People say pop music is all about young, sexy people. It isn t for me. It s about accessible, melodic music which challenges you . . . if that s not a contradiction.
Correct me if I m wrong, but it would appear that Sean O Hagan has just blown his chances of managing the Spice Girls. Still, with the amount of projects that he s been working on of late, the High Llamas frontman would find it pretty nigh impossible to find a window in his diary should Mel B and her gang ask him to do lunch, business or otherwise.
In the last two years alone, he has recorded two albums with the High Llamas (Hawaii and the forthcoming Cold And Bouncy, about which more later), made substantial contributions to two Stereolab albums (Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Dots And Loops) as well as collaborating with the Lab s Tim Gane and Andy Ramsey on the experimental Turn On project, lent a helping artistic hand to singers as diverse as Will Oldham and Terry Hall, and brought his band around Europe as special guests of Pavement, opened for Beck in London and I haven t even mentioned his myriad re-mixing duties for everyone from Shonen Knife to Mouse On Mars.
Oh yeah, and he worked with the Beach Boys.
That all came about because they were all big fans of Hawaii, explains O Hagan matter-of-factly. I was meant to be the go-between between Brian Wilson and the rest of the band to oversee the last artistic record. I say artistic record because they had been making country albums and all sorts of rubbish. I didn t really want to be involved in anything with them, to be quite honest, because it s all true: you shouldn t meet your heroes, don t get involved, you can t recreate the past etc. . .
But I met them and talked to them about the sort of record I thought they should make. The Beach Boys were quite keen. I hung around and oversaw some kind of a recording. Brian Wilson didn t make a decision but his wife and various other people basically didn t think it was a good idea.
Stop me if you think you ve heard this one before . . .
Hawaii, which was described when it came out in 1996 as the best Beach Boys album since 1968 s Friends , has been released in the US to some success on the new V2 label, to which the Llamas have recently signed. A tour of the States to promote Hawaii will be followed immediately by a corresponding offensive on the European front for its successor, the enigmatically-titled Cold And Bouncy.
But the genesis of The High Llamas was, to put it mildly, a little bit more low-key. Having climbed out of the wreckage of Microdisney in 1989, O Hagan, still in a bit of a creative daze, recorded an eponymous solo album for Demon Records.
I realized that there had to be a total reinvention. I think the first thing that happened was that I personally had to decide from a writing point of view what I found exciting.
Using that album s name to christen his newly-formed band, he recorded a mini-album in 1992, Apricots, for the slightly inauspicious Plastic Records. This was later released in France with extra tracks as Santa Barbara. It was only now that O Hagan was beginning to form a clear idea in his own head of the kind of direction in which he wanted to move.
I just went straight back to the starting point: the Beach Boys, he exclaims, with the air of Sherlock Holmes explaining the crucial clue in the cracking of a case. Then we finally got things together in the studio with very little money and no label and made Gideon Gaye. I suppose you could call it radical pop. It was obviously a derivative record. But it was derivative of a totally unacknowledged period of music. And I didn t think that was a problem . . . and I still don t.
Initially, Gideon Gaye sneaked into record shops undetected, courtesy of Brighton s Target Records. It was only when Sony did a deal with O Hagan s own fledgling label, Alpaca Park, that Gideon Gaye came to the attention of the relevant authorities ( Checkin In, Checkin Out even got played on daytime BBC Radio 1).
Dodgy puns aside, the album s sumptuous Wilsonian harmonies and lavish sunny-side-up keyboards had critics falling over their well-worn copies of Pet Sounds to reach for ther theasauri to, as is their way, acclaim O Hagan as a genuine pop maverick. But though Pet Sounds is now widely seen as the glorious pinnacle of the golden age of 60s West Coast pop, it was regarded as anything but when it first appeared, as O Hagan explains.
Nowadays, Pet Sounds is often referred to as the greatest album of all time, or one of them, by The Sunday Times and Rolling Stone etc. but it was just a passing episode at the time. In America, because the Beach Boys ended up doing the cabaret circuit, there was no artistic legacy. They were just regarded as a bunch of lucky guys from California who happened to have a couple of hits.
And it must have destroyed Brian Wilson when Pet Sounds just disappeared like that. And it s taken 30 years for it to be fully appreciated. There s been an unacknowledged campaign over the last decade to reinstate that record and Smile so I thought that it was a totally valid musical genre to be playing with in 1993.
I see nothing wrong with having to look back and collect from the unexplored dusty corners of pop history and mixing it up with what s going on now. You absorb and you filter it. You ve got a problem, though, if you do it slavishly and don t actually add anything.
Like Oasis?
Oh God, yeah. It s tiresome. That s what the whole British heritage rock industry is doing.
O Hagan is artistically a tad more ambitious. Hawaii, a sprawling 77-minute concept album that was a miracle whip of banjos, trombones, strings and all sorts of slinky keyboards, has been described as, and I quote, an idiosyncratic portrait of pioneering life in early North America . But of course!
The new album, Cold And Bouncy, may sound initially like its twin town, but there are subtle differences that a closer look at the map shows up. The ongoing collaboration with Stereolab, and especially Andy Ramsey, has widened O Hagan s musical borders and granted all manner of dots and loops asylum.
At first we thought he was only going to come in for a couple of weeks, says Llamas drummer Rob Allum, who manages to sneak a few words in edgeways in between O Hagan s intense verbal outpourings. But after a while we couldn t get him out of the studio. He loved it. He d be sitting there suggesting what colour shoes you bought (laughs). He was like a mad professor, bringing in all these ancient drum machines.
But the main stylistic shift on the new album is down to The High Llamas warmhearted embrace of (post) modern dance, specifically German electronica.
There a very healthy scene there, says O Hagan. You can tell the guys that work in the digital domain from the guys that stick to the analog. It is very much carrying on the Krautrock legacy. It definitely feels as though there s a big point to it all. Electronica as a form has come of age over the last few years. Germany just happens to be one of those places where s it really got a lot of personality.
O Hagan s knowledge of the evolution of dance would suggest that he s been an avid reader of Digital Beat for quite some time.
DJ-based culture went from samples of drums to samples of De La Soul to Blue Note. Suddenly we didn t have the beats anymore. Suddenly we just got impressionistic discovery, archival sampling going on. You ve got people in their early 20s who are making really great radical records, like the great Mo Wax label. I love them to death. It s run by people who are all under 24.
Does he see the impact of this music as similar to that of punk in the late 70s?
Yeah. Except that they re doing it much better, as far as I m concerned. There s so much more to explore. But like punk, it has democratised music. Everything is accessible.
O Hagan s face is alight with enthusiasm as he speaks these lines, proving, if proof were needed, that he s no retro bore uninterested in any music with a date stamp past 1967. But if electronica, never mind its German variation, has at the best of times a reputation for being quite cold and formal, Cold And Bouncy is actually a very warm record, coming with an in-built electric blanket.
We re just carrying on with the Big Pop Experiment, avers O Hagan. You ll recognise The High Llamas there. You ll recognise the flavour and the colour, the perversity. But I would hope that you would welcome the fact that the new album is taking on board its current influences much more efficiently and much more intelligently than we have before.
We couldn t just recreate the last record. We didn t want a Hawaii: Mark 2. We took more risks. Especially in the recording method: we relied more on sampling and sampling ourselves, on a processing and reducing method.
There are ideas bouncing around the record Tilting Windmills , The Sun Beats Down that are slightly absurdist and Dali-esque to a certain extent. We re working with the same tools: pop absurdity, pop experimentation. However, the added element this time is this electronic thing that s woven in so subtly that you don t notice it at times.
The rise of Sean O Hagan s own bunch of super if not quite furry animals happened to coincide with the easy listening revival of a few years ago dubbed Loungecore which admittedly had its plus points (the critical rehabilitation of Burt Bacharach, for example) but also had a high cheese count (come out with your hands up, Mike Flowers).
One thing I will say about all that is that I object to the irony factor, says O Hagan, objecting to the irony factor. I don t want to be involved in music whose only appeal is irony. We take it very seriously. Even though a lot of the sounds we work with are very humorous and the construction of the sounds is sometimes humorous I don t think it s ever ironic. It s totally honest.
Don t get me wrong. There are some real gems to be discovered on all those (easy listening) compilations they released recently there are some great arrangements there but the idea of those records as kitschy accessories full of pleasant irony doesn t appeal to me.
Indeed, The High Llamas have managed to evade any permanent pigeonhole in which critics have tried to place them.
People are coming to us from two totally different ends of the spectrum, suggests O Hagan. You ve those who are into dance, who are led through electronica and exotica into The High Llamas: people who never listen to harmony-based music with chord progressions. And then you ve the people coming to us from the Beach Boys angle, who ll say what s all this electronica music? . And I say, Have a listen to DJ Shadow and you ll find out . We re the great ambassadors! (laughs)
Then there are the people who remember O Hagan as the guitarist who wrote the tunes in Microdisney, playing the musical Jekyll to Cathal Coughlan s lyrical Hyde. With the entire back catalogue re-issued by Creation offshoot, Revolva, in 1996, did O Hagan indulge in a nostalgic stock-taking exercise of his time in the cult Cork combo? And if so, how does he view it all now?
I don t tend to listen back to it, he confesses. What I remember is that the first three albums were interesting and the last two were . . . not so interesting. We became this 80s pop act. I find that very strange.
Was pressure put on the band to move in that direction?
Yeah, without a doubt. When you re younger, you don t know where you stand. But that s the danger of signing to a major. You can end up with an ill-informed A&R person and leave yourself open to such influence. But there wasn t very overt pressure put on us. It was almost subliminal. You suddenly say to yourself: (adopts startled tone) why am I doing this? How did I end up here? You can trace it. I don t recognise myself on those later records.
But there was definitely a direction and a sense of purpose in the early days. Cathal was very much the personality behind the band and dictated a lot of what should happen. I mean that in a positive way. I didn t have a clue in those days. I used to just play music and write with him.
Next year it will be ten years since we split up so to a certain extent I ve forgotten it all. I m trying to sort out the reality from the myth, or the perceived idea of what Microdisney was about.
Finally, I put it to O Hagan, after glancing at the multi-volume 19th century novel that is his career biog, that he is, in fact, a workaholic.
Not really, he deadpans. I ve spent the last few months painting my house. n

Cold And Bouncy is released on January 19th on V2.