A gloriously giddy, goofy evening with indie rock’s next big thing
Pop Sports Team De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-sea
★★★★★
Next weekend, Sports Team will perform to thousands at Reading and Leeds Festival. To warm up for that, they played to a handful of devoted fans on a drizzly Thursday evening on a rooftop in Bexhill-on-sea.
It wasn’t quite the ideal atmosphere for sunny festival-ready anthems like ‘Long Hot Summer’, but it still felt like a good spot for the six-piece band, for two reasons. Firstly, because it encapsulates the English mundanity that their indie rock affectionately mocks, in lyrics about Wetherspoons, Aldershot Community Gardens and motorways. (“He fails to notice a mini-roundabout,” frontman Alex Rice sings on ‘M5’, a giddy anthem that would have raised the roof, if we weren’t already dancing on it.)
The second reason is that it’s through intimate gigs like this that they have quietly developed an extraordinary grassroots following since forming at Cambridge University in 2017. Their early shows often ended with the band inviting the audience home with them, or out to the pub. These days, fans are invited to join a Whatsapp group and an annual bus trip to Margate.
The dedication of a largely teenage and refreshingly unblokey fanbase – with a bit of support from Lewis Capaldi – took their Mercury Prizeshortlisted debut album to No 1 in the midweek charts last year, until it was narrowly beaten down from the top spot by Lady Gaga. Somehow, a group specialising in an unfashionable brand of upbeat guitar rock has become hotter than “a burning British neck/ on an August evening” (as Rice sings on ‘Here It Comes Again’).
It’s true that there’s been a recent resurgence in guitar music, but the most prominent acts – such as Irish post-punks Fontaines DC – take it very seriously indeed. By contrast, Sports Team radiate a goofy, unpretentious joy. Well, most of them do: Ben Mack, a po-faced keyboardist/percussionist with a black-and-white dyed buzzcut, shakes a tambourine as if he’s auditioning for a late Beckett play.
Rice frolicked around like a clean-cut Iggy Pop (if that’s not an oxymoron), strutting like a peacock, prancing like a horse and windmilling his arms in the air. At one point he seemed worryingly close to attempting a stage-dive.
Technically an “in-store” gig for a record shop downstairs, a warm-up before a UK autumn tour, this brief one-hour set was more an amusebouche than a full meal, but one that bodes well for the future: ‘The Game’, a new song from their as-yetunrecorded second album, sounded as good as anything they’ve written.
Never short of self-belief, back in 2018, with just one EP to their name, the band looked into booking Wembley Arena for 2021. From a Bexhill rooftop Wembley still looks an awfully long way away, but Sports Team are heading in the right direction.
Their lyrics dwell affectionately on mini-roundabouts and Wetherspoons