“She makes every move they make, she takes everything they make, She must be a Thelma or Louise, she must be a post-modern sleaze.”

Read these lines in cold isolation, and they come across as the words of an anti-dance cynic. Listen to them in their proper environment, backed up by 90s blues and slo-mo abstract beats and they make perfect sense. The above lyric is a perfect example of the unique fusion of modern day beat poerty and freestyle musical arrangements contained on the Sneaker Pimps debut LP, Becoming X. The Sneaker Pimps are, in so many ways, the music alchemist’s dream. Forget the lazy comparisons with Portishead; dig deep into both their background and work and you will find a wealth of diverse sources and influences at play.

When keyboardist Liam comes to the phone to answer my barrage of questions, the band are in the middle of recording a new version of ‘Spin Spin Sugar’, a track from Becoming X. This, as yet unreleased mix of the song, acts as a perfect example of the band’s willingness to experiment: “The album version is very angular, so we’re doing a pop version of it for the single,” says Liam. “Kind of like the Chemical Brothers meets Nick Drake!”

Nick Drake’s melancholy meets the Chemical’s cartoon beats? It certainly doesn’t sound like a marriage made in heaven, but listen as Liam explains the origins of the Sneaker Pimps, and it becomes clear that disparate elements often make for the best results:

“We have come from both sides of the camp; Chris and I were never really in bands, we were always in the band making music with computers, whereas Kelli was always in bands. I was into dub-house, minimalism and later on head music, which then horribly became trip-hop. I got to know Chris when I was a teenager because we both come from the North-east, and we met Kelli when we decided to turn our little dance band into a great heaving pop machine! It was time for a punk injection, so we asked Kelli to join. A lot of her singing has a really bluesy intonation, and she was in a punk band called the Lumieres at the time. Luckily she agreed to work with us.”

Perhaps it’s simply because a female fronts the Pimps that the Portishead comparisons arose at all. Whatever the reason, there is little to link Kelli’s angry and indignant yelps to the stoned cooing of the Bristol bunch. For proof, check out the lyrical content of the Sneakers’ numbers, laced with healthy measures of disregard for humankind.

“We all have an input into the subjects on the LP, but one of my old friends, Ian Pickering, wrote the majority of the lyrics on the album,” continues Liam. “We all came together last Summer, and he had the overview and edited it all. It’s all based on bitchiness and bitterness really. We’re bitchy and bitter by nature. ‘Bitter by nature’. Sounds like a Murphy’s advert doesn’t it?”

Unlike many of their dance peers, the band have some very strong opinions about contemporary music and issues relating to their work. Despite using breakbeats, Liam thinks that drum’n’bass has reached a bit of an impasse at the moment. Nothing that has been released in the last few months has really excited me. We’ve distinctly stopped referencing drum’n’bass in our tracks and now use breakbeats. At the same time, drum’n’bass has to exist as an antidote to trip-hop, and they just keep on cancelling each other out!”

Liam also has strong opinions about the concept of sampling, “Sampling is a pricey thing at times,” he says in an unhappy tone. “We got a lot of hassle from John Barry for sampling one of his harps and he demanded a large amount of royalties for that. Sampling is an honest, working-class way of making music. If you can’t afford an orchestra you just use a pair of decks.”

Despite such minor setbacks the band have quite a number of creative strings to their bow, and are currently focusing on recording “really fast breakbeats, weird folk music and a remix of the Shamen’s ‘Move Any Mountain’.” More importantly, Kelli is currently singing with her teenage idol Bryan Ferry, and the band are producing for, and touring with, Neneh Cherry.

The future of music looks safe in the hands of the Sneaker Pimps.