Album Review: The Sports - Reckless

Emerging from the mid-70s Melbourne milieu which also developed the likes of Paul Kelly and Joe Camilleri, and actually beat the UK’s pub rock scene to the same musical ground, The Sports fell together as a rockabilly-flavoured R&B band of almost immediately huge live reputation.

As great as some of the songs on their debut album are, Reckless is the product of a band not quite settled on what it wants to be – the purist twang of Ed Bates’ guitar increasingly a bit out of place as the pop sense was beginning to take over. Highlights like Mailed It To Your Sister and Cruisin’ In A Citroen still have some retro flavour to them. However, the band’s first mainstream single, Boys! (What Did The Detective Say?) is certainly a bit more Elvis Costello than Eddie Cochran. Conversely, many of the bonus tracks of this reissue are live shows from early in the evolution, and are often blistering – even as they take to covers from old soul (Chain Of Fools) to then-contemporary Graham Parker songs learnt from the albums they’d just picked up from the local import record shop – the last bit of that sentence may make no sense at all to younger viewers.