Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip come from the UK and they are brilliant. They recently visited Seattle for the second time and while Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip had their dinner before the evening’s show, I asked them all sorts of questions. Things about tattoos, the video for Beat That My Heart Skipped, and what they think of Prince.
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Q: I saw your video based on Cribs – it was fantastic.

Scroobius Pip: Glad you liked it. It’s a nice little house.

Q: What kinds of things have you cooked on your George Foreman Grill?

SP: I cook anything but then I got dragged into the actual George Foreman brand, like pork and beefsteaks and turkey. They are really low fat. I don’t really eat any fruit or vegetables so making eating meat healthier for me is a winner. I’m healthy, as you can see my dinner is 4 chunks of meat [he was eating chicken satays].

Q: You need your protein. Do you take vitamins though?

SP: Not really. I’ve started to be healthier and eat more vegetables now but by anyone else’s standards I’m unhealthy.

Q: What kinds of things do you read, like on the road?

SP: I can’t read in vehicles.

Dan Le Sac: Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh. But every now and then I pick up The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Q: I looked up your hometown, Stanford-le-Hope, and I couldn’t find too much on it but there was a guide online to hooking-up spots.

SP: Really? I need to look that website up.

Q: Is there a big singles scene there?

SP: Not really. There’s not enough of anything for there to be any kind of scene. I think there’s like probably eight pubs, a few takeaways, a pool hall . . . there’s a library, it’s a small one but it’s decent. Not a lot going on there. My mom runs the libraries in the area – that’s how I know they’re good libraries. They’ve got our album in there, so it must be good.

Q: I’ll have to look at the site again and see if maybe the library is one of the hook-up spots.

SP: Yeah, it might be. Kind of bizarre.

Q: I read you’ve been doing a cover of Sugababes on the tour.

SP: Yes, the Sugababes’ Push the Button. A brilliant pop song.

DLS: We don’t do it in America though.

SP: Not many people know who the Sugababes are [in America]. We’ve got three covers that we do and only one of them is by an American. [People think] that we’re doing it ironically but we’re not.

Q: Dan, you studied photography at University of Reading? Was it commercial or art?

DLS: Photography and Digital Imaging – a general thing, somewhere in between useful and not useful. It was cool. It was a nice way to spend three years of my life although I worked full time while I was at Uni.

Q: Did you two meet at University?

SP: No, we met at College properly– before Uni. Then we both went off to Uni, then we met up again at HMV when we were working in the record shop. Then we re-met up again on myspace. We’ve had a long career in meeting and losing each other.

Q: I was reading you do all your song writing via email?

SP: All over email. We’ve still never sat down really and written together. There’s not as many conflicts and you’re not on each other’s backs. To make a change to a beat or develop it could take ages, so while I’m sat there waiting for another chunk I’ll get anxious and annoyed. And Dan will bet annoyed because he’ll be aware that I’m waiting for this extra little bit. It works better to do it over email and give it the appropriate amount of time.


Scroobius Pip


Dan Le Sac

Q: I'm wondering, how many tattoos do you have?

SP: I’ve got four tattoos and two piercings, all hidden away.

Q: There’s one on your arm.

SP: That’s the battery compartment, where I keep my batteries. I’ve got one on my lip.

[He shows me the tattoo of his name on the inside of his lower lip.]

Q: Oh god. That’s awesome – that must have hurt.

SP: It was all right – it wasn’t that bad. It only took 10 minutes. Every one always assumes that but it only took ten minutes.

DLS: Whereas I’ve had my whole body tattooed. I’m mainly scar tissue.

Q: That’s going to give me nightmares. . . so, Prince. Is this someone you are both into?

DLS: I would say Scroobius is slightly more into Prince than I am. I’m more a greatest hits man.

SP: I worship him. I think he’s great.

Q: I noticed in your Cribs send-up you had a dvd of his videos. What’s your favorite Prince video?

SP: I’d like to go for Cream. It’s got this whole preamble before it starts. I haven’t watched any in a while because I’ve been on the road so much. I’m really into Darling Nikki at the moment as a Prince song. I’m not sure if there’s a video for that one – I’ll have to look when I get home.

DLS: Wasn’t the last time you watched that when you got pulled over by the police?

SP: We were on our way back from a gig, so it’s me and [friend] Paul and the driver. So they pull us over, open the back of the van and there’s me and Paul with no shirts on, drinking wine and watching Prince videos. It was a weird scenario. We’d played Brighton the night before and both of us had got tattoos to mark the tour. We’d sweated a lot with these fresh tattoos and they were dripping. The police just popped their heads and go, okay? That was a weird experience.

DLS: I led that.

SP: A good tour story.

Q: Prince will get you into trouble.

SP: He just makes you take your shirt off.

Q: Where did you find the girls for the Beat that My Heart Skipped video?

DLS: We found them on myspace.

SP: I put a bulletin out saying that we needed some girls for a video. The director got a couple of professional pole dancers in for some of the pole dancing. It was meant to be set in a strip club but not your typical one. We didn’t want bleached blonde [hair] and fake breasts . . . we went for more alternative looking girls. The girl who’s playing the one who isn’t a stripper, the one at the bar being hit on, is a singer called Paloma Faith. Again as we have a very low budget or no budget it needs to be favors. All of our videos have included myspace bulletins.

Q: It was good casting.

SP: One of the girls, Nina Kate is on the cover of Bizarre Magazine. She’s got a clothing company. The latex stuff (in the video) is from her clothing company. It works as a good advert, so that’s cool.

Q: How would you describe the look of Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip?

SP: Hairy. I wear a hat sometimes. I like leather ties – I always wear a leather tie on stage.

DLS: I’ve recently moved to wearing a round-necked tee from a long time wearing a collared tee.

SP: A polo shirt was typical of Dan for a while.

DLS: Oh – balding. I’m losing my hair. That’s part of our look.

SP: It’s true. I think that [Dan’s] sideburns are getting bigger and bigger and longer and longer and turning into a beard as the hair disappears on top in an Einstein-esque manner.

DLS: And that guy was a hit with the ladies.

SP: He was.

DLS: [Speaking of] brains not brawn – Stephen Hawking. He managed to leave his wife and cheated on his wife with his nurse. And then married her and had two kids.

SP: I don’t think that’s an indication of brains over brawn. Callum Best is a big hit with the ladies in the UK and he’s an idiot, but he’s very handsome. Whereas Stephen Hawking has a lot of money, which I think influences the deal on that kind of thing in general.

DLS: I don’t know how much money I’d need – he does need a lot of looking after.

SP: But still that’s a good wage. My girlfriend’s a carer so she looks after people like Stephen Hawking on far less. [For Stephen Hawking] it’s like I’m your carer but also your girlfriend. That’s all the girl had to do, surely.

DLS: They had two kids!

SP: They did not. They may have adopted two kids or may have built two kids.

Q: He’s so smart though I don’t know what anyone would talk to him about.

DLS: Jazz – he likes jazz. You can talk silly voices. Famous cyborgs.

SP: I’m sure he could get any voice, so you could say tonight I want to have a chat with Sean Connery and he’ll type in as Sean Connery. That’s how he gets the ladies.

DLS: His voice in his head now is that computer voice. He’s had it so long so when they tried to upgrade his computer system, they’d given him a new, more humanized voice and it freaked him out.

SP: I’ve heard about this before but I don’t think in sentences in my own mind. I don’t think, I wonder if I need to go to the toilet? Yeah, I might as well . . .

DLS: But when that sounds going out and coming back into his ear it was not sounding like him. We’ve had this conversation before and I couldn’t answer it, so I’ve spent some time waiting for this topic to come back up.

SP: There’s a podcast that Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington do – Karl wonders if people think in their own accents and use terminology in their heads that’s local to them. And they figured out, particularly the terminology thing, you don’t think, "Happen I will."

DLS: But there’s one school of thought that says that you do. [There are some people] who visualize their thoughts and others who word them out. Like I can’t imagine something, full stop. If he [Scroobius] walks away I can’t imagine him. I can describe him perfectly but I can’t get a clear, fixed image.

Q: I have been reading a lot about your beard, Dan. What is the ideal conditioner?

SP: Aussie Leave-In – you can leave it in. I haven’t got a lot of time – a lot of good conditioners you need to leave in to soak for 3-4 minutes and then rinse out. I’m an on the go guy.

Q: How did you come across the artist, Jock Mooney?

SP: We saw this little Hitler in a tutu figurine. There was some dumb luck with the line Thou Shalt Always Kill and Hitler stealing Nietzsche’s ideas of having to destroy to progress. . .


Album art for Thou Shalt Always Kill.

Q: What’s the story behind Waiting for the Beat to Kick In?

SP: It was originally a rambling spoken word piece. All the people I meet in it are film characters. All the messages that they give are messages I learnt from that character in that film. I love films, films that have got a good meaning.
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I looked the characters up from Waiting for the Beat to Kick In and here are their respective movies:

Elwood P. Dowd = Harvey
Lloyd Dobler = Say Anything
Billy Brown = Buffalo 66
Walter Neff = Double Indemnity

They did not perform their cover of Sugababe’s Push the Button – instead they did a smashing cover of Prince’s Cream.

Currently they are touring in Europe.

Look at more photos from their Chop Suey show here.