment, for a band who does what we do, puts on a show and makes an event, we’re all about live shows. The album was made to be played live and I don’t think there are a lot of points of comparison for that at the moment. A lot of the bands we listen to are American bands like Parquet Courts, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed and they have visceral driving angry guitar but are very lyrical.  

 

V: Tell us about your debut album coming out in June.

RK: The tricky thing for us is that we wrote it to play live, and now we won’t be able to for seemingly another six months. For the past two years our songs have been played live before we recorded any demos, so it’s definitely a live album. 

AR: We all moved in together in London two years ago, and for us that was always the dream. Move to London, be in a band, live it up. We planned for 150 tour dates, so the way it’s actually been written was between sleeping on rehearsal room floors and living pretty scrappy for a year. I think the deep down happy bit is a bit questioning, finding an alternative mode of living that makes you joyful.

AG: It’s quite interesting now to view it retrospectively, and inevitably people want to know what the album is about, but the reality of it is it really is the direct result of having limited time. It’s definitely a collection of what we were doing at the time. It wasn’t set out to be a concept album, and being on the road so much last year and the energy that comes from that is quite unique in a way. In contrast, we would struggle to recapture that with the place we’re at now, having almost unlimited time to make the next one. 

 

V: Do you have any specific goals for after quarantine? Or any goals you hope this album will lead to?

RK: What we really want is to play bigger shows. The business side has never really interested us, we just want to play live. We’re in a band so we can travel with your friends and play rock music, badly, to as many people as we can. Just to be able to carry on doing what we’re doing and make another record.

AR: It’s amazing to get radio plays and see streams racking up, but it’s all completely abstract until you’ve got people singing the words back at you and destroying themselves to your song. 

RK: We just want to do dumb guitar solos on stage.

AG: Travel again.

RK: And see our friends.

 

V: Your music videos are very theatrical, how does the process of creating a concept for a video go? Is it something you think about when working on the music or does it come after?

RK: It comes after.

AR: With most of them, we have ideas of what we think could be fun to do, and our mate Kris Rimmer, who’s more like another member of the band, helps us do them. A lot of the ideas are things we kind of want to do anyway, like for one of them we hosted a real wedding. It ended up being a weird show room for actors out of work but that was the fun of it. Some of the videos are just a day out. 

RK: The theatrics are really just Alex being himself. You know, his dancing and wacky antics. We love it though, it’s a day we get to go and do something weird, so we try and enjoy that side of it as much as we can.

AG: We recently tried to make a video in lockdown, and we’re spread all around the country so I think it made us realize most of the fun is just pissing around with your mates. When you’re in your room with your Iphone propped up on a chair, it becomes quite dry quite quickly. 

 

V: What’s next for you guys?

AR: It looks like they might open up some tiny venues, and it’s always been our dream to hit every little city that never gets a lot of music in the UK, or the US, or Europe, wherever it is. Growing up you had to go to London and catch the train to see a good show. 

AG: There’s a heritage in Northern Scotland where they do shows on all the tiny islands, so if you live in the area you just go whether or not you have any interest in the band. That would be fun.

RK: Even if it’s shows of twenty people. I don’t think any of us can imagine going six months or a year without playing. Hopefully we’ll be able to play the record live in some way.

AG: And get back out to the states as soon as possible. 

 

V: What is the one thing you want people to know about Sports Team?

AR: It’s the best live show in the world. The greatest show on Earth.

AG: The greatest show on Earth, yeah [laughs].