INTERVIEW: High Llamas' Sean O'Hagan
- Joe Silva
Without as much as a bit of fanfare or dimming of lights, savvy Irish pop musos The High Llamas take the stage at Athens, Georgia's 40 Watt Club. It's St. Patrick's Day, but there's little going on in the way of outrageous merry making. The shabby settees are full of lounging townies unflustered by the band's arrival. Only a handful of the slightly more animated among them approach the front of the house once the band strikes up. The room is instantly a-glitter with vibes, harmony, and warbling electronics.
What started as a gentle tip of the hat on senior pop deity Brian Wilson on their second LP (_Gideon Gaye), became the sprawling tribute on the follow-up (_Hawaii), and the extremely distilled essence of the great man on their latest release, Cold and Bouncy , possibly perfecting a vision they embarked upon four years prior. If I had to own just one album and wasn't too caught up in witnessing the evolution, I'd take the new one. Some would cry heresy, but all bear the same quarter note keyboard lines, the lush backdrop of harmonies and strings, and the same oblique lyrical flourish. More elegant nods to Mr. Wilson's brilliance could possibly be had from Jellyfish and XTC (particularly during their Dukes period), but the depths to which the Llamas have accurately probed his tenets have won lead Llama Sean O'Hagan face time with the master himself.
But O'Hagan maintains that their next record will have a fresh tack and it seems that he's satisfied with the lengths of which they've been able to take their current formula. In the midst of the media swirl that surrounds South By Southwest, Sean commented on the where the Llamas are headed and where they've been.
Consumable Online: Just looking over your history, I noticed that you actually did some road time with U2 while you were in Microdisney.
Sean O'Hagan: Well, Ireland is a small place and it was natural that we'd play with them. I don't think it's any big deal, though. U2 are fine and they're nice people and all but I don't think they do anything significant musically. I'm not a fan. It was a business thing.
C.O.: Looking back to the first LP, it seems like the songs on Santa Barbara have far more structure to them. Do you think you've come a long way from that at this point?
O'Hagan: Oh, definitely. It was that album that really convinced me that I had to abandon that way of working. I found that method very restrictive. It only addresses one ethos, one emotion, one kind of artistic level of communication. There's enough people out there doing that. At best that record should have been (like) John Cale, but unfortunately most people don't know that and might sit down and think it sounds like Neil Young or Steely Dan or something. And as much as I like Steely Dan and Neil Young, I don't want to be artistically in that court. So on Gideon Gaye , I had to reposition the band very obviously and very dramatically. And once we did that, I realized we had found our spiritual home.
C.O.: So how does a song evolve for you these days? What are the mechanics like now?
O'Hagan: Well I still work at either the piano or acoustic guitar, but instead of writing the song all the way through, I write it almost in a sample form - the way a DJ would work. I just basically record ideas onto a four track or tape recorder and collect them over six or seven months. And then when we come to work in the studio, I'll actually call on (them) and sort of re-associate those parts. That's really the beginning of the undermining of the traditionalism of the writing.
When we start to actually put the tracks down we always explore the filtering option. It's almost like there are new sounds out there and new ways to listen to music. But we still work with harmonies and with a lot of bands there aren't any (harmonies). Even with the experimentation, even with the amount of risk, we still have a harmonic basis.
C.O.: What sort of interplay exists between the musicians? I assume you do the majority of the idea construction.
O'Hagan: Yeah, the writing as far as the chords and the top line goes, I still do. As a band, we've been doing it for quite a few years, so we've really come to understand the workings of the studio. The idea of arranging in the studio isn't scary to us. We're pretty much able to make it up as we go along. So there is a certain amount of collaboration and improvisation in the studio when it comes to arrangement and counterpoint.
However, we kind of build in these methods to stop us from remaking our old records really. We do kind of check each other. That's why we kind of filter everything. You know, "What does it sound like fresh? What does it sound like filtered? Okay, why don't we split the signal and have one filtered and one kind of dry." It gives you a mixing option. At the mix, we employ the same method of deconstructing the song that we've been doing over the past three records and I really haven't gotten tired of it.
I really think it's a good idea to deconstruct the songs immediately after we mix it. I would like to think that the way you listen to a Llamas record sounds like a kind of fusion and de-fusion. If you looked at it anatomically, you'd basically have a molecular structure that has a kind of freestyle activity and it gather and then the gathering solidifies and that's a song. Then it kind of scatters and that's the deconstruction of the song. That's how we view the linear experience of the record.
C.O.: Have the records done well enough in the U.K. that you have the budgets now to take that notion further?
O'Hagan: We make our records quite cheaply and we don't use huge budgets. We work in cheap studios and just try to keep everything under control. I think once you get into the realm of big budgets and expensive studios, the working practices (change) and you don't control the event. I think it's very important to stay in control of things. So ultimately the best thing to do is to build your own studio, which you can do quite cheaply and work within a settled criteria.
C.O.: Are you guys on the way to having your own space?
O'Hagan: We pretty much have access to a space regularly that's very cheap.
C.O.: Whatever similarities that might exist sonically between the last three records, do you think that you're going to take another angle to your sound?
O'Hagan: Yeah, I think we have to really. Since you've identified those last three records almost like as a trilogy and even though that's got all sorts of conceptual aspects to it, which may or may not be accidental, I don't think I can take it on much further. I think it would be disingenuous. The spirit of the band is investigation and re-associating ideas and sonic experimentation, so by the very nature of that ethos we do sort of have to work out a new avenue of discovery.
C.O.: Does that mean we can look for more instrumental stuff?
O'Hagan: Definitely and electronic as well.
C.O.: How comfortable are you going to be doing that in a live forum?
O'Hagan: I don't think you should ever connect the two. The minute you try to envisage how you are going to perform something and make a decision on that basis, you're restricting the idea. I think the very fact that it's the same people and you might be working from the same basis of composition that's enough to relate the two activities. I think it's very important to keep the two separate.
C.O.: As far as the lyrics are concerned, do you see any distinct progression?
O'Hagan: I think my lyrics are completely unimportant. I'm not a literary person. When there's a vocal, the lyric is almost like a technique to inspire images. Now having said that, when there is a lyric I'll work hard to make sure that I'm comfortable with it. But I won't use any gratuitous cliche or anything like that. What I'll do is try to create a kind of impression with wordplay or imagery. There's actually no theme, there is no one idea that runs through a song. They're separate lines and each line represents a sort of reduced idea, theme, story or whatever. I'm very interested in the idea of the rise and fall of the symbol and the color of the word.
C.O.: Do you not ever feel the need to express something personal?
O'Hagan: No, in fact I'm totally against that. One thing I find very annoying is when critics talk about the Llamas not involving themselves in passion. I think that should be a credit. I think passion is an overused word and that it's disingenuous, and an over-attributed virtue. Most of it is clinical and a marketing tool.
I think that the idea that your voice kind of slightly cracks when you deliver a heartfelt line or a terribly personal line is kind of corny (laughs). I hate it and I don't enjoy it. I don't see how or why that's a virtue. I love the idea of a totally simulated vocal to the extent that that vocal is part of an arrangement - the vocal is not something your are attracted to. You're attracted to the music as a whole and the arrangement as a whole and the vocal is not a distraction. The lyric should be a visual and the vocal should be a kind of instrumental counterpoint and the vocal harmony should be as textured as a brass harmony. When you get something so crass as Oasis, that are supposed to be so great because they've got a passionate vocal; when it's reduced to that, you just realize that it doesn't stand up as a legitimate form of expression.
C.O.: Well to bring their name up again, U2 (or specifically Bono) is a manipulator of sorts by the way he tries to capture a person's attention or emotions, but don't you think he means it to a degree?
O'Hagan: It's disingenuous. I think he might be just a very good businessman. Don't you make that connection between marketing and performance?
C.O.: Hmmm...hard to say. Considering their position, you'd have to wonder why they would feel the need to resort to that kind of posturing.
O'Hagan: Well because they started off with that. It was their initial tool, wasn't it? And they obviously don't want to abandon that. They have abandoned that to a point. They were very much into the idea of pop being disposable, which they didn't really succeed at very well, but I had much more respect for them for actually trying that. But U2 aren't on my hit list, but I'll tell you who is. Radiohead.
I don't believe them (Radiohead) for a second. I'm not vehemently down on them, as I am say Oasis, but I hate the way that that record ( O.K. Computer ) is supposed to be the greatest record of all time and so radical. I don't think there's anything radical about what they do. They're careful, well-honed cliches. The perfect marketing tool and I think those things need to be exposed. I mean I hate to sound so bitchy about it, but I think it's incumbent upon people to make that point. Pavement excite me. I completely believe them. I got to know Steve on the last tour and was so excited to tour with them. Lyrically, they do things that I'd never be able to do; work with literature and rock and roll in such an intelligent way. I think Air is also making good pop music.
C.O.: Now looking at the music from a visual perspective, is that a concern? As in the video for "The Sun Beats Down"...
O'Hagan: That video started off as a great idea and was very badly executed. Apologies all around for that one. I think "Nomads" is totally us. Completely bang on.
C.O.: Just out of curiosity, have you picked up the (Beach Boys) Pet Sounds box?
O'Hagan: Oh yeah, I've had to write about it.
C.O.: What was your take?
O'Hagan: I enjoyed the studio interplay between Brian and the musicians. I loved hearing the musicians improvise around the tunes. From a purely academic point of view, I liked analyzing the chords because there were certain chords that I could never pick out before. The stereo mix was okay; the acapella mix I wasn't too knocked out by.
C.O.: In terms of somebody like Brian, who's much older now and struggling to recapture some of his glimmer of old, where do you see yourself gravitating to as you get older?
O'Hagan: I think the obvious place for me to go is into film. One thing I want to allow myself, even though I love pop music, is to work outside of the pop format. I went to see Music for Eighteen Musicians by Steven Reich a few weeks ago in London, which had never been scored until recently when a student did it as a thesis. Well, it can be performed now and he performed it with the Steven Reich ensemble and it was very much done on shorthand musical notation and cues. So there's Steven Reich, talking about it at the age of 58, working with this piece of music and it makes perfect sense. And you wouldn't even envision even an element of cringe or embarrassment in it. It was totally legitimate. I don't think that when I'm 58 and trying to perform music from Hawaii, I could conceivably do it justice (at that age). That's why I want to work with instrumental music. It's a natural area.
C.O.: So what's up next?
O'Hagan: I'm going to go back to England and record another single for "Turn On" , which is my other project with Tim Gane from Stereolab. There are remix projects all piling up; Pizzicato Five, Kid Loco. A lot of people think that the High Llamas are about the orchestral pop thing when we actually have a lot of people from club culture that enjoy our music. That doesn't surprise me, though. I'm actually kind of warm and flattered by it.
