Alternative rapper Scroobius Pip is back in action with ‘partner in rhyme’ Dan le Sac. He tells Tim Hughes it’s good to be together

Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkle, Sonny and Cher... when it comes to making music, great things happen in pairs.

Take alternative hip-hop duo Dan le Sac and Scroobius Pip. More than just a silly name, this marriage between beats man Dan and rhyme guy Pip has produced musical magic, with challenging and thought-provoking lyrics backed by a razor-sharp dance soundtrack.

All relationships need time to breath, however, and musical partnerships are no different. Now, having taken time out of their ‘open marriage’, producer and programmer Daniel Stephens and rapper David Meads are reunited. And, says ‘Pip’ it feels so good!

Pip, who met his spouse-in-sound while working at his local HMV in Essex, believes that taking time away from the hectic schedule of writing, recording and touring, has served to strengthen them as a live act.

While apart both released their own albums – Dan with Space Between the Words and Pip with the Top 40 long player Distraction Pieces.

“It couldn’t have come at a better time,” he says. “The people we got to work with on our solo records have inspired us. Now we have come back together we are generally awesome.

“We have always been solo artists anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal to do our own records. We did them before we started and we’ll do them after this ends – but it’s great to play these new songs.

“The whole tour is selling out, and that’s down to hard work. Since 2006, whether together or alone, we’ve been touring constantly and that has built an amazing fan base.”

Pip is talking from the van on the road between Manchester and Edinburgh on a rapidly selling out tour which hits Oxford next Thursday. The shows follow the release of their third joint album Repent Replenish Repeat – their first since they rekindled their relationship and reaffirmed their musical vows.

Hard, dark and cinematic, the glitchy, beat-heavy follow-up to 2010’s Logic Of Chance and 2008’s Number 31 hit album Angles, is killing the competition.

So how does he sum up the sound? “It’s rap, but it’s a completely different kind of rap,” he says. “It’s nothing like 50 Cent. We’ve got our own sound and it’s hugely varied.

“I come from a spoken word background, but if you say ‘poetry’ people say they don’t like Wordsworth – though Wordsworth has got nothing in common with what I do.”

“All genres and labels are so broad and open to interpretation. We want people to make their own minds up. It’s all completely subjective. It’s great that we live in a time where if people want to know what we sound like they can hear it on YouTube.”

Over the years, Pip has chatted and ranted about everything from knife crime and democracy to birth control and, on their sweeping 1997 manifesto Thou Shalt Always Kill, issued messianic entreaties against questioning Stephen Fry, buying Coca-Cola or Nestlé products, and watching Hollyoaks, urged us not to stop liking bands just because they’ve become popular, and, with prescience, ordered us “not to worship pop idols or follow lost prophets”.

So what is getting his goat at the moment? “I always write about what I find interesting at the time,” he says. “That is always going to change. I can’t keep going on about the same thing time and time again. If you cover something, you’ve covered it – unless you change your mind about it.

“There are tons of my lyrics I don’t agree with as strongly now. People always ask if I want to change anything in Thou Shalt Always Kill but half of that was contradictory anyway. That’s the point of it.”

Standout tracks on the new album include Gold Teeth – a spirited attack on consumerism written by Pip and inspired by the beat-heavy track supplied by his partner in crime. Another, Stiff Upper Lip, sees Pip calling for direct action, criticising those whose idea of rebellion stops at Twitter campaigns and Facebook groups, and urging people instead to “pick up a brick”.

“It’s about the fact that I’m not going to write any more political songs,” he says. “It’s time to get out there and do something about it.”

The new material has an unmistakably filmic feel. Does he, I wonder, have a particular interest in cinema? “I’m a real film nerd,” he laughs. “I run a film night in London and cinema influences me just as much as literature and other music. In fact, some songs are written in a film style, rather than a linear form.”

And what comes first: the lyrics or the beats? “It works every way you can imagine,” he says. “Sometimes Dan will send the beats over and I’ll match it to vocals, and other times I’ll write first.”

One thing they never do, though, is write together. “If you think of what we do, it lends itself to solitude. I can’t jam and I’m not a freestyler. I have to sit down and craft every syllable and give it some space before it comes together.”

And how does he make it flow? “I’ll write it, ignore it and it somehow embeds itself naturally,” he says. “If it’s a slow, spoken word piece I might even have it in front of me. I’m not arrogant. I would rather read it and nail it than stumble over it.”

“The priority now is making sure we smash every show. The point is not to send people out stroking their beards and saying ‘that’s an interesting point’ but to give them a good night out. After all, that’s what we are there to provide.”

CHECK IT OUT
Dan le Sac and Scroobius Pip play the O2 Academy Oxford next Thursday. Tickets are £14.50 from ticketweb.co.uk