High Llamas' Sean O'Hagan: "I decided I would make the record I always wanted to make"

Sean O’Hagan is governor of The High Llamas, the celebrated avant-pop outfit he formed in 1990, following the break-up of the legendary Microdisney, co-founded by O’Hagan and the late great Cathal Coughlan.

Hey Panda, the Llamas’ 11th long player, channels contemporary electronic soul. It’s influenced both by the musical taste of Sean’s adult children, and his recent creative collaborations. Among the artists he’s worked with of late are Merseyside royalty The Coral, cult indie filmmakers the Safdie Brothers, and polymath King Krule.

The album also features two co-writes from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, guest vocals from Rae Morris and Sean’s daughter Livvy O’Hagan, and production assistance from Fryars. Think late-period Miles Davis mixing it with Sault and you’re in the ballpark.

The first thing that strikes you about Hey Panda is its fantastic artwork – a giant panda bear, set against a backdrop of vivid colours, astride ’70s blockbuster-type lettering.

“I made Radum Calls, Radum Calls in 2019,” Sean explains, referring to his last solo album. “Then I fell ill with cancer. When that happens, you don’t know whether you’re going to make another record again, but you do recover and slowly you’re back. I decided I would make the record I always wanted to make.”

Before he goes into the music, O’Hagan is keen to discuss the cover and the title.

“I made a panda friend on TikTok during the pandemic,” he says, in a decidedly unlikely explanation. “Myself and my daughter Liv, who was very influential on this record, used to watch this panda every single day, eating enormous two-foot carrots. He’d just sit there with his big belly and crunch through them. It was enormously therapeutic. I loved it.

“This panda was followed by hundreds of thousands of people. So when I went to write the first lyrics, it’s me singing to the panda. Just basically, ‘You’re my friend, I don’t know who you are. You’re in China somewhere. But you’re my friend and you’re forcing me to make dance music, Mr. Panda.’ So that’s a thank you to the panda.”

And the striking artwork?

“One day, I was walking down the street and I saw a movie location truck,” Sean recalls. “It had that Star Wars kind of typeface and I thought, ‘That’s perfect for Hey Panda.’ And the colours are just ripped off from Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain.”

That explains that. Now for something a little more complicated – the sound of the record.

“For a long time, I’ve listened to R&B dance music,” notes O’Hagan. “I absolutely breathe it, but as an older bloke who comes from an Irish family, I could never do that. I just thought, ‘Don’t be a fool. I haven’t got the tools. I haven’t got the vocabulary to articulate it’. But I saw people like Christophe Chassol, Solange, Tyler the Creator, Frank Ocean and others, and I thought, ‘That isn’t a million miles from the melodies I write.’

“I just decided I would try to take ownership of it and that’s what the record is. It’s not a dance record, but it is as close to a dance record as I can make it. It’s almost like me saying thank you to that community.”

Where do you begin to create an album as layered as Hey Panda?

“You begin with small parcels of music on guitar or piano,” says Sean. “I’m not on an SP 404, even though I love those things. Those parcels I create have unique melodies and they’re completely disassociated – they’re almost islands, and they are very unusual and unique. I don’t even recognise them, they just come to me and then I record them.

“Normally what happens is, I try to develop them, and I can’t. Because as soon as I develop them, the uniqueness of the geography of that little idea disappears. So, I just go to another island, completely disassociated and I try to bring them together. I try to write the harmonic link between them.”

Expanding upon that premise, Sean digs deeper into the nuts and bolts of Hey Panda.

“‘Toriafan’ is a song about dyslexia,” Sean says. “It’s about not being able to perform in a classroom and to be academically challenged, which I definitely am. I wasn’t very good at school. With Livvy and Ben Garrett [Fryars] singing on it, it was a spiritual thing. It was just like, ‘Oh, my God, this is it’. I was so happy. I was bouncing when it happened.

“Also, the beginnings of several songs – ‘Sisters Friends’ and ‘Stone Cold Slow’ – have this very stately piano. I love the piano music of Benjamin Britten. As a kid, I loved Mícheál Ó’Súlleabháin, a musicologist in Cork University. He used to play arrangements of Irish musical piano, almost like a mixture of Frank Bridge and Seán Ó’Riada. And, that sort of chimed with… Do you listen to the piano music from the Éthiopique period?”

Sean explains to me the basis of Éthiopique – a compelling fusion of Ethiopian folk music and the choral tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Played mainly by nuns, it emerged from Ethiopia in the ’60s & ’70s, sounding “like Keith Jarrett, but in a strange key.”

“I really respond to those things,” Sean expands. “It’s like another island, this stately piano, and then suddenly, bang, you’re in and the beats are happening.”

This leads us to the amazing power of hip-hop.

“The whole development of hip-hop in the ’80s is basically people who weren’t musicians, who started off with two turntables, and added a drum machine, sampler and keyboard,” says Sean. “They said, ‘Okay, I don’t know what I’m doing on this keyboard’, and they just put their fingers down. And they looked at the shapes. By doing that, they basically created harmonic movements, which the first time you hear it, you probably think, ‘That sounds wrong’.

“But then you heard it again and again. And then you’re not saying that sounds wrong, you just say it sounds odd. Then suddenly, it doesn’t sound odd, it sounds normal, because you’re hearing it over and over. After that, the vernacular changes, everything changes. Which by the way, is what happened in music in the 14th century.

“Because in the 14th century, when the monks were singing melodies, they added a second melody that goes across it as a counterpoint, and the harmony would have been the third, or a fifth. That’s how musical chords developed, basically from religious music, from the monks. And every new interval in the chord was challenged by the Vatican, saying, ‘Those harmonies are the work of the devil, you can’t have that.’”

Credit: Simon Russell

Sean picks up a guitar to illustrate his point.

“There was always this thing with Western music, where you had to resolve the chord,” he continues. “You had to bring it back to the root effectively. This resolving the chord was all about civilisation – if you didn’t resolve the chord, it was almost like saying the house is going to burn down, or you’re some kind of lunatic. You haven’t resolved the chord!

“Then people like Wagner came and they let it hang. And the audience got really upset, they got fidgety. They did it again in hip-hop with these really odd chords that they just flung in, because they didn’t know what they were doing, which is great.”

I congratulate Sean on his continuous musical evolution.

“I’m chuffed,” he admits. “I won’t pretend I’m not. I didn’t think I had it in me to make this record, but I did and I’m really delighted. I have to credit Ben Garrett, who’s just incredible – I made his last album with him and I learned so much. He’s a producer, and I started the conversation by saying I didn’t have the tools and the vocabulary.

“After working with Ben, I sort of acquired that. There’s so much knowledge out there in young minds, it’s just incredible. In my cohort, there are other guys who are 64 and still going out to gigs, but they might be nostalgic for an earlier period as a golden age. My message to them is – the golden age might be now.”

Hey Panda is out now.