“The cheese sometimes gets up to 70 miles an hour,” explains Chris Anderson, the cheese-rolling champion that stars in British buzz band The Maccabees’ video for their new single “Can You Give It.”  The clip celebrates a peculiar addition to U.K. sport tradition: tumbling curds in competition down the hills of the English countryside. “There’s this festival to celebrate the making of cheese in Gloucestershire and people risk life and limb—broken legs and arms are really common—just chasing a wheel of cheese down a really steep hill,” Maccabees’ frontman Orlando Weeks told Interview magazine. “The winner gets to keep the cheese. And that’s it.”

The images in “Can You Give It” have a documentary authenticity, as the video was filmed entirely at the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling And Wake, an event held annually on the May Spring Bank Holiday in the U.K. famous cheese making region of Cotswolds.  Some trace cheese rolling alternately back to the Phoenicians and the Romans; others claim it is descended from pagan spring rituals. Its pop-culture profile seems to be growing, as evidenced by various mentions of cheese rolling on TV shows like ER and Gilmore Girls; there are also, naturally, online versions of the game. Regardless of  growing awareness -  competitors travel all over the world to spin the wheel at Cooper’s Hill – cheese rolling remains a uniquely veddy English pastime that survives from era to era. “It’s just weirdly British, and worth celebrating,” Weeks says. “When the war was going on and there were rations they did the same thing except it was a fake cheese because they didn’t want to waste cheese rolling it down the hill.”