Photo © John Knights
“This music is literally for sharing, it’s everybody’s music.” Sean O’Hagan is speaking down a slightly crackly phone line from his home studio in London about music and egalitarianism, touching on folk modes of performance and the unpretentiousness of music that valorises community over individual experience. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s picked up on the simple joys of O’Hagan’s songs and arrangements for his group The High Llamas, who formed in 1990 on the back of O’Hagan’s rough and ready solo record titled, with predictive referentiality, High Llamas.
Over their fifteen-year tenure, The High Llamas have written some of the most richly constructed and oddly affecting pop music since The Beach Boys’ disarmingly humble pop fantasias on Friends and Surf’s Up, or the post-Tropicalia sweetness and modernist impulses of Brazilian artists like Marcos Valle, Joyce, Milton Nascimento and Lo Bôrges. The group have also drawn on 1950s pop arrangements, English jazz and Canterbury prog, 1970s singer-songwriters, German electronica, Italian soundtrack music, French pop and American post-rock to create a self-styled universe where songs are pliable, mutable sculptures. They have cross-pollinated with everyone from Stereolab to Arthur Lee and Scottish folk outfit Appendix Out, Louis Philippe to Will Oldham and Kev Hopper, Saint Etienne to Lee Hazelwood and Edith Frost, and O’Hagan also has a neat sideline in string arrangements for groups like Saint Etienne offshoot Birdie, Doves and Super Furry Animals.
But back to O’Hagan for now - he’s on a roll, explaining in roundabout fashion why he’s disinterested in the cult of personality that comes pre-packaged with so much current music. Instead, he’s offering alternate prescriptions of ‘ways of going on’ for musicians interested in society and community. “(This) is what music was about many years ago. It was storytelling. People went from town to town to share tunes. Just like when Irish music was taken to Australia, it wasn’t about the people, it was about the music. Actually, that’s a really good way of putting it. It’s a shared experience, a shared happening.”
“For me, tunes are gifts,” he continues. “I might go to a country where I can’t speak the language, and it’s a struggle, you’d have to exchange some pidgin language, but you could sing a tune to someone, and if it’s a great tune, that’ll communicate. That’s what I’m trying to say. It really is a shared experience, and there is something egalitarian about music, which is innate.”
Though they’ve continually shifted aesthetic ground since their formation in the early 1990s, The High Llamas in essence work through similar concerns on every record: arranging beautifully crafted songs in unassuming yet surprising ways. High Llamas, credited to O’Hagan alone but also featuring future long-term Llama Jon Fell on bass, is a great opening shot, a set of stripped-back songs that touch on the peculiarly English country rock of Brinsley Schwarz and the plain-speaking r&b of Alex Chilton’s s post-Big Star solo records like Black List or High Priest. It also builds on the mid-Atlantic melodies of O’Hagan’s first group Microdisney, which he co-directed with Cathal Coughlan on vocals and lyrics. The group formed in the early 1980s and went on to record several albums for Rough Trade before disbanding in 1988. (Fell was also a member of Microdisney.)
The subsequent High Llamas mini-album Apricots was released in 1991 on Plastic, an offshoot of England’s Creation Records run by The House Of Love’s Chris Groothuizen. Apricots was later expanded to become the French-only album Santa Barbara in 1992, which preceded the group’s first magnum opus, 1993’s Gideon Gaye, a stunning album recorded on a shoestring budget of ₤2000 and originally released on the tiny Target Records label in Brighton. Around this time the group’s core membership solidified, with O’Hagan and Fell joined by Marcus Holdaway on piano, organ and strings, and Rob Allum on drums and percussion. Holdaway and O’Hagan are also responsible for the group’s string arrangements. This same line-up backed Arthur Lee of Love for a series of performances, where the group gave note-perfect renditions of Forever Changes.
With Gideon Gaye the Llamas found their feet, essaying a brave collection of songs that traversed territory from the Beach Boys’ post-Pet Sounds pop dreams to the quaint country FM of “Checking In, Checking Out”, the song that had Herb Alpert trying to sign the group to his label. In the end, the Llamas formed their own company, Alpaca Park, via Sony/V2, and settled in to record their 1994 double-album Hawaii, which thought through the Gothic America of Van Dyke Parks and Dr John by way of complex arrangements and cellular instrumental suites. The album’s playful lyrics loosely addressed nomadism, nostalgia, film and musical theatre, and the effects of colonialism. Bruce Johnson and Brian Wilson were such fans of Hawaii that O’Hagan was invited to collaborate with The Beach Boys on a new album, though the project was ultimately shelved.
During this period, O’Hagan had also been doubling as an ancillary member of Stereolab, and for a time the two groups were inseparable. For their fourth album Cold And Bouncy, the Llamas brought Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay on board as electronics advisor, who filtered the group’s playing and scrawled giddy blurts of analogica over songs that were beginning to appear more like modular constructions than simple verse-chorus-bridge narratives. This development in writing style blossomed on 1999’s Snowbug, a warm, breezy album that was equal parts Tropicalia and Shuggie Otis, which featured contributions from Tortoise’s John McEntire and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen, and was recorded in part by McEntire, Jim O’Rourke and Tortoise alumni Bundy K Brown.
By this stage, O’Hagan’s approach to writing and arranging was coming across more like a series of mischievous non-sequiturs, hopping between sections like nomads crossing continents. “The modular approach, if I remember, was literally working with individual ideas, totally separate, even written over extended time periods,” O’Hagan patiently explains, “and then throwing them together, perhaps fine tuning the flow by changing key so that the ongoing section follows on intelligently. I might throw a passing bar in to ease the change. It’s a way of forcing yourself not to write in cliché.”
“That’s one approach,” he further qualifies. “There is another approach which is instinctive. That’s when I try to imagine myself as a French writer in the late 50s slinging out songs for the torch singers of the day. Very silly I know, but I imagine the community of musicians at work.” Often with an O’Hagan song, you never quite know what’s coming next: he’s adept at throwing the listener’s expectations for a loop, moving the arrangements around like Lego blocks and reusing elements throughout the song as mnemonic devices. “The structure is sometimes classical verse, chorus, middle eight, but sometimes the chorus is integrated into a verse and takes one by surprise,” he clarifies. “I am a great fan of opening a song with an instrumental refrain drawn from the chorus perhaps which sets up the first verse. A good example would be the opening to “Calloway” on Beet, Maize And Corn.”
High Llamas fans who also follow modern English fiction may have been surprised to find a reference to the group in novelist Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters Club, which elliptically addresses the political and social malaise of 1970s Britain: the final section of the book is titled “Green Coaster” after a song from Snowbug. For his part, Coe has repeatedly professed his love of the group’s music, going so far as to write the liner notes for 2003’s Retrospective, Rarities And Instrumentals double-CD compilation on V2, where he wonders whether “any other band, in the history of pop music, could release a double CD compilation and not include a single love song on it. Have The High Llamas ever recorded a love song, in fact?”
It’s an interesting question. O’Hagan’s approach to lyrics is refreshing in a field that privileges the emotional outpouring of the individual over the observational documentation of the everyday. When I ask O’Hagan about his lyrics, he is honest about his struggle with the written word. “I am not a literary person and read much less than I should. I find lyric writing difficult and not a natural process. Lyrics come right at the end, sometimes six months later. With words, I try to defy the obvious lead the music sets and write about architecture, food distribution, urban regeneration, the US space program, poets who encounter traveling salesmen.”
O’Hagan tends to work in ‘concrete abstractions’, making everyday experiences surreal via their framing within a structure that often privileges the musicality of the word over its meaning. O’Hagan is by no means a nonsense writer, but the logic to his lyrics is far from the traditional ‘I love you/you don’t love me’ memes that plague so much pop. There’s a subtle, benign game play going on in his lyrics, where O’Hagan offsets the romanticism of his arrangements with a narrative or tableau that defies expectation. He suggests that he learnt this from his Microdisney band mate Cathal Coughlan, who O’Hagan thinks may have been drawing on John Cale’s example, and O’Hagan himself admires what he describes as the address of “the mechanics of living” that’s writ through Cale albums like Paris 1919 and Vintage Violence.
“The Goat Looks On”, from Gideon Gaye, is a perfect example of O’Hagan’s writing, with its detached observations on the quotidian impacts of urban ‘progress’: ‘Can’t quite believe what I’ve just seen, Construction workers dressed in green. A supermarket on the hill, The way things happens makes you feel ill. And the goat looks on, at another one.’ The lyric works as counterpoint to the sweeping strings and slow, mournful tone of the song, just perfect for lyrics that rhapsodize over love’s easy tears. O’Hagan, rather, removes the first-person from the frame. “I do this because it’s a protection, I could never be too personal with words,” he reflects. “I don’t really want anyone to know that stuff, but I like the sound and effect of a love song…so how about making it sound like a love song, but you are singing about a goat on a hillside watching a supermarket being built instead. Perfect. No one gets hurt but I really feel for the goat.”
This take on song lyrics also reflects O’Hagan’s own engagement with the mechanics of living. “I am a very political person and regard your responsibility to your community only second to that of your family,” he asserts. “However, I could not attempt to bring that into my writing. I am just not that good. I separate the two without a worry, and then I live a life that I hope respects the sanctity of others.” It also defiantly pulls the plug on the cult of personality endemic to so much pop and rock. “I think it’s weird that a large number of people would want to know everything about a certain singer,” O’Hagan sighs, sounding genuinely puzzled. “You can hear the emotion in the vocal style, it’s a big set up, you can hear the ‘crack’ in the vocal style. There was a time where it disappeared for a while, but it came back, and everyone was excited about deep emotions in music, and passion in music, and yeah, passion in music is great but only if the passion is genuine, if it’s about sharing…”
Snowbug was The High Llamas’ final release for major-indie label V2, after which they signed to Drag City in the USA, and Stereolab’s label Duophonic Super 45s in Britain. Both labels had previously released O’Hagan’s Turn On collaboration with Stereolab’s Tim Gane and Andy Ramsay, an experimental instrumental mini-album whose sense of play made it an important precursor to both the Llamas’ Cold And Bouncy and Stereolab’s Dots And Loops. In 2000, the Llamas released a mini-album, Buzzle Bee, which saw the group at their most abstract, particularly on the schizophrenic “New Broadway”, which cuts between performances much like an electro-acoustician mangling analogue tape into deliriously abstruse audio scaffolds.
Without the financial backing of a large label, The High Llamas have perhaps had to scale down their recordings, and it took them three years to follow up Buzzle Bee. 2003’s Beet, Maize And Corn received fairly short shrift in some quarters - I remember a ridiculously misguided review in Adelaide, Australia’s street press which suggested the album was a carbon copy of the Llamas’ earlier records. But its fantastic combination of understated lyrics, sweet nylon string guitar, buzzing organs, and the pop-in-abstract of the group’s most risky strings and brass arrangements yet, mark Beet, Maize And Corn as the group’s mislaid masterpiece, and my favorite work in their canon.
When I start asking about the album, O’Hagan appears surprised and pleased that I’ve picked up on the record’s quiet yet determined individualism: there was simply nothing else in 2003 across pop music’s bleak horizon that sounded quite like this. It has always struck me as the group’s most self-contained set of songs, and according to O’Hagan, the album works through several key areas of interest. The rhythm section is all but absent from the record, with percussion working more as punctuation or shading. “The difference between the music I’d been brought up with, you know, post-Beatles pop music, and some music from the 1950s that I was interested in, was basically the absence of backbeat,” O’Hagan observes. This absence gives the record its unhurried, nostalgic air: “I really wanted a record that had autumnal colours.”
O’Hagan also worked with two particular string sounds - a very dry string sound, and its converse, “that American sound, strings (that were) dripping with reverb.” The brass arrangements on the album stand out the most, though. Arranged by O’Hagan and Andy Robinson, they draw on the avant-garde brass O’Hagan had heard on Carla Bley’s landmark albums from the 1960s and 1970s, beautiful titles like Escalator Over The Hill. “They were quite strange records,” O’Hagan chuckles, “those Carla Bley avant-garde brass arrangements. But it’s a great sound, I really wanted to use that sound. That’s what you’ll hear on songs like “Barney Mix”.”
Furthermore, the way the songs repeat tiny cells of melody and harmony, from the seemingly real-time cut-ups of “Porter Dimi” to the languorous, dream-like haze of strings that floats through “The Holly Hills”, a song that eulogises Van Dyke Parks and the art of the song writer producing for pop singers - ‘But white pianos seem to be across the hills of Beverly / The singers wait for songs to sing, the city pipes the water in / One day the singing will begin, Across the Holly Hills’ - recalls the demands of composition for film soundtrack. “You are completely right about the repetition of ideas on a record as homage to film soundtrack and I get a lot of my instrumental developmental ideas from soundtracks,” O’Hagan claims. “I love French and Italian soundtracks, and American - let’s not forget Bernard Herrmann. They are as experimental as they are impressionistic. Using the sense of soundtrack removes the song from the ordinary and gives it a special space of its own.”
I’d also always been intrigued by the cover for Beet, Maize And Corn. High Llamas record covers in the past had featured rude huts, abstract paintings dotted with power lines, or skyscrapers made unreal by pastel shadings, but Beet, Maize And Corn is clothed in a gorgeous painting of an everyday urban setting: a tower block in glass and red. O’Hagan divulges, “Beet, Maize and Corn featured a local landmark hated by all but painted in a slightly 1950s Parisian style. Previous to that, we played with graphics for a while but I got bored with that and returned to trusted painting. It will go in and out of style but we will stick with it. I just love it. One picture and you can create a little world for a few to see. The art does not need to function next to the music. I like the idea of causing the listener to ask the question ‘how does this work’?” And, far from the abstracted imaginary of some of his earlier lyrics, O’Hagan recalls with genuine wonder, “after Beet Maize And Corn I was walking around and I thought, ‘I’ve just written about what’s on my doorstep’.”
Can Cladders, the new High Llamas record, features another painting by Jeremy Glogan as its cover. “All the mini scenes are extracted from the songs but this is a first. The new painting started off as a collage I knocked up and I asked Jeremy to paint the collage very much as on the cover of Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite”. The album is a subtle about-face from the gorgeous urban stillness of Beet, Maize And Corn. The way O’Hagan puts it, he wanted to tap into a rich seam of 1970s singer-songwriter recordings and soul, gospel and r&b choruses. “There’s a lot of joy in that music”, he grins, singling out Laura Nyro And Labelle’s 1971 collaboration Gonna Take A Miracle, where the New York songwriter paid tribute to soul and pop from the 1960s with the Labelle trio as female chorus, as particularly important. It’s not a sound that The High Llamas have touched on before. “I’d shied away from it,” O’Hagan agrees, “but on that Laura Nyro And Labelle album, there’s that track called “The Bells”, and I thought, well, I just want to get that gospel stuff (on the record).”
The resulting album is perhaps the most celebratory of their career, with the female chorus of Winnie Asmah, Tania Degale, Sylvia Arthur and Kelsey Michael belting out charming counterpoint to O’Hagan’s modest singing. “They hadn’t really heard the music I’d referred to,” he recalls, “but I had the idea that I had, and we just gathered around the piano, and listened to the records. The rhythm section came back, and we recorded the rhythm section mostly with just a few mics and a few takes, I really wanted to get that live sound you hear on those records…(For the vocals) the idea was really a trashy recording, a slightly trashy sound on the vocals.”
It works beautifully, with the sweet, understated melisma on “Winter’s Day” the record’s highlight, alongside a gorgeous near-ballad named after and written in tribute to the American jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, whose Afro-Harping album is an under-recognised classic, and who played on countless sessions for soul singers before moving further out into previously uncharted territory. O’Hagan’s lyric documents an experience he had while DJing, playing Ashby’s records to the general confusion of the squares in the crowd: ‘Puzzled by the sound, Dorothy’s around, from another day / Music lost and found, from another day / Brought upon a harp from another day’.
“Sailing Bells”, with its chorus cascade of rich harmony - almost like a folk music round - and gentle spider’s-web strings, pays homage to another of O’Hagan’s heroes, Robert Wyatt. “Yeah, there’s a tribute to Robert Wyatt in the second verse,” O’Hagan explains, “where the lyric goes ‘Bobby sails the cat / Down the Medway flats / Like a freeform not far from the land / Sailing bells are hung / Brushes on the drum / And the free men of Canterbury play / And the cat moves on down the Medway’. That is basically, I dunno, that’s more just about Canterbury in the 1970s being the hub, the Canterbury scene. I was trying to capture the scene, of these hippie guys making their music, Soft Machine, Hatfield And The North. For some reason, I put them on a boat. And of course, ‘Bobby sails the cat…’ is Robert Wyatt.”
It’s a beautiful image, the antic heroes of a very English strain of 1960s psychedelia, Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, and Australian ex-pat Daevid Allen manning the sails. O’Hagan acknowledges that Wyatt in particular is an “incredibly important” figure in his private constellation of musical heroes. It’s not hard to figure why. Wyatt was one of the first singers to break free of the Americanisms of early 1960s English r&b and rock, first in The Wilde Flowers and then with the earliest line-ups of The Soft Machine, and his consequent project Matching Mole. Wyatt sings with an almost defiant colloquialism, his slightly soured falsetto bringing equal parts pathos and humour to a nearly four-decade run of solo recordings that draw from jazz, prog, bossa nova and pop. And though Wyatt’s music is never short of the whimsically absurd - Wyatt himself has claimed in interview that he’s “deeply shallow” - his benign presence and generosity of spirit is matched by a cussed political streak.
One of Wyatt’s great skills is the wry concealment that often occurs in his lyrics, with political broadsides cloaked as dolorous love songs, an approach that directly echoes O’Hagan’s own take on the word. “Yeah, you’re absolutely right,” O’Hagan agrees, before continuing, “Robert Wyatt, I mean, getting back to what we’ve been talking about, he’s never shied away from pop music.” Anyone who’s seen Wyatt’s Top Of The Pops appearance when his mid-1970s cover of The Monkees’ “I’m A Believer” broached the English charts would doubtless agree, with his plain-singing vocal the bridge between the way-out Canterbury cats and the pure pleasure of the pop song.
I wonder aloud whether Wyatt’s conversational singing style had any impact on O’Hagan, and he pauses before suggesting there’s one particular connection: “I think it’s really love of melody, and…There’s a little bit of folk music in the way I sing, not that I sing like a folk musician, but I don’t like the idea of embellishing. There are very few people who sing without that (these days), maybe Trish (Keenan) from Broadcast, she doesn’t embellish the melody.”
As we speak, O’Hagan has been editing and mastering the soundtrack for La Vie d’Artiste by director Marc Fitoussi, which has been composed in collaboration with Tim Gane. As The High Llamas slow their output - over three years separate Beet, Maize And Corn and Can Cladders - O’Hagan has been busying himself with other projects. Alongside the film soundtrack, which is due for release on Beggars Banquet sometime in 2007, he has recently been collaborating with fellow Llama Marcus Holdaway and artist Jean-Pierre Muller on their ongoing Musical Painting and Musical Wheel collaborations, where O’Hagan’s and Holdaway’s compositions inhabit the very fabric of Muller’s artwork. He also recently wrote three songs for the new album from Kassin+2, Futurismo, the latest manifestation of the post-Tropicalia trio of Moreno Veloso (son of Brazilian pop pioneer Caetano Veloso), Domenico Lancellotti and Kassin.
O’Hagan’s ongoing connection with Brazilian music, which he hails for being “sophisticated pop music, but not ‘hack’ music - it’s sophisticated pop without pomp”, also led to his hiring as musical director for the London Barbican’s staging of the Tropicalia manifesto album Panis Et Circensis. O’Hagan and Holdaway transcribed the Rogerio Duprat arrangements from the album and staged the performance with Brazilian outfit Orchestre Imperial. His enthusiasm for Brazilian music spills over in our conversation: “One of the things I love about that music, and it connects back to our earlier conversation about community and music, is that at their shows the entire audience sings along with the tunes! It happens at Caetano Veloso gigs, you go and see him and the audience is singing along.”
It’s an approach to the song - as conduit for shared experience, as an access moment for community - that resonates with O’Hagan’s own writing: his dream of an egalitarian song that rings true, a benign, generous and unpretentious song that collapses the false divide between experiment and accessibility. “Your instinct leads you to write in a way which satisfies your artistic intentions and if you are strong you stick to your guns. If the high street likes your music, so be it. If the avant-garde embrace you, so be it, just as long as they do not abuse a non-believer for not being on message.” O’Hagan pauses before concluding, with a gentle nod, “It’s the music and not the lifestyle that is important.”
Originally published in Signal To Noise #45, Spring 2007.
