Itchy catches up with Dan Le Sac

In some ways, Dan Le Sac is the louder half of the musical marriage he and Scroobius Pip form, although without being particularly vocal...

Itchy wonders what he will have to say for himself, but any fears that we are chatting with quiet half of the duo are soon dispelled. Le Sac is quite the chatterbox.

'I can answer Pip's questions. I know all his answers anyway.'

Dan may be able to talk for England on subjects as diverse as Billy Bragg ('he may not be a radio darling or a video darling, but he still sells 200 tickets wherever he plays') and Nietzsche ('misunderstood'), but he admits to being camera shy.

'I'm in Thou Shalt for 3 or 4 seconds, my hands are in Beat That My Heart Skipped, maybe my face, in Look for the Woman my face appears on the TV screen and in Letter from God I am a poster. I'm just not a performer.'

Having seen how intense the live shows are, this sounds like modesty. Surely he must enjoy performing on some level?

'In an emotional sense and a business sense, live is what it's all about. It pays my rent and it makes me happy.'

In that case, it's good to hear that the duo spent September touring around the USA to promote the release of their album there.

They appeared on the Carson Daly late night show, going out live across the states, although Dan is more excited that they got to play with hip-hop artist Sage Francis, who is also the boss of their US label, Strange Famous Records.

After a gruelling schedule of 23 gigs in 24 days there must have been a few bust-ups?

'No, we don't argue. We just choose not to talk to each other.'

The tour was to promote the release of their album in the States, where the pair had already caused controversy when Thou Shalt was released there.

'It was at the same time as a high school shooting. We spent about two weeks emailing students saying we're not telling people to kill, we're saying you should always perform to your very best – it's hip-hop vernacular.'

Scroobius Pip VS Dan Le Sac's unique mixture of spoken word, hip-hop, electro, drum'n'bass and rock already baffles genre boundaries here at home. Playing to US audiences must have been daunting.

'When people don't get told it's hip-hop, they get it. When they get told it's hip-hop, they start criticising it on hip-hop terms, and you can't really put us into a genre.'

Which, Dan admits, doesn't always make things easy. In the absence of the waxing lyricist, it seems proper to find out a bit more about the emergence of Dan's own sound. He must be pretty pleased with his success after feeling 'inadequate' in school music lessons.

'I played a bit of guitar, a bit of piano – but neither very well. They had an Atari, a really old computer with a bit of music software and a synth. So I always ran off and hid in the little room and I learned how to programme and produce before I learned to play.'

Le Sac was born in Braintree, on the same ward as Liam Howlett of The Prodigy. He thinks their shared landscape of rural Essex had something to do with the fact that they both ended up creating music that doesn't put you in mind of an English country garden.

'Because there was no music scene – I came from a town of 100,000 people, but two pubs – you had to dig to find music. The music that we make is part of that quest to find music that excited us that wasn't Kylie Minougue.'

Le Sac combines influences from indie, blues, electronica and drum and bass to come up with the unique beats behind Pip's poetry. Itchy has to ask - how would he describe their sound?

'The only description I've got for it is English. We're really good at taking other cultural references into our music. If you're living in Burnley, no matter what kind of music you make, you're gonna hear Indian, Asian influences and you can't help but pick those up.
So I'm just a funnel for all the music that's come to me through living in England.'

Quite. Pip's outspoken lyrics cover all aspects of modern British life from music idolatry to self-harm to Coca–Cola to boycotting the Oxford English Dictionary.

Their latest track, Letter from God to Man, dealt a scathing attack on humankind's lack of respect for the planet and excessive warmongering in the name of religion.

Pretty heavy stuff. Would it be fair to call them pessimists?

'I think we're pro-active, because we actually write songs rather than just sitting there bitching about things.'

Pip uses his image – somewhere between preacher and 'terrorist', as Dan calls him – to point out the inherent problems with religious fundamentalism, but also as a wake up call to apathy, in songs like Angles.

But Dan insists that despite Pip's didactic tendencies, they aren't trying to tell people what to do. They're just trying to get them to think for themselves.

'Music only makes a difference if musicians themselves are honest. Putting your politics and your actual emotional beliefs in a song is more important than people reading about it.'

For now, Dan is looking forward to their Loud in Libraries tour around the UK, kicking off at the British Library on Halloween. Could this be part of the government's new scheme to make librairies 'cool' and unintimidating to modern youth, Itchy wonders?

For now though, Dan is just happy to have the 'best job in the world' and to know that people are enjoying what he does.

It's kind of nice, because I'm the only person in the world who would come up with those certain sounds. If someone else was working with Pip it would be a different album even if all the words were identical.

After all, without the backing of Mr Sac, Scroobius Pip would just be another weirdy-beardy spoken word sort, opining into the mike. You can't really dance to that, can you?

For tour dates and tunes, go to www.myspace.com/lesacvspip

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