Fresh off the back of new album Boys These Days, Sports Team take to the road over this winter. They stopped off at Wedgewood Rooms on Friday night ready to see how the south coast took to the new material.
Opening the night was Dublin newcomers Bleech 9:3. They are on a graft right now, having supported both Shame and Sports Team in the last week alone. Fans of Dead Pretties and Palma Violets, keep an eye on this lot. They possess a kind of energy that is much needed on the scene at the minute. Across a landscape of heritage-act driven festival line-ups and anniversary tours, Bleech are a breath of urgent and fresh air. Do you ever get that feeling at a show where you just know a band is going to be huge? With the way they’re going, it won’t be long before we see them gaining serious traction. The crowd were receiving them well. They fit nicely into the current line-up of great alternative rock bands coming out of Ireland now, and indeed across the channel too.
Two hours before doors, a story popped up on the Sports Team Instagram of a blazer in a charity shop. No preface, no context, no words. Of course, frontman Alex Rice stepped out on stage sporting that jacket. I’m not sure how many bands of today would engage in some light preshow charity shopping and what I’m sure was a brisk sweep through the cheapest ales Portsmouth had to offer them. It’s a reflection of the bands ability to keep things as authentic and raw as possible, perhaps the core of their appeal.
Raw it was- opener ‘The Game’, from 2022s Gulp!, set a precedent for the night ahead, sprawling guitars and a sopping wet front row (including us in the pit) thanks to Rice emphatically spitting out his drink. Rattling through album tracks and deep cuts alike, including ‘Happy (Gods own country)’, the crowd lapped up a whistlestop tour of their discography thus far. Human pyramids and an attempt to make the crowd turn into an Olympics rowing team were to follow, to varying success. The venue itself even became a soft play for some time, as Rice clambered up onto the speakers and sat looking a lot like a frog whilst delivering his love letter to Aston Kutcher, and then swung back down again from the lighting rig like they were monkey bars, almost pulling the whole sound system with him.
For a tour celebrating the release of a new record, the setlist was littered with older material. Only four of the new album tracks got a runout, five if you include the latest single ‘Medium Machine’ from the EP attached to the new record’s deluxe edition. Are Sports Team confident in their new album? You’d hope so. They’re on their third, with no sign of slowing, as the new material suggests. Or perhaps they just know what the fans want. Perhaps it’s a critical self-awareness that the objective of a good gig is to get in, smash the hits, convert those on the fence, and get back on the road. But the album has been out for months now- fans have had time to dig into it, absorb it, and let it get under their skin. With Sports Team, you never know if anything they say or do is tounge-in-cheek. They could tell you something till they’re blue in the face and then go back on it- because if you listen closely you’ll find the irony of it all at the heart of the music they make. Was this greatest hits show, or an album tour? The line remains blurry. But with Sports Team, that’s probably the point. A mashup of covers came mid-set, with the band riffing their way through ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ crossed with Cary Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ over the top towards the end. This is probably the first time anyone has ever uttered those words.
The band closed out the first part of the show with ‘Maybe When We’re 30’: a soppy departure from the bands usual sound into a life of settling down and taking things steady. After Rice left the stage, the band played on, and swooning guitars turned the end of the set into a shoegaze sludge of textured fuzz. But they were never going to leave without going Fishing, were they? A back-to-back assault of the hit track with ‘Here’s The Thing’, both first album cuts and fan favourites, closed out the night, before a romp through ‘Stanton’ brought the night to a close.
Friday night at the Wedgewood Rooms proved a lot of things, the stability of the speaker system under the weight of a fully grown man being one of them. Almost a decade into the game now, no matter where you stand on their quite frankly mixed bag of appeal, you can’t deny that Sports Team have one of the finest, energetic live shows around. If you can, try and get out there and get involved with a Sports Team gig: get kicked in the face in a pyramid of human limbs, spat on by the frontman, and make sure to throw yourself headfirst into the supports, because you never know what you might find.
