Sean O’Hagan’s musical journey started in cult Irish band Microdisney, where he provided the delicate melodies and arrangements that underpinned Cathal Coughlan’s bitterly humorous lyrics. After Microdisney’s demise in 1988, Sean O’Hagan formed the High Llamas. Over 11 albums, the High Llamas have explored O’Hagan’s unique musical vision, which combines influences as diverse as the orchestral brilliance of the Beach Boys, the jazz harmonic explorations of Charles Mingus, and such non-rock music as bossa nova and library music. The High Llamas became a beloved cult band, and O’Hagan joined Stereolab as an auxiliary member and almost wound up collaborating with Brian Wilson. The High Llamas’ 11th studio album Hey Panda (2024) sees the band’s orchestral and harmonic mastery expanded to include hip hop beats and sounds from R&B. Meanwhile, their first six albums, Santa Barbara (1992), Gideon Gaye (1994), Hawaii (1996), Cold and Bouncy (1998) remix album Lollo Rosso (1998), and Snowbug (1999), have finally been reissued on vinyl after many years. The High Llamas were playing at Leaf in Liverpool, a show which OUTSIDELEFT’s Jonathan Thornton was super excited to be attending, and Sean O’Hagan was kind enough to talk with him while he was in town.
OUTSIDELEFT: The new High Llamas album Hey Panda is really interesting, because it has a really different sound but it’s still recognisable as High Llamas. Where did that change in sonics come about from?
SEAN O'HAGAN: It came about from a couple of things. I've been a fan of contemporary R&B and everything post-J Dilla for a very long time. And I probably would have tried to have made a record like Hey Panda a few years ago, but I didn't really have the means. Or in my head, I was worried about misappropriating and whatever, because I’m such a fan, I didn't want to think I was straying into an area that I loved, but thinking that I could just assume the kind of the rights of the area. And it was really my daughter who said, no, you understand it, you really love it. And then I worked with a guy called Ben Garrett from Fryars. I helped make his record, and he's very much from that generation. He's a kind of a contemporary pop producer, but he's got a real knowledge of contemporary sound, and I found the path to actually create that sound with Ben in so many ways. So the couple of years I spent with him were really informative. My job with Ben on his record was to bring the arrangements, to bring a tiny bit of High Llamas into his work. And so I thought, well, then I can just take a little bit away into into my little world. And as much as I love the previous sound, I really believe that if you're going to be a long-lasting band, you have to have iterations. You can't just be the same thing. And so this the latest, maybe the final iteration of the band. Because of the sound of the High Llamas, the way I write chords and I write melodies… I don't think too many people do it like that. And so even if you're using fat synths and beats, if you're using the chords and the shapes and the counterpoint that I've always used, you're going to hear that voice. It's going to be evident. So for the listener to say, it sounds completely different, but somehow completely familiar, is what I want to achieve. And I think it can be achieved by that the relationship, the bedrock being the melodies and the counterpoint and the chords the top lines are very recognizable.
OL: One of the exciting things about Hey Panda is that you’ve had this deep love of pop music going back to the 60s and Brian Wilson orchestral arrangements, but now it’s got those modern aspects as well, so it’s like you have 50 years of pop music in one package.
SO'H: Yeah, that's an interesting way to look at it. The thing is that you take Hip Hop and R&B, okay, it's very, very contemporary. But Hip Hop also borrowed from 50 years of pop music by its very nature. And in the best possible way. So I like to think that on something like ‘Bade Amey’ there's some of the very contemporary sound, but I'd also like to think that there's a sound that could also be mid-60s, the Impressions Curtis Mayfield, or, you know, even early 60s early doo-wop. But I’m 65, and the most important thing for my generation is that we keep listening and that we don't assume that because we were there when the when the template was formed that we own the template. I'm sure you know people of my age and they'll politely kind of say, I love your music, but it was all said and done in my day. How many times have you heard that? And unfortunately, the prevalence of that opinion is far too wide. It's slightly arrogant and disrespectful, and it means less music, really. Because you think, why even try? I would like for people my generation to widen their listening, and to be prepared to realize that we are in a very, very, very positive age of contemporary music. We’re in a great age.
OL: It's exciting because there's just so much happening. You can't really say, there's nothing out there for me, because there's so much out there.
SO'H: So much!
OL: The other striking thing about Hey Panda is that it has some of your most personal and introspective lyrics.
SO'H: Absolutely, yeah. I'm glad you noticed that. So I used to have this kind of strange rule when I was younger, that you have to divert from the personal. And it was a good rule, I understand why I did it. I did it because I thought there wasn’t enough variety in lyricism. I just thought, hang on. We've been listening to the classic pop song for so long. And the subject matter is boy meets girl, boy breaks up with girl, or whatever. So I’d write about all sorts of things. I'd write about buildings, I'd write about imagined happenings. I'd write about arrogant employers. I'd write about a bunch of guys in a steel yard. Which is great. But this time, being 65, I just thought, you know, the one thing that really shaped my life was the fact that I was really bad at school. And I was bad at school because I have a crippling dyslexia, but I went to school in the 70s when people didn't know what that was. And I was very confused, because I was this person who had lots of ideas I was sparking, but it wasn't happening on the on the paper in front of me. It wasn't happening in the exam hall. And what that does is it closes down your confidence, because you think that you're lesser, shall we say. But I realized that all that was wrong, because I'm just thinking, wait a minute, I've got a really sparky brain. I can do stuff. The only thing to do is music, really. So I was on a building site when I was 15. I worked in building sites, worked in food factories, but there was always music in my head. And thank god for punk, because I was the right age. And the thing that punk did was, it didn't say, go and make noisy music. It said, no, just go and ignore everything and do exactly what you want. That's the most important thing, which is what it did for me, And because I clearly could organise music, dyslexia pushed me towards it, because that was the only thing I could do.
OL: So it's interesting you say about different lyrics as well, because you were in Microdisney with Cathal [Coughlan]…
SO'H: The god of lyricists!
OL: One of the great lyricists for sure. And he went off and did his own thing in Fatima Mansions, which is great, and you went off and did your own thing, which is complimentary, but in the opposite direction
SO'H: Yeah. I mean, when we were working together, especially in the very, very early days, that dynamic was always there. But we actually learned from each other's dynamics. The thing that separated us in the end wasn't really us. It was the structure of a hyper-professional music business that was demanding something that we weren't going to give them. And that sometimes creates anger.
OL: I think in retrospect, you look back at the 80s, and you see that so many of these alternative indie bands were trying to be forced into cookie cutter shapes by people who just didn't understand them.
SO'H: Yeah. I think that's a very good point. I think they misunderstood the fact that these people were idiosyncratic people. In their poverty and in their in their two-room flats, wherever it was, in Brixton or in Hyde Park, in Leeds or in Gateshead or whatever. These people were creating unique little worlds. And then the thing they seek, obviously, sustenance and sustainability, which is money. And even though a major record company at the time would say, oh, come hither, we understand, this is your home, the record company would be impatient. And within a very short amount of time, within months sometimes, they would be trying to professionalize something that is idiosyncratic…
OL: Yeah, and it just winds up breaking it…
SO'H: Yeah, yeah.
OL: And after Microdisney you formed the High Llamas, and those first six albums have just been rereleased on vinyl, which is lovely, because they've been quite hard to track down for some time now. So what was it like revisiting these albums, now that the 90s are 30 years ago?
SO'H: So, yeah, it is history. It's not recent history. To some extent, it's like visiting somebody else's music. But the one thing it did do was teach me what I really loved about the back catalogue and what I wasn't so happy about. And what I loved in the back catalogue was Snowbug. I absolutely loved it. You know, Hawaii was an extraordinary record, but I think it’s much less extraordinary now. And when I think about, I go, it's just a record. But I forget that at the time, it was extraordinary. It was an odd thing during, a time when noisy American rock was very much running things. And there were some really interesting things happening. However, there wasn't an exploration of odd influences with Brian Wilson and Charlie Mingus on the same record. That wasn't happening. And so, to make a wide screen record which segued and cross faded and had such a variation of influences was quite odd. Now it's less odd. The record that I am so happy with is Snowbug. I think going through Gideon Gaye, Hawaii and Cold and Bouncy, that trilogy was a journey towards Snowbug. Which was a much more natural record for me. By Snowbug, I was listening to a lot of Brazilian music.
OL: It makes me happy to hear that, because Snowbug was the first High Llamas record I heard, so it’s the one that made me a fan, but it’s always the preceding trilogy that gets the props….
SO'H: Yeah, which is fair enough, I suppose. And it's because they were such definitive statements, those records.
OL: For sure. And you also have Lollo Rosso, the remix album, which was done in collaboration with other artists. So what was the process of doing that? I imagine it would have been quite different from doing Gideon Gaye…
SO'H: Yeah, well a lot of it, I think half of it, was what we call swapsies, where they did one and we do one. So that's how that sort of thing happened. It was a marketing thing in the day, but it became obvious that we were assembling a collection and it could make a record. It's so funny. Where does it sit, in the in the pantheon? I don't know, it's a really confusing one, because it's very, very much a 90s sort of tool, so to speak. I suppose it's beginning to happen a little bit again now. Is it a thing?
OL: A little bit, I think, yeah. It's always been an interesting record because it foregrounds the electronic and avant garde influences that have always been in the High Lamas, but in the other records they tend to be a bit more in the background or mixed with other things…
SO'H: I remember some of the guys I worked with, Schneider TM, people like that, were great fun. They found it inspiring to work with melody because they realized that they hadn't really worked with much melody before that. So that was quite interesting, and they would be intrigued by it, and have lots of questions. Mouse On Mars, they're amazing. They're my favourites. I'm still in touch with those guys in Berlin. They don't really do much now. They do bits and pieces.
OL: And around the same time as Cold and Bouncy and Lollo Rosso was when you were a member of Stereolab….
SO'H: Yeah. So it's fairly obvious…
OL: That feedback, yeah.
SO'H: Yeah. We all learned from each other. It was amazing. And within Stereolab, obviously, Tim [Gane] was a massive inspiration for me, And Andy Ramsay should get more of a credit. He's the drummer who was also programming a lot with that modular electronica. I'm still very close to Andy. I worked for Andy a lot in his studio. He was a very influential musician practitioner in my career.
OL: Yeah, and it was nice because you were able to bring that orchestral side that they didn’t have before….
SO'H: Yeah, Absolutely. Well, that's what I did, the orchestral arrangements. Stereolab is very much Tim's vision, but he wanted that, and I was able to bring that. I didn't even know how to do that. Those early records were how I learned how to arrange, really. And Marcus [Holdaway], who's in the High Llamas, who is trained, gave me some basics in writing and putting it down on paper. So I learned like that. And not just orchestration, but also different keyboard sounds and working with clavinets and and polyrhythms.
OL: You can really hear the story of that sound opening up. It's a trilogy, isn't it? Like miles, yeah. Emperor smiles to catch up and Dotson loops, You can really hear the Stereolab sound opening up over that trilogy of records, Mars Audiac Quintet (1994), Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996) and Dots and Loops (1997)
SO'H: Yeah, absolutely. It starts to bounce along. A lot of things that happened at that time, like the [New York sculptor] Charles Long collaboration [Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center, 1995] and The First of the Microbe Hunters (2000) and things like that.
OL: And you still do a fair bit of arranging for other musicians today as well.
SO'H: Yeah, I do, when I'm asked. And I'm really happy to do it. And it's how I make my day living. That's my day job, really. People are sometimes afraid to ask cause they think I'll turn them down. But if people ask, I’m very open. If I hear something in the music and I think I can add to it. And it’s a living,
OL: Yeah, for sure, and there are less ways to make a living from music nowadays.
SO'H: Yeah. You have to be very smart. You have to diversify.
OL: To bring us to a close, what’s next for the High Llamas? Is this the start of a whole new chapter?
SO'H: I think it'd be wrong to say, this is the start of a whole new chapter really. Because, as you know, it’s been how many years since we last did this?
OL: It's been a while!
SO'H: Yeah, I did the solo album, Radum Calls, Radum Calls (2019), and it was really working with Ben and Fryars that allowed the possibility to think about the High Llamas making a new record and do stuff again. I'm not going to say anything, but I'm certainly not finished. I'll be doing stuff. Personally, I want to collaborate a lot now. And if I could collaborate with people who are from a different generation, that's what I'd be really excited to do, because I know I can learn more from those guys. I am working on something with a guy called Dee-Morris in LA at the moment. Great, great writer. I'm just doing a little bit with him. I'm 65 nearly 66 I kind of don't want to take up all the room, you know?
I really like doing the solo shows. Have you ever seen, when I did the solo thing, which I just do on my own? And that’s completely different, but I do that, and I quite enjoy that as well. All the guys in the band, you know, they've all got stuff going on. John [Fell] is a very highly professional guy. Rob [Allum] has got a whole thing going. So we can't say, oh no, we're just hitting the road and we're off. There’s two reasons. First, there isn't the finances there, secondly, I know it's really lovely we came, we played, but we're not playing a huge audience, and that isn't really sustainable. And so there are a group of really beautiful, dedicated people who have been with us on the journey, and they'll always be there, but we're not talking about a sustainable industry-size musical act. So, I think it's nice that we're doing this and we're getting out, we're playing, and we'll probably play whenever we can. But for me, there's, there's loads to do, Mainly as a collaborative person. Personally, I love being on stage, but I also like being hidden. I love being just the unacknowledged writer in something.
OL: Thank you so much for talking with us!
Essential Information
Main image Photo of Sean O'Hagan by Simon Russell (from the Drag City records website)
The High Llamas six classic records from the 90s have recently been reissued by Drag City, let Jonathan Thornton be your guide right here...
