Music

Thou Shalt Get Off Thine Arse
In ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’, there’s a line which says, ‘Thou shalt not read NME’, which got us a lot of stick and a lot of press, strangely enough. What it means is that you should actually go out and hear stuff yourself as opposed to just accepting someone else saying, ‘This is good, go and listen to it’. Go and find out by watching for yourself, not just what Time Out tell you to watch. I don’t get to attend a lot of the smaller local nights these days because we’re touring, but that’s where all the big acts start out, unless they’re a ‘Pop Idol’ winner or some shit like that.

People like Kate Nash and Jack Peñate and Adele, we played together at tiny little venues in London before it started to happen for any of us. All this has been happening for ages, but all of a sudden it’s happening on main stages and so everyone knows about it. You could have been enjoying it far earlier and getting it properly. You could have been watching it develop, instead of waiting for someone to push the button and make it big. You’ve gotta get out there and listen more. Feature continues

Thou Shalt Be Part Of The Solution
If you want to put on a night of your own, as horrible and commercial as it is, MySpace is a great place to start. There’s a great way to just hear a load of someone’s catalogue straight off the bat, by just logging on and hunting around. Me and Dan have always been about recommending acts to people as well. If someone tries to book us and we’ve got another gig already, or maybe they can’t afford us, which sounds horrible, we will always say, ‘There’s these guys who are on their way up, try booking them instead.’ If you talk to a few people, you can build up a night of new music just on recommendations.

Thou Shalt Remember Where You’re From...
If me coming from the spoken-word scene is getting us some exposure then we wanna give some exposure to the spoken-word scene as well. As much as we can, I try and get spoken-word people involved. At our Scala gig we’ve got an outfit called A Poem Inbetween People to come up and do a track with us and with one of the support acts as well. It’s one of the curious remainders of old British culture that
I like to take advantage of, that if someone on stage starts speaking, the audience will generally have enough manners to be quiet and listen to what they have to say. Obviously if there’s a big industry guestlist contingent it’s not quite as polite.

...But Thou Shalt Have A USP
There’s far better poets than me, I just happen to have been wise enough to grow a big beard, which has given us commercial success. Some of the other facially, follically challenged poets don’t have that, so let’s try and get them some exposure just for their talent. It’s a genetic problem. It’s not their fault they can’t grow beards – they can still talk very well.

Thou Shalt Pay It Forward
We know how lucky we are; we recorded ‘Thou Shalt…’ in our bedrooms and sent it to John Kennedy at Xfm and he played it a few hours later. That’s just human decency in its purest form, so we owe that to anyone else, without trying to sound like too much of a hippy. We’re still unsigned; our whole career has all been about relying on the kindness of strangers, so we’ve gotta do the same for other people.

Thou Shalt Sell Out Unashamedly
We definitely intend to sign to a label at some point because we want to focus on just making the music and doing the gigs. There is a temptation to think: 'Well, we’ve got this far on our own, so we can feasibly put the album out on our own and do it all.' But it’s not something where we’re making a big stand against labels and and saying, ‘Fuck you, we’ll do it ourselves’. We like being self-reliant, but we’re not arrogant enough to think that we know how to do things better; there are people that have been putting out albums and all that for their job for years and got really good at it, and we’ve never done that. So by no means would we think that we can just turn up and know how to run a record label.

Thou Shalt Reject Poserdom
When I’m writing, I just try to not think consciously about avoiding clichés or deliberately confounding expectations or anything like that, because you can go too far the wrong way. There are acts that are just too self-indulgent – they’re so against being poppy or whatever that they just make unlistenable music. I just like to try and do stuff that I don’t think has been done before, or tackled in this way before. So when I write a track that’s got a story or narrative, I try to approach it from different angles and make it interesting, as opposed to just a story you tell from A-Z. That’s why I use things like costume changes in our live show, to highlight the different perspectives of the characters in a song like ‘Angles’.

Thou Shalt Be Brutal With Thyself
We’ve had a couple of tracks recently where we’ve just thought: It’s all right but it’s not gonna change anything. Although we’re not claiming that anything we do is gonna rewrite the history of music, it is about being critical of yourself. If you write something you feel is a bit too obvious, then be brave enough to just scrap it and start again. If you can see someone else having done it, bin it. But at the same time there’s a lot of stuff that’s been done and done well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be done again as well. But you do leave yourself open to being labelled as just another indie band or another whatever.

Thou Shalt Think Of Thy Audience
It really annoys me this way that labels crush forward-looking for things which sound exactly the same as what’s hot right now. The trouble is, by the time those bands even exist, music has moved on to something else. Like with Kate Nash, people say she’s the new Lily Allen but she’s been doing her own stuff for ages; if she’d waited for Lily Allen to turn up , she’d still be learning to play the guitar right now. It’s much better to try and give people something new, or at least different; credit your audience with a bit of intelligence, they don’t want to hear the same thing over and over.

Thou Shalt Have An Escape Plan
I’m saving shaving the beard off for when me and Dan have a hideous falling-out and I launch my solo career. I’ll shave it off and go pop. I’m torn between two ways of doing it. It’s either gonna be during a live set, as I start off fully bearded and actually shave it off during the course of the show, or I’ll shave it off beforehand and have a really good fake beard stuck on for a month or so and then start pulling it off halfway through the show. That’d really freak people out. That’d make people think I’d gone mental!’

Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip’s new single, ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’ is out on Monday. The twosome play the Scala on Wednesday and perform head-to-head with A Poem Inbetween People on Saturday.