What's Your Coda Gonna Be?
An enlightening chat with Sean O'Hagan of The High Llamas
Back in 1994, during my first full year as an adult resident of Los Angeles, I went to the beach practically every weekend. As a fresh arrival from the Midwest, I had yet to become even remotely jaded to the joys of the Pacific Ocean, and L.A.’s population (and traffic) had shrunk so precipitously in the wake of the Rodney King riots and the Northridge quake that you could easily get to Venice or Santa Monica from the Mid-Wilshire District in just 20 minutes, or to Leo Carrillo State Beach in just 40.
On many of those mellow beach afternoons, The High Llamas’ Gideon Gaye was my soundtrack for watching the sun-sparkled waves roll in. The record was like a gorgeous, glorious cross between the experimental chamber-pop whimsy of The Beach Boys’ Smile sessions and the languid drones of Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, and it had the ability to make time stand perfectly still for me.
I knew almost nothing about the band (I’d been turned on to Gideon Gaye by a review in one of the British music mags, and special-ordered a copy via my then-gig at the Virgin Megastore), but then I started seeing the name of their leader Sean O’Hagan pop up in interesting places. Turns out he was also a sometime member of Stereolab, another band I loved blissing out to, and word was that he and the Llamas even backed up Arthur Lee on one of the Love leader’s pre-Baby Lemonade forays to the UK. Clearly, this was someone I should be paying attention to…
I first met (and later interviewed) O’Hagan during the Llamas’ 1997 US tour with Spiritualized and Mouse on Mars, and found him to be an incredibly thoughtful conversationalist, as well as the type of insatiable music fan who was as interested in finding out what you were listening to as he was in talking about his own work. He was very much the same when we reconnected again last month for this FLOOD magazine interview, in which we discussed the Llamas’ wonderful new album Hey Panda, whose atypically personal and introspective songs were partially the result of his recent bout with bowel cancer.
Our interview went well beyond my FLOOD word-limit, however, so I thought I would make the rest of it — in which we touched upon such subjects O’Hagan’s early days with the politically-charged Irish rock band Microdisney, his songwriting process, his knack for creating string arrangements, and that time he almost made a record with The Beach Boys — available for my paid Jagged Time Lapse subscribers to read. (And once again, I’d like to thank all of you who drop a few bucks in the tip jar every month via your paid subscriptions. I am profoundly grateful for your support!)
And without further ado, here we go…
Can I ask how your health is these days?
Oh, yeah — I’m very lucky. I’m well into remission and I haven’t had any throwback. My buddy Cathal from Microdisney didn’t make it. [Cathal Coughlan died of complications from prostate cancer in May 2022.] But you are never as strong as you were before, once you go through this; if I do a gig, I will be so tired after the end of it, whereas before I would be, “Okay, what’s next?” Now, I know what next is — it’s go out that door and to bed.
As you mentioned earlier in our interview, your “day job” is scoring string arrangements for other people. This was a talent you discovered relatively late in the game, correct?
Yeah, I was a challenged kid. I didn’t do well at school. I left school, I worked on building sites — you call it construction — and in car factories and just manual labor for, until I was 21. I was listening to music all the time, and I had musical ideas, but I didn't know how to express them; I was a shy person, and it was only through meeting Cathal Coughlan that I was able to do so. We literally formed Microdisney on one day, and there was no looking back. We just said, “Yeah, we’re gonna do this.” And then that was it. It was like a rocket. We were off! And it lasted a journey that lasted 10 years, and then stopped and then started again a few years ago, when we did a few bits and pieces together. [The pair reunited for several shows in 2018 and 2019, and Coughlan sang on three tracks on Radum Calls, Radum Calls, O’Hagan’s 2019 solo album.]
When you don't have a college degree and you have been sidelined the way the world sidelines people like me — “We’ll always need people pumping gas, so that’s you,” you know? — when you discover you’ve got something that you can do and it works, and you can actually put this stuff together, then you just hang onto it for dear life. And music is the only thing I could do; I mean, I know I could do lots of other things, but I haven’t had to do anything else. I’ve been lucky; I’ve been able to sort of keep it going.