Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip

Take one plain face and give it some large, knowing muttons chops. Take another plain face and add a weighty, insightful beard. Now put the first face next to an Apple Mac and the second in front of a pen and some paper. Ignite, stand well back, and enjoy the spectacle.

The first face is Dan Le Sac, a production robot from the planet Gameboy. He sees our world in binary code. For him, sound is merely a calculated output resonating from a user interface. He, therefore, only ever communicates through pings and bleeps.

The second face is Scroobius Pip, a pugnacious scribe with an arsenal of words. His pugilist blows come not from his fists, but from his mind. His wit is so sharp it cuts deep, real deep, leaving victims wounded and spurting jets of liquid hip hop.

At first glance they seem the most unlikely of pairings and at first listen it’s clear why they never work together off stage. Yet, as the inventor of the first peanut butter and jam sandwiches must’ve said, don’t knock ‘em till you try ‘em. And the masses do love to try ‘em. Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds and Bestival have all swollen with the hype surrounding this hairy, label-less twosome.

As a band, it was clear they were revelling in the headline kudos of Scala and it showed as they swaggered through a think-tank of rarities. Le Sac’s lo-fi Hot Chip geekery fused a kinetic structure upon which Pip delivered his poetic, belligerent sermons. Dishing out lesson after lesson, this was a vision of the future, machine telling man what he would otherwise not consider: the hidden beauty of Tommy Cooper’s death; the story of ‘Angles’, a suicide revenge murder with many points of view; the dissatisfaction of God with Man (“I was a simple being that happened to yield such powers, but I just laid the ground, it was YOU that built the Towers”).

Despite this, the lecture was not just insight and inciting: there was romance in ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’ as a naked electro thump coupled with Pip’s synthetic yearnings; there was political surrealism in ‘Fixed’ (“I got a holster, I keep biscuits in”); and there was infectious sarcasm in the novelty single ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ (“Thou shall not judge a book by its cover, thou shall not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover”).

Due to the absence of a tangible album release (Xmas is the word on the street), the set list was Keira-thin. To flesh out the body of the show a few theatrical props were adopted – a Bible, an intricate detailing of the periodic table. These were then aided by a couple of surprising covers - Prince’s ‘Cream’ as an encore and Public Enemy’s ‘Bring The Noise’ in an old school mashup competition against supporting hip hop swingsters, The Anomalies.

Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip are not just a band. They are sent messengers, harbingers of computerised enlightenment. All hail the faces of DLS Vs SP.