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Mavericks and Monets: The hidden depths of
the High Llamas
"I would like to paint as a bird sings" - Monet
Mavericks and madness need not go together. Nor greatness and genius,
excellence and eccentricity, talent and tragedy. Facing neat little rows of
seats with neat little rows of balding men in their 40s and 50s are a band
which, like their audience, seem to have been afflicted by some sort of
ageing disease. 1999: The cutting edge. 2009: The cosy sweater.
Standing centre-stage without any notion of being in the limelight is the
band's leader Sean O'Hagan, as grey-haired and laidback as a likeable
geography teacher with one eye on his pupils and the other on early
retirement. It's a long time since The High Llamas toured Britain regularly,
a long time since the brilliant trilogy of albums Santa Barbara, Gideon Gaye
and Hawaii appeared on V2 in 1992, 94 and 96 respectively, a long time since
O'Hagan's concept of music-making was thought sufficiently intriguing to
entice the Beach Boys' 'lost genius' Brian Wilson to invite him to a private
audience in LA with the vague notion of asking him to produce a new Beach
Boys album which, eventually, never happened and, now, never will.
Wilson has come out of the shadows since that meeting, both commercially and
artistically, even managing to complete Smile, the 'lost' album from 1967
whose lasting vibrations brought both men together briefly in the mid-1990s.
Nothing much emerged from that meeting and the critical, as well as
commercial, spotlight deserted O'Hagan in the Noughties, leaving him to sink
quietly into the obscurity Wilson himself once longed for. Life may have
ended on V2 by the end of the 1990s (Cold and Bouncy in 1998 and Snowbug in
1999 being the band's final two releases on that label) but the High Llamas'
devotion to marimbas and bossa nova rhythms, modern electronica and vintage
synthethizers, folk music and perky pop hasn't diminished since then. Their
pretty minimalism may have had a pretty minimal impact outside of their
small but loyal fanbase since switching to smaller independent label Drag
City in 2000 but just because the appearance of magic is missing, doesn't
mean greatness is not being conjured up.
To know this is true, all you have to do is to ignore how the band or their
fans now look, though among the crowd inside the art centre politeness of
Manchester's once beer-soaked Band on the Wall venue just along from a jazz
club, the Dry Bar, altogether a nice little row of music-related venues,
it's possible to detect a smattering of young
egghead-looking students hoping to be lifted and inspired, and close your
eyes and listen.
"Smile probably never should have had a beginning, middle and end shape.
It was never meant to have shape. It's moments of music"
- David Anderle, director of a&r, A&M Records;
quoted in Brian Wilson & The Beach Boys: How Deep Is The Ocean? By Paul
Williams (1997)
Rarely has a band so deeply 'pop' as the High Llamas enjoyed such little
popular success. That's 'pop' as in the wide-eyed openness of
Smile-era Brian Wilson and his Monet-like search for beauty in its utmost
purity, a search whose frighteningly ambitious nature was made even more
unnerving by its delicate nature and childlike vulnerability.
Differences abound, of course, and O'Hagan has never been a Brian Wilson
clone in any sense. While Wilson eventually took all those unfinished
fragments of his famous song cycle and attempted to bridge the gaps with the
help of original collaborator Van Dyke Parks in a lofty dream of creating
wholeness, O'Hagan has always been more grounded, less grandiose. High
Llamas' songs are content to leave the fragments as just that - only
stretched into some unspecified infinity where thoughts of a destination or
overall meaning are irrelevant.
Wilson's old-fashioned sense of spirituality may always have outweighed Van
Dyke Park's modern intellectualism but it's the opposite in the High Llamas
who have never really attempted to reproduce those heavenly harmonies.
As cosy as a set of slippers on stage, The High Llamas' retro-futurism is a
model of precision as clinical as Parks, suggesting O'Hagan actually has
more in common with the latter than Wilson. It's this which, perhaps, the
former Beach Boy himself in search of a possible new partner detected in
O'Hagan at the height of the band's critical peak all those years ago.
Although O'Hagan's on-stage reminiscences about a previous visit to
Manchester as a young man with his first major band Microdisney sound
heartfelt, only two songs in the entire set betray signs of clear-cut
emotion. The one about Peckham or Clapham or Brixton or
some other part of London where he clearly lives/has lived, the other about
Microdisney. Passion and personality appear to be as absent as ever on the
High Llamas' most recent albums Beet, Maize and Corn (2003) and Can Ladders
(2007)
It's this which explains the conundrum of why O'Hagan continues to potter in
the margins of pop history despite his impressive melodic skills.
Obvious hook follows obvious hook but the genial frontman always resists
pressing any obvious emotional button. Rather than being simply another
indie musician in thrall to the artier side of the Beach Boys, albeit the
first, O'Hagan and the High Llamas are a different, more quietly complex
beast altogether.
Try imagining Paddy McAloon's perfect pop songs for Prefab Sprout rearranged
into ribbons of tonal harmony by classical musician Steve Reich played by a
down-home Americana outfit with slight British reserve. Imagine a rootsier
version of Peter Brewis's art-pop minimalism The Week That Was where the
melody is fixed within a rigid structure. Yet played with the ease of a
country-pop band. It's this strange mix of hard and soft, complexity
and simplicity which helps explain the band's lack of any proper hits,
though encore The Track Goes On from their 'biggest' album Gideon Gaye,
still sounds like it should have been one.
The beauty and irony of this understated approach is that everything the
High Llamas do is in service to the whole in a way Brian Wilson would surely
appreciate. This applies not only to the instrumentation, nor
O'Hagan's homely
vocals, which are utilised as just another instrument in any case, but to
the songs' very melodies. The meaning of all this repetition and subtlety
starts to sink in at just about the same point in the evening as broadcaster
and writer
Stuart Maconie, fresh from his show on BBC6 Radio, squeezes through a small
gap in the room to join the hushed brethren standing at the back. A
great band refusing to do the obvious with the obvious, the High Llamas
approach takes them to the summit of pop perfection once scaled by Brian
Wilson but from a different direction. The High Llamas breathe in shallow
breaths, play on their tip-toes, pad like cats. They boast an
astonishing lightness of touch but don't be fooled by the apparent inaction
- the surface of the lake may be calm but that doesn't mean there aren't
depths below.
Mavericks and madness need not go together. Nor greatness and genius,
excellence and eccentricity, talent and tragedy. Yes - that is a banjo on
stage but there's nothing rural or inbred going on here. By not
hammering home the point, O-Hagan and the High Llamas leave the point free
to float to the surface of its own accord in its own time in
the mind, heart and, occasionally, toes of the listener. Like the
ripples in a Monet painting, the music's grace shines through as gloriously
yet unforced as nature itself.
Graham Chalmers
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