"At one point we were violently anti-guitars. It got to the stage where I was hiding my indie records. It took a little while to pull them out of the cupboard."

"There are two different approaches. One's making an album with a folk ethic of song structure, melody and lyric. The other is making it as sonically contemporary as possible. Which means embracing the entire discourse of dance music."

"Trip hop is just the 90s version of goth"

You might think the Sneaker Pimps are an indie band, but their spectral brand of guitar-laden beats would never have existed without dance music. Founders Liam and Chris started out making trip hop, and a score of dance remixes have even put on speed garage pirates. Now on to the Nike tattoo, the dreams of vomiting fish and how Chris gets all the girls that Joe falls in love with. Writer: Rob Fearn; Photographer: Eitan

"WHERE'S the tuba?" Sneaker Pimps' guitarist Chris Corner launches into Teutonic mode, as five foaming beers are plonked on the Bierkeller table around which the group are huddled. Today's a rest day in the German town of Freiburg, on what drummer Dave Westlake calls "the sobriety leg" of the band's European tour. But not that you'd notice. The Sneakers might be carving a niche at the head of the post-Portishead breed with the spectral trip hop of '6 Underground' and the Garbage-style electro-pop of 'Spin Spin Sugar', but right now they're intent on just one thing. Getting royally moosed. Chris points at the Swoosh design tattooed on his wrist. "I went a bit mad in the States and that was the result. They were giving away free merchandise. I was going, 'Give me Nike!' I think I was after an endorsement." On the same US visit Dave fell in love, while Liam (Howe - keyboards) injured his knees jumping out of windows in the home of techno ("I was shouting, 'I sacrifice myself to the streets of Carl Craig!'").
"You feel a million miles from anything you know, so you lose it a bit," confesses singer Kelli Dayton. "But I remained rather calm and very sober throughout. I'm through my madness phase. I was the first to crack, and I'm fine now." Even so, the tiny 23 year old, whose Brummie accent sounds completely at odds with her svelte appearance and smooth vocals, is already on her third shot of schnapps. According to Chris, Kelli only gets drunk once a year, an event that's usually marked by the destruction of plate-glass windows and the snogging of complete strangers. "You've caught her on the right night," he says. "We'll all be covered in vomit by the morning." Luckily, the only ill-effects of Kelli's binge turn out to be strange, schnapps-induced dreams. For any amateur psychologists, the Sneakers' singer dream consisted of finding a body, which looked like it had been dragged out of the water, in the bunks of the tour bus. Liam pumped its stomach, causing the corpse to spew wriggling sea-creatures, which Kelli was forced to eat. "The thing is, I don't like sea food at the best of times," she says afterwards. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kelli soon professes herself cured of the urge to drink.

FROM Freiburg, the Sneaker Pimps travel over the border to Thun, a small lakeside town in Switzerland, and home of the infamous Café Mokka (slogan: 'Fuck This Town'). Backstage Liam is attempting to explain how he and Chris, friends since their teens, went from peddling what they call "bedroom-bound beats" as F.R.I.S.K. and Line Of Flight to the Sneaker Pimps' 21st Century rock n' roll. "At one point we were violently anti-guitars," says Liam. "It got to the stage where I was hiding my indie records. It took a little while to pull them out of the cupboard."

Now the guitars are back, but their debut album 'Becoming X' remains a record that could never have existed without dance music. Sink into the moody, Nellee Hooper-mixed waters of '6 Underground' and the Massive Attack squelch of the title track. Cue up the widescreen beats of 'Post-Modern Sleaze', the rolling, trip hop rush of 'Low Place Like Home'. It's easy to see why both dance and indie camps are trying to claim the Sneaker Pimps as their own. If the Sneakers are a dance band, they're one that's overcome its blind hatred of guitars and re-discovered the song-writing traditions that were vapourised by acid's big bang. If they're an indie band, then - like Garbage - they're one that actually sounds 'modern', state-of-the-art, the way a rock band ought to sound in the late 90s. Either way, they're at least a thousand times more exciting than Oasis... or the average techno purist. "I don't think it can ever be bad to be in more than one area," says Kelli. "I think we're desperately anti-purist and, as people, incredibly indecisive..." Liam says. "...and scared of being just one thing," Kelli adds. Liam, 26, and Chris, 23, both grew up in Hartlepool in the North East of England ("He was poppin' my sister for eight years," Chris explains. "I couldn't avoid him. He was coming around all the time.") Drummer Dave, 26, and bassist Joe Wilson, 24, are two more of the five piece Sneakers' DAT-free live incarnation, although it was Liam and Chris who wrote the music and lyrics on 'Becoming X' along with unseen 'sixth member' Ian Pickering. "A lot of the lyrics are quite tongue-in-cheek," says Liam, a former art-school student. "I suppose they're critical or satirical or disposable in various ways. But I don't think they're weighty. Just quirky, cultural anti-statements." Anti-statements like 'Tesko Suicide', inspired by a drunken argument Liam and Kelli had about the glamourisation of suicide, where Liam suggested that suicide kits might as well be available in supermarkets. 'Post-Modern Sleaze', meanwhile, dissects the 'Thelma & Louise' syndrome, whereby seemingly happily married women ditch their partners for a trashier lifestyle straight out of a magazine. Kelli prefers the words to 'How Do', based on traditional folk songs from cult 70s black magic film The Wicker Man. Liam and Chris spotted Kelli singing with her band The Lumieres in a pub's backroom in 1993. Back then, the two were making music as Line Of Flight. Having no pretentions to soulfulness, the feisty, punk-reared Kelli fitted their needs exactly - someone to drag their productions kicking and screaming out of the studio. "Soul music is something we feel unqualified to involve ourselves in," admits Liam. "We're more interested in English music. The new wave. That's a lot more what we're about." "I don't think it's an agenda," says Joe. "It's just purely about honesty." In a way, Sneaker Pimps' darkside fusion of widescreen breakbeats, PJ Harvey and feline punk is just a logical extension of what's been happening in trip hop for some time - in the millennial blues of Portishead or Tricky's howling noisefests. "Trip hop is just the 90s version of goth," agrees Liam. "The Sisters Of Mercy was a kind of slowed-down breakbeat. They (the goth scene) really embraced machinery, even someone as desperately goth as Alien Sex Fiend - they didn't have a bass player, they had a keyboard player." Direct and friendly, a golden-skinned lover of 90s nouveau punk outfits Sonic Youth and the Pixies, Kelli grew up in Birmingham's Bartley Green area. She left school at 14 and started playing in punk bands. The singer met her boyfriend, Bill - a 36-year-old Canadian - in the mosh pit of a Cramps gig. She thinks the other Sneaker Pimps are jealous of him. They certainly seem to enjoy calling him 'Billy Tiny Willy' (he's six foot two). Kelli, though, gives as good as she gets when it comes to the 'on-tour banter'.
Liam: "I mean, when me and Chris grew up, which was..."
Kelli: "[quick as a flash] ...last week!"
"I was watching Nirvana on the telly the other day," says bassist Joe at one point, "thinking, how the hell did anyone fall for that shite?" "It's not shite, though, Joe," says Kelli. "That's just your opinion. It's not like you know about music. You know what you like, that's all. It's not like everyone else has got these blinkers over their eyes and you're the enlightened one..." "Yeah, but Nirvana are shit, though, aren't they?" says Liam.

THE Sneaker Pimps are the first to admit that they enjoy taking the piss out of each other. Liam claims that most of the arguments centre on women. "What usually happens is that Joe brushes past some girl and falls in love," he explains. "Chris then swoops in, gets off with her. Joe's pissed off for about a week. At this point Chris forgets entirely. 'Eh? Who was that?' Meanwhile, Joe's still reverberating from luuurrve!" Sneaker Pimps take their name from a posse employed by The Beastie Boys to make trainer-buying runs to New York. The Beasties' Mike Diamond turned up at one of the Sneakers' LA gigs, although, according to Liam, he doesn't remember coining the term. ("He did say it though - on The Word.") Mike D wasn't the only hero they met in the US. The band recorded with goth shock rocker Marilyn Manson for the film Spawn, which features several other rock-dance collaborations. Elsewhere on the soundtrack, Rage Against The Machine team up with The Prodigy, Metallica with Goldie and - in an inspired piece of casting - Def Leppard with Alex Reece ("He cut his arm off in tribute," jokes Dave). On top of the link-up with Manson came the Bjork 'incident', a late-night meeting between Chris and the Icelandic chanteuse, the mention of which prompts the other Pimps to delight in a hilarious rant about both her and her current love interest, Howie B. "You should have seen Chris's face the next day," says Liam. "He came back to the studio at 11am having not slept, going, 'I want her babies!'"
"That's enough about Bjork!" says Chris sharply.

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