“It was K9 who asked ‘Why don’t we start making beats for ourselves?’,” states Dice.

It was a simple question that would effectively change the future for the band.

“People didn’t really appreciate what we were doing,” starts Dice. “We enjoyed what we were doing and the mainstream areas of others but K9 wanted to put out songs that people really enjoyed listening to. I was more into the pure hip-hop, beats and rhymes and K9 started to put some melody into it. We stopped the samples and began to make our own sounds but K9 and I weren’t really good performers so we needed a formula. So I asked Hi-C to do the singing for some of our songs and Trapp to do some verses.”

It would be a willing formula that would produce the successful hit ‘Itsumo’ but by all accounts the song’s achievements far excelled its expectations.

“People were criticising the song. It’s a very lame rap song. It’s like a joke, we never really planned releasing it,” begins Dice. “But we went to a bar and they played our song. No one knew that we were drinking there. When they played it everyone was shouting and screaming and standing on tables. It was weird and frustrating because we have tracks in our album that we put our heart and effort into and there’s this song that took 15 minutes and all of a sudden it’s like a hit. But we came to appreciate it later on.”

As fans of Japanese animation movies the pair were inspired and thought about the possibility of creating a song for an anime. With no one speaking Japanese, Hi-C explains how they managed to persuade a neighbour who had recently returned from working in Japan to translate their lyrics.

“We made the beat and wrote the lyrics in English. K9 wrote the melody and she translated it,” adds Dice. “We had no idea what she was talking about,” he laughs. “But it sounded good.” >>