When Microdisney split in 1988, few people cared. And almost nobody cared about the future activities of guitarist Sean O’Hagan, who, together with singer/lyricist Cathal Coughlan, had penned some of the most memorable records of the mid-80’s. Theirs was a very unusual brand of "new wave" (as it was called in those days) which set social comment/existentialist lyrics to Big Star/Scott Walker/Steely Dan-ish pop and fingerpicked country guitar. Their songs reflected the legendarily grim, weird life they had been leading in London since their arrival there in 1983. Imagine a Kaurismaki movie, only bleaker, the ups being tours of Poland and the downs being periods of sheer starvation. But albums like The Clock Comes Down The Stairs (1985, re-issued 1996) managed to turn those sour times into a thing of beauty. After all, The Clock reached number one in the indie charts, and I firmly believe that the songwriting duo Coughlan+O’Hagan wrote more important stuff than Morrissey+Marr… Cathal Coughlan went on to form the Fatima Mansions and took the Microdisney anger to its scariest extremes – to those who know Dublin well, the name says it all. Sean O’Hagan was spotted somewhere selling Disney toys (!), then started a band named after his first album, High Llamas (1990). The songs on those first two works (Santa Barbara came out in ‘92) proved that his input in Microdisney had been much greater than people thought, but they were generally too poppy and pretty – with the exception of "Apricots", which recaptured that old Microdisney feeling of displacement and impending misery. By 1995 The High Llamas had become a steady quintet led by Sean and keyboardist/arranger Marcus Holdaway, with an ever-changing set of musicians gravitating around it and a very unusual, un-rocky instrumentation (strings, Vox organ, harpsichord, xylophone, banjo). Gideon Gaye, an album built around four songs and recorded with a very low budget, sold unexpectedly well and had a second release on Alpaca Park. The more traditionalist magazines like Mojo took a liking to the Llamas because of their blatant Beach Boys connections – they became almost fashionable for a while. The following year saw the release of Hawaii, a complex and ambitious piece of work, probably their masterpiece, announced by Sean as "classic Bacharach writing, but with Mingus brass – and a Mike Nesmith feel. And a soundtrack-y, Serge Gainsbourg vibe". Tepidly received by most critics (I’ll never understand why), its cinematic instrumentals fully display Sean’s fascination with movie soundtracks and easy listening, while the songs set him up as a writer of unique style, as instantly recognizable as, say, Donald Fagen. Hawaii boasts lots of enthralling moments, like the "Dressing Up The Old Dakota" long instrumental fade-out, in which the chord sequence is repeated many times – the harmonic structure breathes in front of the listener, then the track fades into some electronic interlude. The lyrics perfect Sean’s resigned exploration of the dubious and the vulgar. The world they conjure up is the old Microdisney world (just take a look at the Gideon Gaye front and back cover), but Sean’s perspective is more fragmented and cryptic than Cathal’s. In Gideon Gaye the rape of a London cityscape and community was seen through the eyes of a goat. Now we deadpan before an improbable landscape made of little fir trees, chalets (or woodsheds), swimming pools and bits of (Greek?) columns, called Hawaii… its perfect soundtrack must be the desolate/mocking horns of "Ill-fitting Suits". Nothing works there, men grow weary, luck ran out, it’s a pantomime best described in "Theatreland": « The movement on the stage was so slow/They’re calling it the stop and go show…The music was a little shaky/The scenery a little flaky/The audience surprised themselves with/The strength of the abuse they handed ». It reminds me of when I saw them supporting (the immensely great) Pavement last summer, playing a Cold and Bouncy-free set to a crowd of uninterested, nonplussed teenagers. The band was drowned out in the mix by the string section, (ex-Microdisney) bassist Jon Fell glanced about half-heartedly smoking a cig like he couldn’t be arsed any more, the tragically unglamourous Sean sang « Fly them to the Riviera/Fly them to the USA/Fly them till you think they’ve/Reached their dying day » then he brutalized the audience with big squalls of theremin… About three people cheered every time he reached the end of a song, and he’d always say, "Thank you. Too kind". At the start of the 90’s Sean became also involved in Stereolab, that is guitarist Tim Gane and Parisian singer Laetitia Sadier plus another unstable line-up. They had already recorded an album (Peng, 1992) and a host of singles consisting of lo-fi, experimental/melodic Krautpop with strictly analogue keyboards and confrontational, agit-prop, anti-consumerist lyrics. I suppose Sean’s contribution was crucial in defining Stereolab’s new direction – mixing their earlier style with easy listening and soundtrack atmospheres. His marimbas, brass and string arrangements etc., featured on most Stereolab recordings from 1993 onwards, are much more than finishing touches. If you strip "Percolator" of its string section – as Stereolab actually do in their concerts – it loses much of its cinematic, sci-fi character and becomes a different thing, albeit very exciting (it is admittedly one of their most popular live numbers). Other examples of Sean’s brilliant arrangements for Stereolab are Music For The Amorphous Body Center (1995) and the "Fluorescences" single (with a flute line reminiscent of the The Smiths’ "There’s A Light That Never Goes Out"). Anyway, the inputs and influences between the Lab and the Llamas are mutual to the point of direct quotation. For example, on the Llamas’ Cold and Bouncy, between tracks 12 and 13, you can hear a quote from the Labs’ "Refractions in the Plastic Pulse" fourth part. As for the easy listening/lounge/sci-fi/soundtrack element, it must be said that it can be humorous but is never meant to be ironic. In that sense, they can be compared to Japanese clubpop bands like Pizzicato Five, who are frequently mistaken for being kitschy or ironic when in reality they’re just playing the music they like (check out the Sushi 3003 compilation, where "Ping Pong" is reworked into a Bacharach song). Irony, as Cathal Coughlan once said, is a thing of the Eighties, and there’s nothing worse than ironic, jaded pop (that was said by one Stephen Malkmus). Nor are they particularly interested in the lounge trend (although they may have started it – the Labs are naturally hip). They are fascinated by those sounds and music because of their otherwordliness, their unspeakability. And the very essence of what the two bands share is an enigmatic, algid, obsessive, mainly unromantic, maybe futile type of beauty – a type of beauty which is common to all the many bands they have collaborated with, especially Tortoise. As Laetitia puts it in "Refractions in the Plastic Pulse", « Une action sans fin,/sans trophée et sans gloire–/Une création sans fond,/Sans profit ni victoire ». It’s no surprise Stereolab once wrote a song about artist Lucia Pamela, who claimed to have recorded an album on the moon. That song was about an obsession for sounds – sounds and colours, that kind of beauty. The most distinctive element in Stereolab’s music we can pin down so as to explain its charm is the French 60’s pop influence. That’s what gives it its peculiar, evocative and somehow reassuring, womb-like flavour. Which is strange and interesting when you come to think about it. Most of us (i.e., the Bagpiper readers and writers) were little children or weren’t even born in the 60’s, and the mental images we have of that era must derive from movies, photographs, old family pictures and so on. When I listen to tracks like "Cybele’s Reverie", "Slow Fast Hazel" or "You Used To Call Me Sadness", lots of those images spring to my mind… a Nouvelle Vague film, maybe one of Antoine Doinel’s girlfriends, those first colour photos which came with a white border (oh, and Belle and Sebastian put an Agfa Isorapid on the cover of a single!), and all of that mixed with subterranean mental snapshots from childhood – streets, supermarkets, whatever. The resulting effect is a sort of strange nostalgia for something I have never actually lived. But "nostalgia" is always a wrong word with Stereolab –I think it’s more to do with an active feeling of being somewhere you couldn’t actually be. Paul Buchanan once said, "Music reminds me of a place I’ve never been": I think that suits Stereolab perfectly well, "that place" being a personal fantasy of the Sixties or the space age or anything. Certainly their songs affect the listener’s world in a way other pop music (especially electronic stuff) does not – you listen to "International Colouring Contest" or "Cybele’s Reverie" a handful of times, then go out and… it stays with you, it changes your environment, just like when you’ve just come out of a cinema after seeing a great film – something every good pop record should always be able to do. The French pop element is still strongly present on Stereolab’s ninth album, Dots and Loops, especially on "The Flower Called Nowhere", "Prisoner of Mars" and the five-movement suite "Refractions in the Plastic Pulse". But Dots is a dazzingly versatile record – there are Brazilian influences ("Rainbo Conversation", "Diagonals"), drum’n’bass set to odd time signatures (listen to that luscious « chi-pa-chi-pa-chi » bit on "Parsec"), even some plain Machine Age jazz ("Brakhage", "Contronatura"). Uhm…Laetitia used to like Joe Jackson (how unhip, the cloth-eared will say), and I think it shows – some of this stuff reminds one of the positive, explorative energy behind such ambitious "pop" records as Night and Day and Body and Soul (and by the way, Tortoise are Brand X). The only criticism I can think of is that it sounds more clinical when compared to its predecessor, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. That record had a dirtier, groovier sound, and sparkles of real abandon ("Metronomic Underground"’s close, for example, or Sean’s dashes of Wurlitzer on "Cybele’s Reverie") which this one lacks. Still, Dots is undoubtedly their most accomplished work. As for the Llamas’ latest offering (Cold and Bouncy, released this year, a few months after Dots and Loops), it takes them somewhere new. The songs remain the same – maybe even more geometric and tightly-assembled than before – but this time Sean, in a perverse attempt at removing the focus of the song from the music and vocals, has swathed many of them in what at first sounds like a little orgy of sequenced plink-plonk-zip-splosh digital rubbish, a gormless mush of bubbling sounds (concocted with the help of Andy Ramsay) that explode on the surface like some funny sonic disease. The first time through, it can really annoy you (I wished I could have an electronica-free remix of the album), then it starts to make aesthetic sense. You realise that, in most cases, the "treatment" is not at all that obtrusive or heavy. Although, in a sense, some of the songs have been "Stereolabbed", it’s still sounds like The High Llamas –and what’s more, there are too many good tracks on this album to avoid it (the instrumentals "HiBall Nova Scotia" and "Homespin Rerun", for example). This time the High Llamas have created a totally new, unique soundscape, a strangely silvery and warm sonic world, perfect in itself. The thing is, it’s really hard to imagine where the next step will take them. They’ll probably record an unplugged album with Tim, Laetitia and Lucia Pamela – on the moon, of course.