DAN LE SAC VS SCOOBIUS PIP/ KID CARPET/ERZA
The Old Firestation, Bournemouth 29/10/2008

Rejoice! The future of hip hop is here!

It’s a freezing Wednesday evening and the rain has just arrived. Bournemouth needs warming up this evening, and The Old Firestation in its centre is certainly well named and placed to do so.

Dan Le Sac and Essex’s poet laurite Scroobius Pip have certainly made a name for themselves on the “scene”. British hip hop was certainly in need of innovation, with Dizzee Rascal being bizarrely hailed as its king, and boy have the pairing given it a kick up the arse.

But before that, we get support from two wildly different but equally creative and original acts.

Erza arrive onstage to an oddly hushed Firestation which is usually buzzing by this time. The lead rapper looks uncomfortable to start with as he looks across an unpopulated barrier as his student audience stand well back, but thankfully this doesn’t last for long as his sheer energy pull the crowd in, as he clears the stage and starts dancing with his growing crowd. The duo (completed by the obligatory white nerd on the computers and synths) are an incongruous but invited mash of Kanye West and Calvin Harris, while the rapper, with crew cut hair, bicycle chain bling and painfully tight white trousers is the male Grace Jones, with dangerously sexual thrusts added to heighten intensity.

By the end of their oh-too-short set, there’s quite a throng at the stage to greet Kid Carpet. Despite the terrible reviews his second album, Casio Royale, has met, live the one man band is a powerhouse, and it’s like nothing anyone’s ever seen before. Pulling his ancient Casio keyboard out of his trunk brings out a whiff of nostalgia in his young audience. What follows is a winning concoction of cheap synths, connectivity with a willing audience and genuinely amusing lyrics.

Kid Carpet ends by asking the swarm if they’re ready for tonight’s main attraction, and they most certainly are. Dan Le Sac wanders on, looking like a slightly lost, grubby roadie and pull his laptop out of his rucksack. No expense spared here then.

To bring on his poetic partner, Le Sac brilliantly melds his beats with the theme tune of Antique Roadshow, and the twosome launch into an energising rendition of The Beat That My Heart Skipped.

For the next 55 minutes they play the choicest cuts from their critically hailed debut album Angles, along with a pair of inspired covers (singalong version of The Specials’ Nite Klub and, bizarrely, Push The Button by the Sugababes). They range from a gut-punching Back From Hell with strobes blazing to the sensitive and well-handled Magician’s Assistant, a song about suicide, which brings the audience right down to reverent silence. Between songs the banter is well put together and connects with the audience without feeling forced.

They end on the hits. Thou Shalt Always Kill was their breakthrough into the mainstream, a rant of modern day commandments (sample lyric: “thou shalt not question Stephen Fry) to which most of the crowd know the words, whilst Radiohead-sampling Letter From God To Man bring procedures to a close.

Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip are right out in front because they have the bravery to do hip-hop in new ways. Unlike much of the modern day dross, they look at REAL issues affecting British kids in a frank way, be it self-harm, suicide or the constant search for perfection. This destruction of boundaries is held aloft by a wonderful live performance which will hopefully be broadened further by a second album.

What helps is a realisation, as put in Thou Shalt Always Kill, that “guns, bitches and bling aren’t part of the four elements, and never will be”.