The story of The High Llamas’ 77-minute opus “Hawaii” is told by the band’s frontman and former MicroDisney guitarist Sean O’Hagan and two giants of popular music, Love’s Arthur Lee and Brian. The story ends with an exchange with Wilson. beach boys.
In June 1994, Arthur Lee performed songs from Love’s legendary album Forever Changes at The Garage in London, backed by The High Llamas. Sony Music executive Jeremy Pearce was also in attendance.
“Jeremy showed up at Arthur Lee’s show with Martin Kerr at Boo Radley’s,” O’Hagan recalls. “Martin told him he had to come to this show, he would see Arthur Lee and the High Llama.”
“Jeremy had a division at Sony called LRD (Licensing and Repertoire Department), which had Creation, which was the most successful record company in the UK in 1993-1994,” says O’Hagan. Masu. “There were nude records, too, and that was Suede. He could basically do whatever he wanted.”
Pearce was impressed and officially signed The High Llamas. “Jeremy was hooked,” O’Hagan recalls. “He told me to make the next album, whatever it was.”
This is very different from the 1988 breakup of MicroDisney. It was a scary time for O’Hagan.qatar [Coughlan, Microdisney’s frontman] He was a songwriter and lyricist, and I wasn’t. He just wrote music. he didn’t know what to do. ”
O’Hagan found his voice and released a solo album, High Llamas, in 1990. Using that name as a band name, she released two of her albums on independent labels.
The second was Gideon Gay, an album that set the template for what was to come, as O’Hagan explains: That’s how Gideon Gay started. ”
Sony reissued Gideon Gay and released “Checking In, Checking Out” as a single. In June 1995, NME described the song as “an absolutely special out-of-body pop experience” and awarded it the “Single of the Week” award. The stage has been decided to be Hawaii.
“Hawaii was actually made very quickly. We had everything organized and everything written, so it was done in six weeks,” O’Hagan says. “Each song had a personality, a story, and roots, and it all made perfect sense to me.”
Hawaii’s 29 songs play like one 77-minute piece of symphonic pop. Short experimental instrumental pieces follow longer instrumental passages, interspersed with twelve more of his traditionally lyrical pop songs. It sounded like a complete departure from the sounds that were popular in the mid-90s.
“Hawaii was really weird, first of all, double albums were unheard of back then. Songs without beginnings or beginnings were unheard of,” says O’Hagan.
“We had just come out of Sub Pop, we had just come out of grunge. Blur was somewhere on the horizon, the beginning of Britpop. America was basically run by Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. So what was it like to make a record whose main influences were Nino Rota, Brian Wilson, Charlie Mingus, Burt Bacharach, and Alice Coltrane?
When the album was completed, O’Hagan presented it to Sonny Pierce. “He was silent for a while,” O’Hagan says. “During the gestation period of about six months, he kept coming back, and in the end he said, ‘I’ve made the most extraordinary record, no one has ever made a record like this.’ Told.”
“Hawaii” can be described as a concept album about the first settlers from Europe to America. “The idea is that even though we are European, we make music that is an homage to a lot of American and a little bit of Italian and French cinema,” says O’Hagan. “It documents the first time Europeans tried to settle America and how they did it.”
The album’s themes were interpreted in artwork drawn by artist and former Stamps bassist Kev Hopper. “Sean said the theme was pilgrim fathers and wooden huts,” Hopper says. “The image is earthy with strange postmodern overtones. It suits songs dealing with theater and falsehood. The Black and White Column is based on the Buren Column. [French artist Daniel Buren’s art installation at Paris’ Palais Royal]. I remember drawing dozens of them, cutting them out and pasting them together. ”
O’Hagan remembers the first time she saw Buren’s installation. I walked around them for years and they stayed with me. That’s three things he did. It was a naive depiction of the new America that Europeans saw. It was French conceptual art. And a sort of Disney-esque “Hawaii.”
But which record company would release this ambitious album? In 1992, Richard Branson reportedly sold Virgin Records to Thorn EMI for $1 billion. The deal included a “non-compete” agreement. By 1996, that clause had expired, and Branson wanted to form another record company. He cheekily named his new label his V2.
“I was in the studio and I got a call from Jeremy Pearce,” O’Hagan recalls. “He told me that he was going to leave Sony, that Richard Branson wanted to get back into the business, and that Branson had asked him to start a label. I said I would only do it if you came. I said of course I would.”
Hawaii was Branson’s first album released on his new label in March 1996. Reviews were uniformly positive. Spin called it “nearly two hours of perfect, mood-shaking, easy-to-listen pop.” The Washington Post wrote that “O’Hagan has transcended rock and roll” and that Hawaii is “certainly a European interpretation of American popular music.”
Billboard wrote that “High Llamas sounds like a missing link between the Beach Boys and Steely Dan,” and O’Hagan was part of a “new breed of popsmiths” they dubbed “Oak Pop.” I wrote that there was. [orchestral pop] They “returned to inspirations such as Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and Burt Bacharach in their quest to construct a perfectly orchestrated pop masterpiece.” It was a great summary of what Hawaii is like.
Hawaii’s story begins with The High Llamas serving as Arthur Lee’s backing band and ends with O’Hagan’s interaction with another musical hero, Brian Wilson.
“Richard Branson became a friend.” [The Beach Boys’] Bruce Johnston. Johnston heard Hawaii and played it to Brian,” O’Hagan explains. Branson dreamed of bringing the Beach Boys into the studio with O’Hagan producing.
“It’s like a movie,” O’Hagan says. “Being at the ballpark in Cincinnati, being in the hotel with them, having meetings with them, you can really see that.”
Branson’s plan never came to fruition, but for O’Hagan it was the culmination of an amazing journey that began many years ago when he met MicroDisney bandmate Cathal Coughlan in Cork, the city where O’Hagan had moved from Luton. became. A teenager with Irish parents.
“I remember sitting in Lotabeg Green in Cork listening to Pet Sounds. Cathal and I were listening to SMiLE and Pet Sounds tapes and thinking, ‘What’s going on there?’ I was thinking. Is it a bottleneck guitar? Is there a string there?
“Hawaii”, which has been out of print for a long time, will soon be reprinted. “It’s completely becoming a reality,” O’Hagan said. “I doubt it will be the end of this year, but it could be early 2025. Gideon Gay and Hawaii will be mastered soon and we’re collecting artwork. It’s very much happening.”
The High Llamas released two more albums for V2: “Cold and Bouncy” and “Snowbug”. Since the early ’00s, the band’s albums have been released on Chicago’s Drag City Records.
O’Hagan has since participated in numerous collaborations and performed at the reformed MicroDisney with Cathal Coughlan from 2018 to 2019, until the singer’s death in 2022.
The High Llamas will release their 11th album “Hey Panda” at the end of March. Their first full-length release in six years, Hey Panda, includes two co-written songs with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, guest vocals from Ray Morris and Lizzie O’Hagan (Sean’s daughter), and the Friars. Featuring the production of. A thoroughly modern-sounding album thanks to the use of AutoTune and electronics, Hey Panda is also unmistakably a High Rama record.
- Paul McDermott’s podcast “To Here Knows When – Great Irish Albums Revisited” is available on all listening platforms