Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip

Despite growing up in the same Essex village Stanford Le Hope, dan le sac and Scroobius Pip were merely passing acquaintances before sharing a Christmas season working at the Lakeside branch of HMV. After a brief creative courtship – sharing Myspace links and remixes – their very first collaboration struck gold. Hot off the CDR burner, their first song Thou Shalt Always Kill was sent to XFM’s John Kennedy in demo form and within 24 hours Kennedy had played the track on his show. Pip swiftly set up a myspace page with their solitary track… “Suddenly it went crazy - everyone was emailing the track to other people, so the only thing to do was borrow £200 and make a video.” That video has now chalked up 3.5million views on YouTube and the single’s hastily arranged release on Lex cracked the Top 40.


Shunning the inevitable major label overtures, Messrs le sac and Pip opted to sign to Rob da Bank’s Sunday Best label, ensuring that their critically acclaimed debut album became one of the leading independent releases of 2008. Released in May ’08, Angles arrived just 12 months after the first fruits of their partnership had hit the airwaves. The duo’s unexpected rise saw them working on tracks in the back of Pip’s Toyota Space Wagon, as they journeyed between a growing list of festival, TV and radio engagements. That this ad-hoc germination should produce such a cohesive and thought-provoking debut album, is testament to dan le sac’s production work and the enduring appeal of Pip’s word play.


Angles entered the Top 40 and for the next 18 months the duo toured Europe and the US to an expanding live following. Visually and musically dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip defy any prefab industry model, their towering structures of Casio enthused electro-hip-pop often cutting against the conventions of Radio programming. And yet they have become airwave and chart regulars, their first album providing the singles Beat That My Heart Skipped, Look For The Woman and the Radiohead sampling A Letter From God To Man. Their 2010 follow-up, the beat heavy lit-pop tour de force The Logic Of Chance, followed its predecessor into the Top 40 with a raft of critical acclaim and a bewildering amount of radio play for a pair whose sound stubbornly refused to 'fit in'. With the free-flowing opener Sick Tonight, old school dancefloor hip-hop of The Beat and the euphoric Italo-disco of Get Better, le sac Vs Pip continued to conduct a great leap forward in alternative conscious pop.


Now the presenter of a weekly Hip Hop and Spoken Word show on XFM, Pip’s self released solo album in 2011 also reached the Top 40. Following solo albums from both Dan and Pip, the duo return with in October with new album Repent Replenish Repeat and a sold out UK tour.