Sports Team by Lauren Maccabee
Sports Team, Laura Marling and Porridge Radio were some of the Mercury Prize nominees performing on the BBC last night ahead of the winner being announced later today.
Sports Team aired Here’s The Thing – one of 2020’s best singalongs taken from their nominated debut album Deep Down Happy – while Laura Marling performed the title-track of Song For Our Daughter and Porridge Radio picked Sweet from their Secretly Canadian debut Every Bad.
“It’s in the lyrical realm where Sports Team differentiate themselves: songwriter Rob Knaggs has an observational eye like Messrs Turner and Cocker, yet unlike those two giants his experience is one as a member of the middle class rather than the working,” our 8/10 review of Deep Down Happy reads.
“Though the band are surely loath to be viewed through a class prism, kudos to him for not hiding from this fact, as it’s no less valid an experience than relying on Universal Credit. Through singer Rice, Knaggs laments the boredom of chain pub The Slug & Lettuce, for example. The only real moment for pause on the album, the piano-led Long Hot Summer, contains passionate vocals and the timeless lyric: ‘There’s nothing for me in this town’.”
