Episode Notes

Episode 37 of To Here Knows When - Great Irish Albums Revisited focuses on Hawaii by The High Llamas released in 1996 on Alpaca Park/V2 Records.

This episode is a deep dive with Sean O'Hagan on one of my favourite albums of all time - Hawaii by The High Llamas. A long chat, bookended by stories about Arthur Lee and Love, Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys. In between we touch on everything from Cillian Murphy, The Coral, Mercury Rev, Sean’s 2019 album - Radum Calls, Radum Calls, signing to V2 Records, Gideon Gaye, A&M’s Jerry Moss and Herb Albert’s Almo Sounds, Tim Gane and Stereolab, Cold and Bouncy, Cathal Coughlan, Microdisney and loads, loads more. We also chat about the new High Llamas album - Hey Panda.

Sean O’Hagan has featured once before on this podcast. Back on EP20 I featured my documentary Iron Fist in Velvet Glove – the story of Microdisney.

Microdisney split up in 1988 and Sean would go on to release his debut album High Llamas on Demon Records in 1990. Using the name of that album for his new band, The High Llamas would release their debut album Santa Barbara in 1992 and follow it up a few months later with the mini album Apricots.

Reviewing Apricots in the NME, Stuart Maconie wrote:

“Don’t come here looking for blissed-out noisescapes, Apricots is a sophisticated yet manic dash through rock’s palatial halls, round by the Beach Boys, down past Steely Dan, pausing for a quick look in at Big Star and The Rolling Stones before going out through a door marked 1969.”

Gideon Gaye came next in 1994. Reviewing the album for Select, the late David Cavanagh was mightily impressed, writing:

“Gideon Gaye makes for a lovely sister piece to Holland. Its got all the long hypnotic organ parts and yearning multi-harmony vocals - he’s not quite all the Wilson brothers plus Love and Jardine, but he’s not bad - and as Microdisney’s former guitarist there are plenty of that band’s ingenious chords too. There’s even a spot-on impersonation of Steely Dan on ‘Checking In, Checking Out’. Whatever the man thinks he’s up to, he’s making some great records.”

“Checking In, Checking Out” was released as a single from Gideon Gaye and awarding it “Single of the Week” in the NME, Keith Cameron wrote:

“Checking In, Checking Out, is a lilting pop-wise cut from Gideon Gaye, neatly encompassing most of what is great about the band: perfect harmonies, undemonstrative orchestration, an upful melody counterpointing O’Hagan’s drily melancholic vocals. An altogether special out-of-body pop experience, it becomes the biggest hit not actually about summer.

Below is a short extract from my Oral History - IRON FIST IN VELVET GLOVE the story of MICRODISNEY (Part 3 - The Virgin years). Here Sean talks about the years between the split of Microdisney and the recording of Gideon Gaye.

Sean O’Hagan — I’m 29 maybe, and it’s frightening because I didn’t know what to do. Cathal was a songwriter and a lyricist and I wasn’t. I just wrote music, Cathal wrote music and lyrics. So I felt that I could carry on but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I think I was probably pretty much in shock. Cathal is very quick, he’s very fast and forms The Fatima Mansions very quickly but that’s because he’s a hard working guy and he’s very focused. I don’t know what to do really so I start driving a van with Friends of the Earth. I had heard bits and pieces of The Fatima Mansions but what you do is, you avoid each other, I don’t want to hear them. I was writing songs but I was totally directionless, because I haven’t got a voice, I had never written a lyric. I was doing some demos.

Sean O’Hagan — I remember weird things, Kirsty MacColl gets in touch and asks me to join her band. A few people said that maybe I should be producing various people; maybe I should move to America, that my future was there. There was all sorts of stuff going on but I kind of started to try and write songs and then demoing and of course it was weird going in because you’re not with your pals. It’s just you and you realise how difficult it is. Wilderness, wilderness years, three or four years in the wilderness, absolutely just not able to do it. Then Anita Visser comes over from America and we become pals and I decided to form a band [The Twilights] with her at the centre and Jon [Fell] then wants to join us and then Marcus Holdaway joins us, this is before The High Llamas. There’s a whole waft of songs that I’d written that sound like Wendy & Lisa, it’s unbelievable, going back to this American thing.

Sean O’Hagan — Then I kind of make a record and I decide that it’s gotta be my own voice. The only way that I can find my own voice is through Alex Chilton. So again, I get very close to Alex Chilton. I want the record to sound like an Alex solo record. Demon [Records] hear it, and want to put it out. So that was the beginning really. After that I really begin to form a musical vision in my head, that’s the real beginning.

Sean O’Hagan — The real, real beginning is Santa Barbara. Anita had such a great voice, her voice and my voice and Marcus on stage. I was still obsessed with little bits of The Band. Still obsessed with weird things like The Byrds. Strange things happened like an Italian label asking us to do a cover song. I can remember doing a cover of ‘Up Around the Bend’, by Creedence Clearwater Revival but doing it like The Byrds, doing it like something from Sweetheart of the Rodeo [Columbia, 1968] and thinking, “Wow this works so well.” I can remember doing a cover of ‘Brass Buttons’ [Gram Parsons] and really beginning to understand how to arrange and produce. These things are all out there on various little labels, we did a cover of Nick Drake’s ‘Chime af a City Clock’ and these were all off the back of Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara becomes huge in France, and we sort of had another career in France. Anita wanted to go back to America, then I met Tim Gane from Stereolab and for some reason I’m dragged right back to Brian Wilson and that’s the beginning of Gideon Gaye.

The stage was now set for Hawaii.

The album was released on 25 March 1996 and received praise from all quarters. “Hawaii proves that sophisticated pop music is still possible today,” wrote Music & Media. “Quirky instrumental miniatures connect lavishly-orchestrated and exotically-arranged pop songs.”

In his review of the album for The Irish Times, Kevin Courtney wrote, “Sean O’Hagan’s pet obsession with the sounds of The Beach Boys is given full vent on this fully realised follow up to 1994’s Gideon Gaye, as the former Microdisney man attempts to emulate the genius of Brian Wilson; with some studio magic of his own.”

Courtney continued:

“Hawaii is a 29 track tribute to an era when popular music really was popular, and easy listening wasn’t merely kitschy; the album’s dense layers of Moog, banjo, strings and brass open on to wide, sunny vistas of sound and style, and O’Hagan's complex melodies and arrangements conjure up a picture postcard of a musical paradise, which has since been spoilt by vulgar rockism. Everyone from The Boo Radleys to Rollerskate Skinny has tried to create their own Smile, but The High Llamas have come closest to recapturing the flavour and fantasy of, Wilson’s lost masterpiece.”

The album even breached the Top 100 of the UK Albums Chart landing in at No. 62. And if you ever wondered why copies of Hawaii on double vinyl are so elusive (and expensive), it’s simple - only 11% of its sales were on the desired format.

In October 1996 Billboard published “Pet Sounds - The Thirtieth Anniversary, a Billboard Tribute”

“If an contemporary group exhibits a debt to Pet Sounds, it is certainly The High Llamas, a free-floating unit fronted by singer-writer-producer Sean O’Hagan, a former member of Irish band Microdisney and a frequent sideman on Stereolab’s albums,” wrote Chris Morris. “Both The High Llamas’ 1994 album Gideon Gaye and its current sequel Hawaii profoundly display Brian Wilson’s influence in their densely orchestrated richly arranged pop excursions.”

Sean spoke to Morris for the feature and tried to articulate Pet Sounds’ lasting impact on him:

“I was 18 when I actually heard it, and it was a revelation that basically shifted and rewrote music history, as far as I was concerned. As soon as I heard it, my personal musical vision completely changed. It has basically informed everything I’ve done in music since my 20s until now. It’s only now that I have the ability or the guts or the level-headedness to really address it full-on, as I seem to be doing.”

Sean continued:

“Pet Sounds really made me aware of the power of two or three chords, the power that two or three chords can have on an individual, the emotional and physical power that the right three chords can have. I know a lot of people who talk about it in mostly spiritual terms, and I could, but I don’t want to, because I don’t want to take away from the music.”

A few months earlier in May 1996 Craig Rosen wrote a cover feature in Billboard about orchestral pop titled: “Building a Perfect Ork-Pop Masterpiece - Forward-Thinking Acts Look to the past.”

“Bored by the three-chord simplicity of grunge and neo-punk, a new breed of popsmiths is going back to such inspirations as Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and Burt Bacharach in the quest for building the perfect orchestrated pop masterpiece,” wrote Rosen before profiling Eric Matthews, Winnipeg’s Witch Hazel and The High Llamas.

Sean tells Rosen, that what was once branded as alternative rock isn’t much of an alternative: “There is this whole misconception that American college rock with twisted baseball caps and checked shirts is adventurous, but it’s the most conformist, corporate thing out there.”

Sean explains to Rosen that once he began to rethink his musical strategy in the years after 1990’s High Llama before putting together The High Llamas to record Gideon Gaye: “The music that I listened to was The Beach Boys from Today up to Holland, The Left Banke, Van Dyke Parks and people like that, and a lot of soundtrack music like John Barry, and electronic experimental music like Kraftwerk and Neu.”

Sean continues:

“The most important thing to me is to try to make a record that is going to change the way someone else makes a record. I know that’s quite an arrogant thing to say, but we don’t do music to reassure ourselves, but to investigate new possibilities. That’s what these people like Brian Wilson did. he stopped making surf records because he thought, ‘There’s got to be something more.’”

We got further insight into the influences at the heart of Hawaii in January 1998 when Spin published “D Boys” a feature by Chris Norris on bands abandoning rock music for more exotic sounds. He wrote, “For an emerging breed of discriminating heads, exotic sounds - as found in drum’n’bass, French pop, tech-step, or Japanoise - have replaced rock’s twin towers of words and melody as the lingua franca of the musical underground.”

“I was bored shitless by guitar rock for years and years and years,” Sean tells Norris. “How many times can you rewrite ‘Sweet Jane’?”
Norris continues:

“While his former band, Microdisney, specialized in pop-rock of the Squeeze school, O’Hagan is among the many former rockers to explore sonic exotica. The High Llamas’ recent Hawaii is a sampledelic lounge manifesto: pitch-perfect dentist-office music, circa 1966, with saccharine strings, mellow “Walk On By” trumpets, bachelor-pad Moog, Muppet Movie banjo. Like many Sound Boys, O’Hagan found his source-book in the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.”

Sean explains further:

“From looking at the Beach Boys, I saw the Martin Denny thing, from there the early Yellow Magic Orchestra thing. These people were investigating harmonies in really interesting, nearly orchestral ways, but they were using subversive sounds to do it.”

In a review of Hawaii a month earlier for Spin, writer Erik Himmelsbach mentions the Beach Boys and Smile but contends that the album’s, “real reference point is [Van Dyke] Parks’s 1968 foray into Joycean mad science, Song Cycle.” Like Norris before him, Himmelsback also mentioned the dentist-office: “And so it goes, until you’re not sure if Hawaii’s the greatest record you’re ever heard, or if you’re just spent too much time at the dentist’s office.”

In his 2001 Aquarium Drunkard retrospective review of Hawaii, Mark Neeley wrote: “Loosely a concept album with themes of colonialism and early tourism (through an Anglo-Irish lens), the sounds of Hawaii were crafted with an arsenal of harpsichord, banjo, sleigh bells, string sections and myriad other instruments. The complex arrangements and production on songs like the lush, orchestral “Sparkle Up” sharply convey the spirit of lost West Coast studio works, nodding to the likes of Bacharach or the Pet Sounds/SMiLE sessions.”

Neeley continued: “The group drew inspiration from elements of the past when it was not fashionable, and simultaneously delivered original sounds that retrospectively seem very much ahead of their time. Highly recommended - hopefully in new physical formats in the near future.”

I concur completely with Neeley - Hawaii is highly recommended and as Sean explains in this episode, new physical copies of both Gideon Gaye and Hawaii are in the works, both albums are about to be cut for reissue.

I first met Sean in May 1996 when The High Llamas played in Cork on the Hawaii tour. I was working with Frontline Promotions at the time and we promoted that gig and I also got to interview Sean earlier in the day for my radio show that at the time was on Cork Campus Radio. I interviewed him again in 1998 when Cold and Bouncy was released. The 1996 interview is lost but in 2021 I found a cache of old MiniDiscs (remember them) containing some of my interviews from the mid-late 90s, the Cold and Bouncy interview was among them. The quality on the MD wasn’t great so I’ve transcribed the interview and it can be read at the link below:

“Sean O’Hagan and the Pan-National Avant-Garde” by Paul McDermott

For Further Listening/Reading:

For the Irish Examiner’s Ireland in 50 Albums series I’ve written about Hawaii…

Hawaii is available on Spotify:

Hey Panda is available on Bandcamp.

Here’s a few words I wrote back in 2012 about Hawaii for the defunct Irish music website We Are Noise:

Below: Press cuttings from various UK and US music publications, click on each image to enlarge.