Interview: Scroobius Pip

Scroobius Pip began his musical career as a spoken word poet, playing open mic nights and impromptu gigs for the people waiting in line for jazz shows. In 2005, he released a collection of low budget recordings entitled ‘No Commercial Breaks’, however, it was when he teamed up with producer Dan le Sac and they released the album ‘Angles’ that people really started to take notice. Following festival appearances at Reading & Leeds, Glastonbury, Pukkelpop and a headline set at Two Thousand Trees, the duo decided to take some time out to concentrate on their respective solo projects. For each of them this involved a return to their roots, however for Scroobius Pip it also involved getting a variety of session musicians, and someone called Travis Barker, to collaborate with him on the album ‘Distraction Pieces’.

How was the transition from working with Dan to playing with a whole new group of musicians?

Dan was the only person I ever properly worked with, well I guess there were a few others, but it was good to work with tons of producers on this album. A lot of them worked in the same way as me and Dan because they were in America. Generally when Dan and I are writing we do it all over email because he lives in Reading and I live in Essex. Neither of us has the style that requires us to meet up; when I’m writing I need to get in my own head space and when he’s writing he needs time to build up all the tracks. It’s not like it’s a band where we can just meet up and jam, we’ve always given each other our own space for the writing process. A lot of the producers on the new album were like that, but with Steve Mason, for example, who produced The Struggle, I went up to stay with him in Scotland and sat in the studio to work through the track.

How do you go about getting someone like Travis Barker to play drums for you?

Danny Lohner from Nine Inch Nails, who produced Introdiction, tweeted some of my lyrics, so I tweeted him saying “I’m working on a record, do you fancy making a beat?” He lives in LA and he was in Nine Inch Nails so he knows… everyone. He got Travis’ drums on there and he was really feeling it. We’ve chatted since and he’s keen to do more stuff for me in the future. It’s all been emails and tweets and direct messages. Travis and I were going to try and meet up, because I think he’s in the UK in November, but I’m on tour so there’s no time. We don’t have time to be hanging out with people. As you saw when you arrived, I come straight off the bus and sort the merch and I’ll be on the merch stall all night tonight. It’s not like we have time to chill. That’s been intentional though, we’re keeping it as tight as we can. It’s so we can play these sweaty little venues where there’s more atmosphere and rowdiness. With this album I wanted to get more punk influences in because that’s what I grew up with. I grew up loving punk and hardcore so it’s good to have that weird mixture on stage.

How did you go about getting together your live band to play this tour, because obviously if you’ve got people like Sage Francis and Travis Barker on the album you can’t conceivably get them to tour with you?

“Hey, Travis Barker, do you want to come tour venues of around 500 people with me, come out for one song and then go back to touring stadiums with Blink 182?” [Laughs] Yeah. Worgie, the guitarist we’ve got on tour with us, wrote a lot of the album with me and produced three or four of the beats. It was him and Yilla who oversaw the whole thing. Worgie plays guitar on the live show and operates all the laptops, that was an obvious choice. We auditioned for a drummer, which was something I’d never done before, but it’s kind of easy if you’ve been in the industry for four or five years as I have. It was sort of like the X factor, but I guess we had to take that route. The drummer we chose, Paul, is a friend of our soundman and tour manager who’s been working with me and Dan for years.

There was a TV show that Akala did on the relationship between hip-hop and poetry. Being that you made the transition from spoken word poet to hip-hop artist I was surprised not to see you on it.

Yeah, I saw bits of that but I didn’t catch the whole thing. It’s a weird one… I’ve got no issue whatsoever with Akala but… I really don’t want to be slagging anyone off [Laughs]. It’s just that he does a lot of stuff on TV and radio as “The Spoken Word Guy” but I’ve never seen him at any of the open mics I used to go to, or any of the events I used to go to. No one that I know on the spoken word scene knows him for that. As far as I know he didn’t come up through the spoken word scene, he was doing hip-hop and then kind of went “Right, I’m a poet now.” Which is fine! It’s wicked! I’m just not overly familiar with him. I’ve got no issue at all, it’s great that he’s bringing exposure to spoken word but I don’t know much of his stuff because I’ve never seen him on the scene.

To me, because Akala’s project is based around Shakespeare, it feels a bit crude; it’s picking the most obvious and most well known poet.

He’s not the only one to have done that, so again, this isn’t any dig against him. Things like that to me just feel very safe and easy, it’s like “Right we’ll bring Shakespeare to the kids” and I’m like “Why? Why not bring them something new?” It’s great to get kids to relate to Shakespeare, but that’s not the only option. How is the next Shakespeare going to come about if everyone is just translating Shakespeare rather than doing new stuff? There’s this guy Polar Bear who does these hour long shows and they’re amazing. It’s just him telling a story for an hour and it’s absolutely mind blowing. But that won’t get as much coverage because it’s not as easy as “Let’s bring Shakespeare to the kids. Here’s some art’s council funding”. Personally… again I keep having to stress that I’ve got no issue with Akala at all, it’s great that he’s pushing kids in the right direction and trying to get them away from negative things… but I would rather pay to go see Polar Bear tell this new story that’s current and relatable than pay someone to translate an old text.

Do you think hip-hop has the right to the title of poetry?

I don’t see it as important. I really don’t. Poetry is a word, it’s all relative. There are all sorts of things that to me are poetry because I’ve been able to relate to them so much and they have really influenced me. I think poetry is relative. There’s a guy on the scene called Inua Ellams who always said “You shouldn’t ever refer to yourself as a poet, that’s for other people to do”. I really liked that. When I started off I was all “Yeah, I’m a poet”, because that’s the only term I knew for this spoken word thing. But in reality it’s all individual, if someone connects with your stuff then it’s poetry to them, I don’t think you need to have this division of “That’s not poetry, but that is” and all that. What does it mean? And why is it a good thing? If something isn’t “poetry” but you still connect to it and it’s fucking amazing and it’s really well written then does that make it any worse? I don’t think it does.

Shall we talk about ‘Death of the Journalist’?

I’m getting asked about that a lot for some reason. It’s a weird one, it’s pissed off a lot of people which I don’t think it should. I can see why, but I wrote it as an investigation, I found it a fascinating subject. I’ve still not made a decision as to whether journalism is dead, or dying, and whether that’s a good or bad thing. It’s just that we rely a lot on blogs, and half of these bloggers won’t even be aware that you can get a degree in journalism; I mean it’s something you can spend years studying at university. That’s how it used to be, you’d get your degree and learn about fact checking rules and source checking rules, but these bloggers don’t know that. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing; the freedom of the internet is that you don’t have editors who restrict your content. But because the internet is so vast you could have the best writer in the world, writing these amazing online pieces, but no one would find them. What we, as people, naturally gravitate towards is the pulp journalism, the celebrity stuff. If I had two emails and one was a link to this great piece of writing, breaking down all the issues of today, and the other one was “Look… You can see Scarlett Johansson’s arse” then I’d probably click on the second one and have a quick look. I’d make a note to go back and read the other one, but that’s the nature of humans. It’s our own fault in a way that the stuff that sells is the trashier stuff; it is supply and demand I guess.

A lot of your tracks seem extremely personal, such as ‘Look for the Woman’ on ‘Angles’. Are they from personal experience?

Dan wrote the hook to that track, it was something that he was going through at the time and I’d been in that situation a few times so I could relate to it. I took influence from all of those situations and wrote the verses. In general I don’t write true stories; I’ll take influence from two or three things that have happened because otherwise I’d feel rude and cheap. If that was a true story I’d feel fucking horrible. I’d have taken a relationship that meant something and gone “Here we go, let’s take this on the road”. That’s not cool. A lot of my work is rooted in genuine experience and genuine emotions but I’ll write a new story out of them. The only exception is ‘Cowboi’ off ‘Logic of Chance’ which is something that happened to my Nan, I thought that she was a bit of an inspiration so I put it on there as a tribute.

For more information visit: http://scroobiuspip.co.uk/