His book Poetry in (e)motion, on sale now, isn’t a typical book of verse, it’s a compilation of poems, old and new, in the style of a graphic novel illustrated by fans.
“People were asking me if I wanted to release a book of poetry,” Pip said. “I felt that would be something of an arrogant act because growing up I didn’t read any poetry. I love to watch poetry performed but still don’t read that much so it would have felt arrogant to say I don’t read poetry but you can all read mine.
“That’s why I came up with the concept of making the graphic novel – it is poems illustrated but you can read it without realising it’s a book of poetry. When you do realise it you can see poetry isn’t all boring and dusty and old and a chore to get through.”
Pip is one half of Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, who play this year’s Camden Crawl (May 1 and 2) and Koko on March 23.
He compiled the book’s artwork through a call to fans on Myspace.
“I put out a bulletin two and a half years ago,” said Pip. “All artwork submitted was amazing, such a high standard. It’s become an amazing collection of art. It’s completely fan-made and that was one of the best bits.
“[The publishers] were concerned the standard could be low so they were lining up artists that could step in to bring the standard up. I took the collection along and it was clear they didn’t need anyone else. That was a really proud moment.”
Pip and le Sac, who first met working at a HMV store in Essex and are now signed to Bestival curator Rob da Bank’s Sunday Best label, are touring to promote new album The Logic of Chance, which is out on Monday.
It is described as a collection of beat-led polemics, against a hip-hop backdrop, although Pip relishes the fact that they can’t truly be pigeonholed.
“I’m most looking forward to playing songs off our new album,” he said. “We’ve not changed our sound or decided to go for a specific sound. One of the things I’m proud of the last album for is no one’s really known what genre to put it in or where to place it and this is a development of that. It continues not to fit in any one genre but feels as if we both developed our skills.
“We’ve lucked out from having such variation. Part of us not fitting into one genre is we’ve got to play to poetry type audiences, to hip-hop, to indie, then at 4am in Fabric. But, yeah, a room full of librarians is one strange one.
“It’s great we do live tours now because we get to bring all these people together – we look into the crowd and see real metallers and punks along with hip-hop kids and indie kids and we have a hell of a lot of parent and child combinations coming which is amazing. When I was growing up there was never a band that I was into that my dad or mum was.”
Pip and le Sac are playing the Camden Crawl for the third time in a row this year.
Recalling their first experience, Pip said: “It was one of the first times we were taken aback a bit and realised it was all beginning to work. It was just before our record came out and we had queues all the way down the street – we’d never had that before.”
Aside from playing, they also had time to catch Amy Winehouse at the Dublin Castle.
Pip said: “I was equally excited about the fact that Amy Winehouse was performing really well in a small venue and Ross from Friends was standing next to me. I remember being in the Camden New Journal. We were having a picture taken and then some drunk jumped in to get in the picture and it wasn’t until I looked down that I realised that drunk was the legendary Suggs.”
The strangest gig they have done, he said, was during a tour of libraries: “They really do it well but the first one we got... was a load of old ladies at the back providing tea and orange squash and biscuits...they didn’t have a backstage so we had to come to the stage from behind a bookstand, it was a bit surreal.”
Pip’s an over-eager user of Twitter, through which he struck up a friendship with actor Nick Frost, who has written the foreword to his book.
He said: “I love Twitter – I joined it because I was doing a spoken word night I’d only really promoted on MySpace and about a week before I suddenly had this huge paranoia that MySpace is dead and I need to join the new thing. Through (Twitter) I’ve managed to meet Nick Frost, Simon Pegg and Marcus Brigstocke and found out that they’re fans of our music.
“I sent [Frost] a direct message asking if he’d do the foreword. It was actually four messages because you can only have 140 characters. It was this big long rambly thing and I got a message back saying, ‘Pip you had me at please’.
“We kind of chat now to Frost and Pegg and I’ve been a fan of both for a while, but Nick in particular was the first one I’ve been chatting to on Twitter.
“When Shaun of the Dead came out I bought the limited edition. It came with a little comic book and they seem rooted in that kind of genre. In all their films and Spaced they’ve always shown a love of graphic novels. They’re from a comic book kind of scene so he seemed like the perfect person to ask to do something for it.”
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