THE posters went up overnight. All around Dublin there were big pictures of Sean O'Hagan with the words "Have you seen this man?" underneath Sean O'Hagan had committed the "crime" of releasing an album called Gideon Gaye, a stunning, ambient style opus that had attracted gushing praise from every single music magazine in the world, not to mention Burt Bacharach and Herb Alpert.
Alpert was so desperate to sign Sean's band The High Llamas to his own label, Almo records, that when he couldn't contact Sean in London and heard he was holidaying in Dublin, he paid for the posters to go up.
The dramatic gesture proved futile Sean had already cashed a large cheque from Sony and set up his own label. Still suffering vertigo from having his hero Burt Bacharach praise his work, he set to work on his new album. Operating without budget constraints for the first time in his life, he has finally made the album he has always wanted to make. It's called Hawaii, it's just been released and already Mojo is calling it the album of the year.
Album of the year or not, Sean O'Hagan (39) is more interested in talking about the best album of all time and how it has influenced his new release "Not a week goes by without me listening to Pet Sounds. I'm the ultimate Beach Boys fan and I have no problem at all being influenced by them. After what Bacharach said about the last album, we sent a copy to Brian Wilson but we're still waiting on a reply."
It's not just his age that separates O'Hagan from the current crop of indie noisemakers. His rather unfashionable, almost Victorian, belief that "the real radical music" is not being made by Oasis or Nirvana before them has him name checking the Hall of Fame greats from the Sixties.
"If you listen to the big bands of today, all you hear is three chord rock music in 4/4 time," he says. "I remain convinced that people like Leon Russell, Van Dyke Parkes, Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson were creating truly radical music all you have, to do is listen to the complex time signatures, all the key changes and the uses to which melody was put. It's probably no surprise that they were all seen at the time as `odd ball' musicians, peculiar and quirky in their own way, but if Van Dyke Parkes was a young kid today, he'd Probably be Playing with Stereolab or Dreadzone.
Given his musical aesthetic, it would be terribly convenient to describe the new High Llamas album as an "easy Pet Sounds listening" affair after all, parts of the album sound like they were directly inspired by the beautiful Pet Sounds instrumental, Let's Go Away For A While. But the only similarity between Pet Sounds and Hawaii is that they both have the same ambient feel and the same dynamic use of melody and key change. If anything, O'Hagan is even more wilfully "peculiar and quirky" in his musical style vocals drill in and out of the mix, melodies arrive on the scene only to soar out of sight, and the guitar and keyboards sound like they have declared unilateral independence from the rest of the band.
Born in Luton of Dundalk parents, O'Hagan grew up in Dublin and Cork. Although he claims to have listened only to Neil Young and Planxty in his teens, he knew enough by the time he and Cathal Couglan (now with Fatima Mansions) formed Microdisney in the Eighties that he wasn't tuned in to/turned on by "big hairy loud rock music".
With Microdisney, we wanted to be like Gang Of Four and Scritti Politti," he says, "but those were very confusing days and around about the time we brought out the album We Hate You, White South Africa n Bastards, there were various attempts to mould us into `pop stars'. Because of this and because we felt the magic had gone, we decided to split up."
Because he had all of his material needs catered for by a record company for so long, he found himself having a severe career and money crisis attack. "After Microdisney and at the age of 28, I discovered I wasn't a rounded person, and not as articulate as I wanted to be. So I wandered around for a while, driving vans to make a living." It was another vintage musical great who got him back into the recording studio while Bacharach and Brian Wilson may now be rehabilitated in the Nineties the genius that was Alex Chilton (Big Star) remains largely undiscovered by today's pop pickers.
"My first solo work was very like stripped down Alex Chilton demos, and I went on to record an album called (confusingly enough) High Llamas (1990). With subsequent works like Apricots I went on to enjoy a semi successful career in France people there seem much more open minded musically than in Britain and then for the grand sum of £2,500 I brought out Gideon Gaye year," he says.
IF you want your archetypal "critically acclaimed but commercially ignored"
album, look no further than Gideon Gaye. Despite the high profile accolades (even the head of MTV Europe made it his album of the year) sales remained what the music biz euphemistically terms "modest". Then something strange happened a single off the album, Checkin' In, Chekin' Out, which was O'Hagan's homage to American AM radio (Steely Dan, The Eagles, etc) was getting air play all over the world.
"It was so embarrassing and also a huge mistake," says Sean O'Hagan. "Checkin' In is not that representative of my work and suddenly it was being played on mainstream radio stations alongside Maria Carey. I wanted it to be played on College Radio in the US because that would be more my audience, and the audience for Gideon Gaye, but I heard that the College DJs refused to play it because they had heard it sounded like The Eagles." Quite right, too.
Such was the anomaly of the situation that when the High Llamas found themselves playing in Austria, some earnest type came up to them afterwards to say he didn't really like all the "experimental" stuff they played at the start (basically the other songs off Gideon Gaye) but he loved it when they played a cover version of Checkin' In at the end.
He's determined that no such mistake will be made with Hawaii, and although he's the first to admit that "nobody will be whacked around the head with any sort of new reality there is a delicious eclecticism in the album sweeping guitars, falling strings and even occasional Copacobana cheesy bits. Is it a case of Big Time Ahoy I honestly mean it when I say that don't mind that much if the album doesn't sell. As long as the critical thing stands up and I realise I've made the album I always wanted to make, I'm happy. Basically I just want enough money to make the next album I've been listening a lot to Serge Gainsbourg recently."
