Ireland in 50 Albums, No 27: Hawaii, by The High Llamas (1996)
Cork musician Sean O'Hagan created the High Llamas after the breakup of Microdisney.
The story of The High Llamas’ 77-minute opus, Hawaii, is book-ended by interactions Sean O’Hagan — the band’s frontman, and former Microdisney guitarist — had with two giants of popular music: Arthur Lee of Love and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys.
In June 1994, Arthur Lee performed songs from Love’s legendary album Forever Changes at The Garage in London with The High Llamas acting as his backing band. Sony Music executive Jeremy Pearce was in attendance.
“Jeremy turned up for that Arthur Lee show with Martin Carr from The Boo Radleys,” recalls O’Hagan. “Martin told him that he had to come down to this show, that he’d see Arthur Lee and he’d see The High Llamas.”
“Jeremy had an imprint at Sony called LRD - Licence Repertoire Division. Within LRD was Creation, which was the most successful record company in the UK between 1993-94,” says O’Hagan. “It also had Nude Records, that was Suede. He could basically do what he wanted.”
Pearce was impressed and duly signed The High Llamas. “Jeremy just went bananas,” recalls O’Hagan. “He said go and make the next album, whatever you want it to be.”
This was a far cry from Microdisney breaking up in 1988; that had been a frightening time for O’Hagan: “I didn’t know what to do. Cathal [Coughlan, Microdisney’s frontman] was a songwriter and a lyricist and I wasn’t. I just wrote music; I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.”
O’Hagan found his voice and released a solo album in 1990 called High Llamas. Using that name for a band, he released two albums on independent labels.
The second of which was Gideon Gaye, an album that set the template for what was to come, or as O’Hagan explains it: “I met Tim Gane from Stereolab and for some reason, I’m dragged right back to Brian Wilson and that’s the beginning of Gideon Gaye.”
Sony reissued Gideon Gaye and released ‘Checking In, Checking Out’ as a single. In June 1995, NME awarded the song its Single of the Week accolade, describing it as, “An altogether special out-of-body pop experience.” The stage was set for Hawaii.
“Hawaii was actually made very quickly, it was made in six weeks because I had everything organised, I had everything written,” says O’Hagan. “Every song had a personality and a story and a root and it all made absolute perfect sense to me.”
Hawaii’s 29 songs play like one long 77-minute piece of symphonic pop; short experimental instrumental pieces segue into longer instrumental passages and are interspersed with a dozen more traditional lyrical pop songs. It sounded completely out of step with the prevailing sounds of the mid-90s.
“Hawaii was a really odd thing, first of all, double albums were unheard of then. Songs that didn’t have starts or beginnings were unheard of,” says O’Hagan.
“We were just coming out of Sub Pop, we were coming out of grunge. Blur are on the horizon somewhere, the beginning of Britpop. America is basically being run by Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. So making records where the major influences are Nino Rota, Brian Wilson, Charlie Mingus, Burt Bacharach and Alice Coltrane, was just like WHAT?”
When the album was finished O’Hagan presented it to Pearce at Sony. “He was silent for a while,” says O’Hagan. “Over a gestation period of about six months, he kept coming back and then he eventually said that I’d made the most extraordinary record, that nobody has made a record like this.”
Hawaii can be described as a concept album about the first European pioneers to America. “The idea that we’re Europeans but I’m making music that is an homage to a lot of America and a little bit of Italian and French cinema,” says O’Hagan. “Capturing the first time the Europeans tried to inhabit America and how they did it.”
The album’s themes were interpreted in the artwork painted by artist, and former Stump bass player, Kev Hopper. “Sean told me that the theme is pilgrim fathers and wooden huts,” says Hopper. “The imagery is sort of naive with odd postmodern overtones. It kind of suits the songs that deal with theatrics and falsehoods. The black and white columns are based on The Buren Columns [French artist Daniel Buren’s art installation at Paris’ Palais Royal]. I have memories of painting dozens of them, cutting them out and gluing them on.”
O’Hagan can remember first seeing Buren’s installation: “I had been in Paris and I was struck by the columns. I walked around them for ages and they stayed in my mind. It was three things: it was a naive painting of the new America as the Europeans saw it; it was French conceptual art; and then a kind of Disney-esque ‘Hawaii’.”
But what record company would release this ambitious album? In 1992 Richard Branson sold Virgin Records to Thorn EMI for a reported $ 1 billion. That deal included a “non-compete” agreement; by 1996 that clause had expired and Branson wanted to start another record company. He cheekily called his new label V2.
“I was in the studio and I got a call from Jeremy Pearce,” recalls O’Hagan. “He said that he was going to leave Sony, that Richard Branson wanted to get back into the business, and that he had been asked by Branson to set up a label. Jeremy said that he was only going to do it if I came with him. I said of course I will.”
Hawaii was the first album released by Branson’s new label in March 1996. The reviews were uniformly glowing. Spin called it, “nearly two hours of immaculate, mood-bending, easy-listening pop.” The Washington Post wrote that, “O’Hagan has transcended rock-and-roll,” and that Hawaii was a, “decidedly European take on American popular music.”
Billboard wrote that, “The High Llamas sound like the missing link between The Beach Boys and Steely Dan,” and that O’Hagan was part of, “a new breed of popsmiths” it dubbed “Ork-Pop” [orchestral pop] who were, “going back to such inspirations as Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and Burt Bacharach in the quest for building the perfect orchestrated pop masterpiece.” It was a superb summation of what Hawaii sounded like.
The story of Hawaii starts with The High Llamas acting as a backing band for Arthur Lee and it ends with an interaction with another of O’Hagan’s musical heroes: Brian Wilson.
“Richard Branson befriended [The Beach Boys’] Bruce Johnston. Johnston heard Hawaii and played it to Brian,” explains O’Hagan. Branson dreamed of getting The Beach Boys into the studio with O’Hagan producing: “I was sent to America, my job was to set up a record, I was sent on a little mini-tour with them, the most extraordinary thing.
“It feels like a film,” says O’Hagan. “I can see it really well, being in Cincinnati, the baseball stadium and being in the hotel with them, having meetings with them.”
Branson’s plan didn’t come to fruition, but for O’Hagan it was the culmination of an astonishing journey that had started years earlier when he met his Microdisney bandmate Cathal Coughlan in Cork, the city O'Hagan had moved to from Luton as a teenager with his Irish parents.
“I can remember being in Lotabeg Green in Cork, sitting down listening to Pet Sounds. Cathal and me just listening to tapes of SMiLE and Pet Sounds and going, ‘What's going on there? Is that a bottle-neck guitar? Are there strings there?’”
Long out of print, Hawaii is soon to be reissued. “It’s totally happening,” says O’Hagan. “I doubt if it will be the end of this year but it might be the beginning of 2025. Gideon Gaye and Hawaii are about to be mastered and we’re gathering the 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 been involved in numerous collaborations since, and played in a reformed Microdisney with Cathal Coughlan through 2018-2019, before the singer's death in 2022.
The High Llamas release their 11th album, Hey Panda, at the end of March. Their first long player in six years, Hey Panda features two co-writes with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, guest vocals from Rae Morris and Lizzy O’Hagan (Sean’s daughter), and production from Fryars. A thoroughly contemporary-sounding album, thanks to its use of AutoTune and electronics, Hey Panda is also unmistakably a High Llamas’ record.
- Paul McDermott’s podcast To Here Knows When – Great Irish Albums Revisited is available on all listening platforms
