大象传媒

Find out more about their gig in Reading here:

Thou Shalt Always Kill, which fires off a satirical rant at modern culture beneath an electro beat, became an instant hit. The video reached the dizzy heights of two million hits on YouTube, and the track earned the glorious title of 'most requested song in all eternity' on John Kennedy's Xposure show on XFM.

Not bad for Reading lad dan le sac who cut his teeth in the record shops in the town centre.

"The glue that is Reading held me here."

And so stuck was dan on the music scene here that he ran a weekly music night at Afroba in Reading called I Bet Ya for three years.

"We would just have live laptop shenanigans in there every Thursday night - it was really good fun," says Dan.

Though he maintains Reading has always lacked a central focus.

"Reading's got a really odd little scene," says Dan, "there's no major venue. The Fez has never really worked out what it wanted to be. So there's all these little scenes that have built up around little groups of promoters."

Nevertheless the 'scene' nurtured what is now dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip, something he calls "Samply, hip-hoppy electro-ey poetry".

dan le sac (left) and Scroobius Pip

He adds: "It is just a typical working class white guy's take on hip-hop, it's just all my influences spurning into it.

Then obviously there's Scroobius Pip being a big bearded guy, he's kind of got a flow but it sounds like he's ordering a take-away a bit too fast!"

Though undoubtedly ordering a kebab won't have achieved quite so successful a hit as Thou Shalt Always Kill.

"It's kind of crazy, the track wasn't even finished when we sent it to John Kennedy," Dan reveals.

"So to get all that attention so early is so unbelievable.

"It's nice to see that you can be an unsigned band and still get to the position where you can do what you get to do for the rest of your life.

"For the past year I've not worked, I've just been in a band. It's amazing."

"We were going to call it Little Death but Pete And The Pirates from Reading has just called their album Little Death.

"It was just really weird. We kind of know them but not well enough for that sort of coincidence."

In the end they plumped for Angles, a suggestion made by John Kennedy.

"The guy that played us first got to name the album."

And speaking of full circles, dan is not only gigging in Reading - Sunday April 6 at South Street and possibly the Reading Festival - but is again running a live music night, just like the good ole days. This time it's called Make Do And Mend at South Street arts centre.

Reading must have some pretty strong glue.