Version digitale disponible le 9 juillet 2012.
Dan Le Sac relaxes back into a chair outside a pub on the Portobello
Road, the spring sun warming his features. He looks a very satisfied
man, and so he should. He’s just put the finishing touches to ‘Space
Between The Words’, a debut solo album that’s likely to redefine
perceptions of him and his music.
“With this,” he ventures, “working with so many different people, writing songs, it brought the producer in me back to the fore, in fact, it made me imagine never doing a gig again.”
Fans of his long-standing partnership with Scroobius Pip needn’t worry, he doesn’t mean the last part - in fact they have gigs forthcoming - he’s just revelling in his creative reinvigoration. The album sees him step sideways from the percussive atmospherics which were the backdrop to Pip’s words on the successful albums ‘Angles’ (2008) and ‘The Logic of Chance’ (2010), and embrace everything from electro-pop to psychedelia, all accompanied by an impressive array of vocal talent.
“Making a rap track it’s all about a mood and a beat,” Dan explains, “it can’t be too complex as the vocal’s doing so much rhythmically and I have to support that, not get in the way, whereas writing a song, I can be more sonically extreme, I can experiment and it still works.”
Along the way he lets the spotlight fall on some wonderful, fresh new vocalists, as well as working with one of his musical heroes, the cult electronic folk singer Merz, who appears on the album’s opening number, a pulsing house-pop gem, ‘Long Night of Life’, as well as a lush melodic song called ‘Zephyr’ that seems to have escaped from the late 1960s via Le Sac’s electronica time machine.
“Rob da Bank told me Merz was available,” he recalls, “and I thought he meant the rapper of the same name but when I found it was this Merz, I was gobsmacked. I must have played Merz’s song ‘Lotus’ at least once a month for the last decade…”
Dan Le Sac’s real name is Daniel Stephens. He has a pleasingly down to earth manner to match his name. Raised in an Essex market town, he’s lived in Reading for years where, he dryly observes, he continues to try and get the local clientele interested in his club nights. He’s been producing music in various forms forever, from a recent project with American singer Kid A (of InFiné Records) back to a long ago shoegaze band, Borealis, with old pal, Dr Fraser Rowan (who appears on the album on ‘Breathing Underwater’, an indie-electro corker redolent of Depeche Mode and New Order).
Dan hasn’t veered completely away from rap and spoken word as the groovy, chatted ‘Tuning’ shows, a collaboration with long-term peer and poet Joshua Idehen. There are also two songs featuring rising mic-master B. Dolan, the bass-punching party tune ‘Good Time Gang War’ and the crafty, crunk-tinted smasher, ‘Caretaker’.
“In the last year or so,” Dan admits, “B. Dolan has become my favourite rapper of all time. He has that real rap thugginess but he’s also really intense about how he writes, intellectual but with the sense of humour you’d expect from a big, New England, baldy, bearded bloke.”
An established name who contributes her unique voice to ‘Space Between The Words’ is Emmy the Great. ‘Memorial’ is a delightful surprise, it has a touch of Shirley Bassey Bond theme about it, albeit filtered through clubbier beats.
“When Emmy gets into what she’s singing about, her voice expression is very melancholic,” Dan observes, correctly, “Some singers try to sound like they’re in pain but Emmy sounds like she’s lived a life, that she’s not acting.”
Elsewhere Dan showcases hot rising singers Sarah Williams White and Pete Hefferan. The former appears on the crisp, catchy and engagingly funky ‘Play Along’ (“Someone dropped me a promo of her debut single last year and I was immediately, like, ‘I want her, I want her’.”). Hefferan, meanwhile, is one of the singers from Pete & The Pirates BUT, confusingly, not the Pete of the band name. He sings on one of the album’s two covers, a deliciously doleful, piano-tinted take on Arab Strap’s ‘Cherubs’, a tune Dan had wanted to record for years. He likens it to Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ as a “wonderfully tuneful bit of depression”.
The album’s other cover is also dipped in a sweet sort of sadness, a version of Rhythm On The Loose’s classic vocal house number ‘Break of Dawn’ from which Dan mines sorrowful core essence to create smart, downtempo alt-pop.
With such a feast of juicy morsels on offer it naturally raises the issue of whether they will be performed live.
“I got Ghostpoet to play Reading and I thought the support slot would be the best place to try this out live without the pressure of selling tickets,” says Dan with a wry smile, “It went well, taught me a lot about the songs and that a band needs a leader so I’m going to be the ringmaster in a top hat and red coat.”
He’s joking - we think - but there will be a special live show featuring all the guest vocalists, with a view to further possible performances in future. In the meantime Dan will be taking on tour “a stripped back raving club show, getting drunk on stage, doing live remixes”.
Dan le Sac’s reputation for vibrant good times at festivals and club nights is unarguable, but he’s also proved with ‘Space Between The Words’ that he’s a lot more than simply the bloke behind the bloke with the big beard. He’s a musical force to be reckoned with and in ‘Space Between The Words’, an album “written and recorded in the backs of vans, on trains, on sofas, in hotel rooms, in houses and, finally, a couple of studios too,” Dan le Sac has created a smart, zingy debut shot that will appeal to fans of indie, dance, hip hop, electronica and much else besides. It’s one to file alongside Metronomy, Hot Chip and Field Music as a sharply individual snapshot of modern pop’s endless possibilities.