Sneaker Pimps
Liam and Chris grew up together, knocking around the back streets of Hartlepool in the eighties, with a shared love of Shirley Bassey and Kraftwerk, and Nick Drake, drawn together, by their love for recording and bedroom studio experimentation.
Those efforts produced the "Soul of Indiscretion" E.P., an early example of what became known as trip-hop. The mix of beats and acoustic folk sounds was further explored on the "F.R.I.S.K." EP
In '93, Liam and Chris, now masquerading as ‘Line Of Flight’, released their Clean Up debut in September 1993. "World As A Cone", a five track EP of deeper, spacier grooves that found many admirers in the burgeoning scene that its creators had helped kick-start.
Though they busied themselves with in house production and remix work for other Clean Up acts, both Liam and Chris were keen to progress onto more complex, song-based material. ‘The limits of instrumental music soon became a source of frustration’.
Songs mean more to people than head nodding beats, so with an old school friend, Ian Pickering, helping with lyrics, they wrote songs that would eventually form the debut album "BECOMING X".
It was felt that at this stage, that the nature of their songs would probably suit a female vocal, and after seeing Keli Dayton singing in a pub, they convinced her to join them and formed Sneaker Pimps.
According to Liam, 'because of the extraordinary discrepancy in height between us'; a band united only by their mutual mistrust. "This could be a laugh," they all secretly thought to themselves.
Their first single, "Tesko Suicide," is an elliptical trip-hop number that has something to do with advocating the sale of suicide kits in a well-known UK grocery-store chain. The response to the single was unanimous….
"If you can’t find it in your heart to love such brilliantly stupid, stupidly brilliant pop stars, the joke’s on you." Stephen Dalton NME
"If you’re still looking for a reason why Sneaker Pimps are set to become one of the greatest pop bands to emerge from Britain... then their love of pop culture and their contextual knowledge of pop’s finer workings must surely be it." Tobias Peggs, I-D
"...A stunning impersonation of Bill Drummond hijacking the rhetoric of early Manic Street Preachers after a week in a cupboard with the texts of Jacques Derrida." Roger Morton, NME
"...Total fucking liars..." The Guardian
The debut album 'Becoming X' was released in '96 and at this stage it was regarded as a short-term project, one of many. "We viewed it as a record you selfishly release for only a few thousand copies, rather than half a million international records."
In time, they drafted in college friends Joe, (a polymath chancer), and David, (a reconstructed jazz drummer) and the band came together. "Dave and Joe were asked to join when it looked like touring and live performances were unavoidable.
David had in fact supplied drums on Becoming X whereas Joe had helped design the sleeves for some of the first Howe/Corner releases and had been part of the DJ wing of the organisation, playing test pressings of records Liam and Chris had just finished.
The band then quickly found that a huge momentum had gathered behind the record, which found them in a loop of 18 months of on/ off touring.
The musical genre they had helped to introduce had become wallpaper, the soundtrack to every pizza cafe/cappuccino bar in the world. Sneaker Pimps had fallen into a genre trap and only drastic action could help them escape.
The success of "BECOMING X" caught everyone by surprise. Not least the band members, who woke up in a haze, in America, after eighteen months of touring. Eighteen months of repetition. What do you do when a small idea becomes an international commodity? When the response to an idea far outweighs your expectations of it?
If you are Sneaker Pimps you change things around a little.
When they returned from touring they moved ‘Line Of Flight’ studio from the North East to London. With a new studio they started a second album, but as soon as they started they realised that we wanted Chris to sing on it. He was now ready so, on Keli’s departure the band returned to its core of Joe, Dave, Chris and Liam.
Over the course of a year the band put together "SPLINTER", an album that saw the four boys working together, sharing the tasks of programming and production with the door to the outside world firmly shut. It was music as therapy; born from a period of terrible frustration with the world and the music industry.
Since "Splinter", Sneaker Pimps have hosted a cult concept club at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London called "Home Taping". Taking a stand against the taste tyranny of DJ’s, it attracted Madonna, amongst others, to its doors. They also started their own record label in 1999, Splinter Recordings - a launch pad for acts such as Robots in Disguise, Trash Money and The Servant.
They have worked recently with Maxim from the Prodigy, co-writing and producing a track for his album, and have remixed artists from completely different musical backgrounds such as Placebo, Natalie Imbruglia, Sophie Ellis Bextor and Eagle-Eye Cherry. Done at their own South London studio, projects such as these break the routine of touring and recording their own material. This is the band credited with kicking (Speed) Garage into the charts with the Armand van Helden remix of "Spin Spin Sugar".
In the summer of 2000, Sneaker Pimps parted company with One Little Indian / Clean Up, they packed a car and travelled to the centre of France to write and record material which has Chris Corner commanding the vocals - a marked difference to the standard white male indie voice.
They returned with a third album ‘Bloodsports’, Previewed during their twelve country tour of Europe with Placebo in the spring of 2001, it should substantially add to their tally of 1.5 million records sold to date.
