Hello, Dear Readers. Remember Homeschool, that festival we held a few weeks ago? You know, the one with all the recorded performances from home, the one that got more viewers than people through the gate at Glasto – that festival. Well, while we loved every one of the performances, there was definitely one that stuck out, sent in by Spoort.
Their submission, hosted by ‘Michael Fabricant’ (“It was me in my girlfriend’s wig that she had from when she dressed as Princess Diana for a party,” laughs keyboardist Kingy) was part fake chat show, part music video, and gloriously silly. We like silly here at Dork HQ, so we thought we’d call up the band and see what they were all about.
“We’re all from a town called Hinckley,” starts drummer Ross. “Well, a couple are from Burbage, which is an even smaller village near Hinckley, but we’ll stick with Hinckley to keep things simple. It was a good town for hosiery back in the day, nice tights and good socks.”
“They had a Lazer Quest about 20 years ago too, that was pretty good,” Kingy chips in, completely deadpan. “But not much going on, to summarise. We basically met by all going to the same school, me and the bassist Dec knew each other from primary school and used to play together – we played in assembly once in Year 6, went down a storm. Well, I think it did anyway, although that could be nostalgia talking. Then we met Paul, our guitarist and singer in Year 8, and finally completed the set with Ross in Year 10.”
“I used to watch their band before we met properly though,” Ross explains. “I lived a few doors up from Dec, so I’d go and see their band, and then I told my dad I was gonna learn drums and play with them, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“Because we’ve been playing together since so early on, we all just sort of fell into liking each other’s music taste, especially as we were mainly playing covers of stuff by Arctic Monkeys and all that jazz. Then we morphed into some weird math rock band, and now we’re more into jazz and hip-hop. We’ve really evolved together as time’s gone by.”
This eclectic route to where they are shows on their EP, which puts a foot outside of the indie camp on a couple of occasions, not least with two rap features. “It just made sense to us, because we listen to so much hip-hop,” says Kingy. “And now that two of us live in London there are so many people that know someone who’s going to be able to spit something really good.
“I think genres are blurred and homogenised a lot more than they used to be, too, so I don’t see it as something that ‘out there’ for a band to do. People don’t listen to music in tribes as much as they did, every genre with a big fanbase used to be very much a closed identity – you just didn’t listen to anything else. That’s not the case any more, most people that listen to indie now are at least open to listening to hip-hop, and alternative R&B and indie are almost interchangeable with some bands, which is mad considering how different their origins are.” He pauses before adding: “It’s probably the internet, innit? Bloody internet, melding everything together.”
The internet may be responsible for the collapse of genre boundaries, but it’s also allowing the band to keep making music even though they’ve been in four different places for months now. “We’ve all managed to stay quite productive independently,” Kingy continues. “Which means we’ve got loads of demos kicking around which we can work on and put together, so hopefully we’ll have a full LP ready early next year. Obviously, that’s subject to change though, depending on everything that’s happening.”
“We’ve got some instrumental bits we haven’t edited too,” adds Ross. “We’ll probably start on those when we’re really desperate – we’re all just so bored! I think that’s the real reason we ended up making that outrageous video for the Homeschool festival, boredom. We’re all separated, and we’ve not got all our gear, so we’re quite limited really, and Kingy and I have always loved doing these skits and sketches, so we thought ‘why not?'”
“My character was an afterthought though, to be fair,” says Kingy. “I just let the wig guide me for the afternoon. I think it only took a day or two to make – and an hour of that was the band zoom calling me to try and work out how to frame the video correctly. Luckily Dec does videography and all sorts, so he made sure we didn’t look completely terrible. We couldn’t get together to record anything, but we all did our part.” There’s a heartwarming message there, Dear Readers, although we’re not entirely sure what it is.
Taken from the July issue of Dork. Spoort’s self-titled debut EP is out now.
Words: Jake Hawkes
