• 2007-2014

  Dan Le SacBacking vox, programming, production2007-2014

  Scroobius PipLead vocals2007-2014
• Dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip are an English hip-hop duo, who combine electronic beats with spoken word lyrics. The pair are producer and programmer Daniel Stephens (aka Dan le sac), and vocalist/rapper David Peter Meads (aka Scroobius Pip), whose moniker is an intentional misspelling of the Edward Lear poem, The Scroobious Pip.
• The duo met when le Sac booked Pip for a gig he was putting on at the Fez Club in Reading. Previously both had worked as solo artists in their own right - Pip was in the middle of what he described to the London Real podcast in 2014 as his year of trying to make it in the music industry. He described to host Brian Rose that he was offered a promotion to assistant manager at his retail job in HMV, and thought 'either I need to take it and accept that this is what I do...or I quit, and try and do music for a bit. So I'd saved up enough to record my debut album (No Commercial Breaks), and then I'd saved £3-4,000 which I felt I could survive off for a year - I'm low maintenance! So I quit my job, I had a 1987 Toyota Space Cruiser, and I toured around the country living in that, showering in service stations and whatnot, and trying to get gigs wherever I could...basically I decided that I would try music as a full-time career for one year, and if it works out, great, but if it doesn't I'll happily go back to retail. And it was almost a year to the day that 'Thou Shalt Always Kill' (Dan le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip's first single) came out and got in the top 40. The gamble paid off!'
• "Thou Shalt Always Kill" was the duo's breakthrough single. Previously le Sac had remixed Pip's debut solo album, No Commercial Breaks, and a number of these remixes ended up on their debut album Angles. "Thou Shalt Always Kill" was picked up by XFM DJ John Kennedy, and played on his Xposure program within two hours of him receiving the track. There is a misnomer that Rob Da Bank of Radio 1 was the DJ who gave them their breaktrough radio play - this is incorrect, although the duo later signed to Rob Da Bank's record label Sunday Best Records for their UK releases, with Sage Francis' Strange Famous records releasing Angles in the US.
• In September 2014 the duo played their last show together at the Bestival festival at Isle of Wight, UK. Both were very open on social media about how the split wasn't for good, or even out of any acrimony - it was all part of the plan. Pip told London Real, "We've just done our third and probably final album together, and we're off to do more solo stuff. We always planned to do three albums, and this third album (Repent Replenish Repeat) has been our biggest sales wise, our biggest tours wise, and for us it's a great way to go out. It's nice to go out on a high. We've said to people this is the last record, and it's like 'oh are you splitting up', and it's like, it's not that dramatic! There wasn't a big 'are we gonna split up?' It's like 'I'm gonna do some solo stuff now, and I've not got any plans to do this', you know, whereas with a band it has to split up, or it has to be together. That's the advantage of being a duo as such, we can kinda just leave it, and it doesn't feel like this big thing."
  
  He then laughed when host Brian Rose quipped how it sounded like UFC fighter Chael Sonnen's retirement claims - "as in, I don't believe you!" - and also compared it to other fighters who constantly retire then return, specifically Randy Couture and Tito Ortiz, further backing up the theory that the duo are merely on hiatus to do solo stuff rather than permanently split.

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