PEOPLE
Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip
There’s nothing conventional about the way these two British music makers go about their business. Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip both come from the same small town in Essex, Stanford-le-Hope, yet that has pretty much nothing to do with their partnership. No matter how it gets done, they are now three albums in, the latest of which, Repent, Replenish, Repeat, has recently been released on Rob da Bank’s Sunday Best Recordings. Although Dan moved away from Stanford-le-Hope, “I don’t think we either saw each other or talked there, anyway,” Pip told me, as he and Dan sat backstage at the Garage before a London date on their UK Tour. They had, in fact, become friends working at HMV in the sprawling shopping centre, Lakeside, near their Essex home. But Dan ultimately moved on and was doing “Stuff. Noise in general”, he calls it – productions and remixes influenced by his love of “Joy Division, New Order, Gary Numan. But of course Afrika Bambaataa was into Numan, too”. In the meantime Pip – named after a character in an Edward Lear poem – started to develop his spoken word and rap skills solo, mainly because “I didn’t know any producers”. Eventually he became aware that his old friend was working and sought him out, but says: “I didn’t really know anything about his background musically. But I think that’s what made it click.” Their first collaboration together, ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’, had an immediate impact, and was played as a demo by John Kennedy on XFM (where Pip now has a weekly show, The Beatdown, on Sunday nights). Although that word “together” seems to be something of a relative one. “I think we’ve only worked on music directly perhaps three times together in our whole career,” says Dan. “We are mainly bouncing ideas over email. If he took his beard off, I’d never even know him!” Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip are on tour in January lesacvspip.co.uk Photograph Orlando Gili Words Mark Webster