Sports Team: ‘They pointed the gun at our tour manager... we took cover’

Fresh from a too-close experience of armed robbery in the US, the flamboyant indie band tell Mark Beaumont about their new album, America as the new Roman empire, and being on Louis Tomlinson’s mood board. Many UK bands have broken America; few have seen its civilised facade so quickly shattered. No sooner had Sports Team landed in the US last December to start a tour prepping their third album Boys These Days than their first breakfast at a Californian gas station was interrupted by a concerned citizen rushing in to tell them their van was being broken into.

Intrepid drummer Al Greenwood was halfway across the forecourt, filming the robber as evidence, before she realised she’d brought an iPhone to a Glock fight. “Our tour manager [Lauren Troutman] was ahead of me, running towards them and shouting, asking them to stop,” she recalls, clearly shaken at the memory. “I saw quite immediately that they were carrying something that Lauren hadn’t seen.”.

Like the more crossfire-savvy Americans on the scene, Greenwood took cover behind a car, hysterically screaming for her tour manager to get down. “Eventually they pointed the gun at her,” she says. “She backed away, and we took cover in Starbucks, and they proceeded to load out all of our personal belongings, which was very upsetting to watch.”.

For fans back home watching one of rock’s most dramatic ever TikToks – an acoustic album showcase in an unkempt kitchenette this was not – Greenwood’s post provided hard-hitting evidence that US gun crime could affect anybody. This was a devil-may-care art rock six-piece from London and Margate (via Cambridge University), famed for performing lighthearted tunes referencing Ashton Kutcher and the M5 motorway while dressed in toreador outfits, Eighties pop garb or psychedelic tank tops. Over seven years as one of indie rock’s great rising hopes, in songs slathered in literate wit and comedic metaphor, they’ve wryly dissected the modern British malaise on two Top 3 albums – the Mercury-shortlisted Deep Down Happy (pipped to No 1 by Lady Gaga in 2020) and Gulp! (2022). Now here they were, this most harmless, middle-class and English of bands, dropped slap bang in the middle of NCIS: Los Angeles.

For the band itself, though, the experience rammed home the vast gulf in attitude towards guns at home and abroad. “You could just be in a hold-up and the Starbucks staff were so chill about it,” Greenwood says. An emergency call to the police resulted not in a screaming cavalcade of squad cars to the rescue but a referral to an online report form; within days their ordeal was being commandeered by the right-wing US media to attack California governor Gavin Newsom, an early proponent of defunding the police. “Fox News were going to send a Foxmobile to pick me up and take me to LA to do the Martha MacCallum show [The Story with Martha MacCallum],” says singer Alex Rice, now safely ensconced with his jovial bandmates in a pub in the relatively crime-free utopia of Clapton, east London. But when the band posted their video to US gun-control website Everytown, creating a risk of them espousing some anti-gun sense and decency on-air, the interview was pulled, even as the Foxmobile was on its way.

The robbers took personal belongings, passports and laptops but the band’s instruments were secure in the back of the van, so Sports Team were able to complete the tour as planned. But as their story spread, the illogic of the USA’s gun religion bewildered them. “People, in all seriousness, would be like, ‘if only someone else in that petrol station had another gun. We could have solved this issue’,” says guitarist Rob Knaggs. “You’re like, ‘that would not have solved anything! A gunfight in a petrol station?’” “It would have been amazing to pull an assault rifle,” says Rice, a bass-voiced man who lives permanently on the tipping point between informed contemplation and uproarious laughter. “We should have an armoury in the splitter van, A Team sort of stuff.”.

With supernatural serendipity, Sports Team were held up while preparing the release of their latest single “Bang Bang Bang”. Drilling down into US gun culture, it casts a withering eye over the nation’s racially motivated killings, incel acts of revenge, gun shows, assault weapon open-carriers and crazed mall shooters. Although Rice argues that the song captures the intricacies and juxtapositions of the issue, rather than engaging in knee-jerk European condemnation.

“You can’t judge it the same way you would here,” he says, “[it’s so] embroiled in the culture.” Knaggs agrees. “It’s almost seen as like the printing press there in a bizarre way, this accessory of freedom, free speech and democracy … With the assault weapon stuff, though, you are an idiot if you think there’s any real need for domestic [use]. An AR-15 isn’t a hunting rifle – you’re a moron. It’s a weapon designed for Vietnam conflict, it’s designed to basically stop loads of people at the same time.”.