Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip – the lessbrighteyes interview

As soon as I opened my front door to go to the venue, it started lashing it down with rain. Thunder, lightning, the works. I thought to myself, “I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come”. Luckily, it wasn’t because I got to the venue and Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip were more than welcoming to a journalist like me. So, in the below interview you’ll find discussions about their new album, The Logic of Chance, their sold out UK tour, Deftones, Glastonbury, Jay-Z, the writing process and those infamous Pitchfork and DrownedInSound reviews. Enjoy.

How are you both feeling today?

Pip:  I’m feeling good. I had a day off yesterday but ended up doing some radio work and a book signing so it’s all good. Feeling a bit sleepy, but ready to get back on the road. Dan’s been feeling a bit rough – he’s got a cold and a bad back.

I guess it has been pretty cold recently!

Dan: I was fine this morning but it’s thanks to the rain in Portsmouth!

Pip: The rain brings everyone down.

So you’re feeling the strain of a long tour?

Pip: Hmm, the tour has been fantastic and every gig has been really good. Obviously, people generally say that but this tour has been amazing. Most of the tour has been sold out and the crowds have all been really up for it and every show has something to be excited about. So yeah, I’m not feeling the strain in that way. It’s better to be tired because of that than to be tired of a 9-5 office job and a commute to London so I can’t really complain.

Are there certain venues or places that you always look forward to visiting?

Pip: Kind of, but again with this tour, because it’s only two and a half weeks of the UK dates and we normally do three or four weeks, it is stripped down to all the ones that we’ve had really good shows at before, basically. It sounds so cheesy and fake but I look at the tour dates and think ‘aww yeah that one will be really good, that one will be really good’, all the ones we’ve had passionate and exciting fans at before.

You’ve been to Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms before, right? How’re you going to be doing things differently this time?

Pip: It’s a fair bit different. At that point we had the Living Room set, but now we have a load of new songs and Dan’s got a vastly changed set-up and it’s all quite developed.

How do you keep yourself occupied while on the road?

Pip: We haven’t really had a lot of time to kill on this tour. Normally there are big chunks of waiting around like on the previous tour, I just spent tons of time watching DVDs and playing games and I brought a few books with me. Other than a train journey to Glasgow, we’ve not had any vast amount of time.

Dan: We’ve had the entertainment of B. Dolan in our van.

Pip:  It’s hard to concentrate when there’s a big American just shouting at you and just freestyling about anything that goes past.

So he provides all the entertainment then?

Pip: Yeah. Sometimes against our will.

Dan: Just his raps, generally. He’s like “Hey YOU. YOU’RE in a VAN!” and so on.

If you had to describe a Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip show to someone who had never heard of you before, what would you tell them?

Dan: I’d lie. I’d find out what they like and would tell them it’s exactly like that.

Pip: When they get here, we’ll win them over anyway because we’ve got that kind of show. But no-one believes that when you tell them. You say, “Oh you’ll probably enjoy at least a bit of it” but they won’t believe you. We’ll trick them, lure them here then win their hearts.

Dan: Or kill them.

Pip: Yeah or kill them on their way out.

Dan: After they’ve purchased merch.

Of course. As long as they part with legal tender, it’s okay.

Pip: Damn right.

Dan: And we can get our merch back.

So, let’s talk about your new record, The Logic of Chance, the follow up to previous album Angles. When did you start writing for The Logic of Chance?

Pip: One of the songs on there we had written for the first album and there were points where we weren’t writing at all. It’s all been really broken up.

Dan: We’ve had ideas over the past two years.

Pip: Pretty early on after the last one I was writing tons and tons and then I kinda slowed down, then Dan started to write loads.

Did you find the writing process difficult, or does it all flow fairly naturally?

Dan: It’s a pretty natural process. With writing music you just write and write and you know sometimes you know it’s not very good or sometimes it’s great.

Pip: Either way, it’s good practice to keep working.

I take it you both draw from a wide variety of influences?

Pip: We draw influences from all over the place. My girlfriend gets annoyed because we’ll be watching a film, one word could be said and it’ll give me a little idea and I’ll be noting it on my phone and trying to concentrate again.

What about music artists? Old school stuff like Kool Moe Dee, Big Daddy Kane?

Pip: Not only hip-hop but a real variation. A lot of punk and jazz stuff – there’s a Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane song  called Lush Life that’s the inspiration to one of the lines in Sick Tonight which is a real drum-and-bass type party song. We’re just taking influence and inspiration from all over the place and not necessarily just going Q-Tip, KRS-One, Rakim and all the hip-hop people.

The new album has had both positive and negative reviews – do you ever read what the critics write about your music? Drownedinsound.com seemed to have a pretty damning verdict on it…

Pip: We get most reviews sent to us. For me it’s good to evoke such an emotion. If everyone liked it then either we’re not being covered in enough places if it’s only the people who want to review it, or…I dunno. The biggest selling records of the last decade in the UK were Dido and James Blunt. Very bland but therefore has mass appeal. I’m far more comfortable being a part of something that will split people – some people will like it, some won’t.

For every one person that hates it, one person will like it.

Pip: Yeah, exactly. And then another person that’s never heard of it. So there’s three people.

Dan: Reviews have an agenda. You can read a review in isolation, but you have to put it in a context of whom else that reviewer likes and reads and stuff. We had a really bad review of the first album on Pitchfork but this writer generally thought Puff Daddy was the greatest rapper of all time. People who read those publications religiously know the personalities of the writers so they’ll know whether to take it with a pinch of salt.

Pitchfork does seem pretty elitest.

Pip: Pitchfork is a pretty hipster site. It can be great; it can be a really good site.

Dan: Pitchfork and Drownedinsound, before [the latter] sold its soul to advertising and running lots of other sites not under the Drownedinsound brand like sports and all that that, but yeah before they did that, Drownedinsound had the potential to be a British Pitchfork but this sort of agenda-less journalism actually leads to massive amounts of agenda. The first Drownedinsound review disliked us on reasons unrelated to music. One interview we did where Pip said he liked Sage Francis, the writer said ‘Sage Francis is a racist’ so that makes us racists.

Pip: Obviously Sage isn’t a racist either so it’s all really twisted. It was all over this guy looking on a white power forum and they were discussing whether they it’s okay to listen to people like Sage who are white people making black music and this bunch of racists decided it was okay, so their individual opinion then makes Sage a racist and me liking Sage then makes us racists.

That sounds pretty pathetic.

Pip: It’s craziness. The one thing with the Internet is that it gives everyone a voice and everyone can express their individual opinions so you can’t really complain about that. Even if their opinion is shit.

Haha! Personally, my favourite track on the record is Inert Explosions. Could you tell me a bit more about writing this track and any meaning behind it?

Pip: It’s just about writers block. I thought I had writers block and then I realised it’s just because I’ve got an Xbox and some new DVDs and I wanted to watch DVDs and play computer games. I took myself out with a laptop and I literally just made myself write on that subject and about more than just playing with wordplay and structure and things. Strangely, it’s one of the ones I was least excited about on the album but that’s purely because it was kind of done as a writing exercise. We’ll often have more of an end goal when writing a song but this was more of an exercise in writing. Which is fine, and I can understand why a lot of people are liking this one, but for me it was one that I didn’t feel as connected to because there wasn’t that personal engagement. I was really pleased with it though as it was an enjoyable practice. A lot of it was picking particular words I liked rather than having some kind of story or template to fit them to. It was just being able to make them work and flow.

What about making the beats for it?

Dan: I loved it.

Was it difficult making it?

Dan: Nah, it was just 40 minutes out of my life writing a beat for the demo Pip wrote. It was one of those songs where it just happened. We were on tour in Germany, in the back of a train I think, and it was just something I doodled with and I really liked its simplicity.

Pip: It’s a weird one for us as a track because, when writing it, I didn’t know it would end up this way. It starts kinda straight away – normally when I get Dan’s beats I’ll leave a little bit of breathing space for the beat to start and develop whereas with this one, because of the way I was writing it, it wasn’t a story and didn’t have a particular mood – it was just the beat starting and the vocals straight in which is unusual for us.

It’s always nice to have a bit of variety though – you can’t always start with Dan’s beats and then yourself a little bit later.

Pip: It’s not that we always have a big intro but it’s rare that it’s literally two beats and then the vocals jumping in.

One of the good things about Logic of Chance is that was one of the very few albums to not leak to the internet before its release aside from the MySpace web rips.

Pip: Yeah, that’s a good way of pre-empting it, doing the whole MySpace thing a week early. It’s like, if you want to steal it then you can but it’ll be poor quality and you’re a dickhead for doing so. IT probably did leak in some places but I don’t think we’re of a high enough stature for it to be a big deal if it leaks. It’s annoying when things leak but I don’t think its one people will be risking their jobs over to leak it. When you have some big albums leaking, someone is going to lose their job because only a certain amount of people have the CD.

The new Deftones record leaked recently which wasn’t due out until May 17^th, so it’s out two months early on the internet. The label has had to bring the release date forward to May 4^th but that’s still a month and a half before its due out.

Pip: Fans of the Deftones are similar to us in a way because they have that kind of fanbase that will want to buy the record either way. Deftones seem like they have that kind of hardcore fanbase that will want to buy it anyway.

Dan: It’s not really the bands that care about the impact of a leak; it’s the label that pump money into them. With the Deftones, the marketing spent for it must be about $2.5m.

Pip:  You never know how good a bit of advertising it is for the upcoming Deftones album.

Dan: I wouldn’t put it past bands to leak their own albums anyway. If you can get a bit of press out of it and sell some tickets because that’s the only place where you see some money from anyway.

Pip: That’s where it counts for the bands, I guess. I personally wouldn’t want to do that because we’re on an independent label where we are very much working together but even if we were on a major, you wouldn’t blame a band by just thinking, “Yeah fuck ‘em”. Whatever label the Deftones are on, they will have their team around them but for the people at the top, they are just a product. It’s just something they are making some money. Not that we’re suggesting or heard that the Deftones leaked it themselves!

Still, someone is probably going to be taken into the back and shot. On Thou Shalt Always Kill, fom your previous album, you say ‘Thou Shalt Not Read NME’ but they’ve done interviews with you and reviews of your stuff. Don’t you find that a bit weird?

Pip: I think it’s very grown up of them.

Dan: They could have just gone, “Yeah fuck ‘em, let’s ignore them.”

Pip: They were one of the first to jump on it. They were one of the first things we were on a front cover for. Well it wasn’t a full front cover, it was in the corner, but we’ve been on it and that’s got. With Thou Shalt, there’s some lines that are very serious, there’s some that are half serious and a lot that aren’t serious at all. The NME one was at least half serious because at the time, I don’t know whether it’s fading now or not, but at the time it was a bible for these little kids and they would decide what’s good and what’s not good. Bands at the time, like Bloc Party – their first album was dope but by their second album came around they were already ‘the best band that’s ever been’. There’s so much pressure on this band and it’s like no – it’s a good album but it’s not the best album ever. They done this because I guess Radiohead were having some time off and Muse weren’t doing much and they needed another band to fill that gap of left-of-centre, guitar based band but with a bit of softness and sensitivity.

I think they still do that.

Pip: I’ve not kept massively up to date to tell you the truth.

Dan: The new editor is pretty good. Because the NME is a gender driven paper, it has a demographic that it likes to sell to. But she’s come in and paid attention to the fact that it could be more diverse and it could be fairer to people. Sometimes they do just over egg things when they don’t need to. They still sell 80-90k and they still are the most important resource for, at least guitar based music, in the UK and they need to keep hold of that by being a little bit more all encompassing.

All credit to her, I think it’s brilliant that a female journalist could rise so high and grab the editors position at NME. So what have you got in store for this summer? You’ve been confirmed for Rockness and Bestival, I take it you’ll be doing the summer festivals then?

Pip: We’re still waiting to hear from a lot of them to be honest. A lot of festivals will wait because we’re touring now and the album is just out so they’ll wait to see how the tour goes and it’s gone stupidly well. Most of the dates are sold out bar the odd two or three.

Dan: It’s three. So eleven out of fourteen.

Pip:  We’ll wait and see. We intend to do a lot of festivals. We’ve confirmed a lot of around the world festivals rather than UK ones at the moment. Last year we did a lot outside the UK so this year we do intend to cover the UK, that’s definitely on the agenda again. Last year we eased off on the UK ones because we didn’t have the new album done yet. We had done two years of the UK festivals constantly and it would have felt a bit shit to be like, “We’re back again for the third year with the same songs, come and see us again, it won’t be any different!” So we eased off consciously but we intend to do a lot this year.

Anything you can tell me about? Glastonbury?

Pip: Glastonbury is one of the ones that’s always in the air.

Dan: We’re in France on that Friday, so we won’t be playing Glastonbury on the Friday.

But you could come back for the Sunday, if you so wished.

Dan: If we wanted to. Glastonbury is a funny one because they book based on taste. They don’t book on profile, they book what they want to book. It’s what makes it a lovely festival. Agents don’t really have any swing or ammunition and they can’t walk in and go “These guys have just sold 8,000 tickets in ten days.” With Glastonbury, the bands don’t have to be relevant. Dreadzone play Glastonbury every year, but when did Dreadzone last release a record?

They seem to play down here every year aswell!

Dan: Yeah, they tour and tour and tour. It’s an odd one.

Pip: If they asked us nicely and we could fit it in, we would definitely play. It’s a great festival. We’d help them sell a few tickets if they need us!

It was one of the first festivals you played, right?

Pip: Yeah, it was the first outside festival wasn’t it?

Dan: Nah, that was Camden Green, in Hyde Park. It was the week before I think. That was very weird.

Pip: I’ve been there four or five times before we were doing any music. We might step in and help them out, as Jay-Z did a few years back.

Did you see his performance? Incredible, wasn’t it.

Pip: We weren’t at that one, I think that was the year we missed it but I saw some footage of it, he seemed to smash it, he knows what he’s doing, he’s been around a while.

Thanks for your time guys!

Pip: No problem, thank you!