No. 3: Hifi Sean

Being a work-in-progress, places of safety and psychedelia, psychedelia, psychedelia with the Soup Dragon in Chief.

Sean Dickson in the absolute epitome of the kind of person we wanted this publication (and Bass, Mids, Tops before it) to give a platform to. People who have a different viewpoint to most on This Thing Of Ours, whether that be because they’ve been around the block, because they’re a trailblazer, because they cross boundaries between scenes or genres, or whatever. The thing is, when you look out from those unusual viewpoints, sometimes the contours of the culture become visible in a very different way. Hopefully those various viewpoints add up to reveal more about that culture and its history.

And Sean’s viewpoints - multiple - are definitely different. He’s gone from teenage indie rocker, through being a Proper Pop Star then weird electronic rock explorer, to now being one of the very best producers out there - taking in some high drama along the way. In a nutshell his psychedelic indie band The Soup Dragons turned indie-dance, had a mega hit which led to them touring the world with Deee-Lite (whose backing band at the time was effectively the P-Funk All Stars), but fairly quickly becoming disaffected with the mainstream industry. Sean went on to form The High Fidelity, making some excellent electro-glam boogie somewhere adjacent to Add N To (X) and All Seeing I blended with classic indie introspection, Bollywood strings and Omichord - but then in 2001, he realised he’d been hiding his own sexuality from himself all his life, had a breakdown, was hospitalised, and had to start out building his life, sense of self, and relationship with music back up from scratch.

All that is dealt with in this interview I did with him for The Observer in 2017. Do read that for background, it’s short. Since then, the Hifi Sean alias, which he'd then not long since launched with collaborations with a ridiculous range of people from Bootsy Collins to Yoko Ono, has continually matured, and he’s made some truly unbelievable records: for my money the best of his career. Highlights including a set of remixes of Fire Island and Loleatta Holloway’s classic “Shout to the Top” cover version - with his “House Mix” especially a DJ staple of mine (its ability to get a crowd kickstarted was invaluable when I was warming up for Leftfield the other week hem hem) - and a growing relationship with fellow journeyman David McAlmont, which has led to this year’s stunning Happy Endings album, which were it not for Janelle Monáe would be my album of 2023 so far.

Brian and I met Sean in East London and he took us for a walk around Tower Hamlets Cemetery, reminiscing about his lockdown dog walks there and introducing us in passing to the guy who’d saved it from developers to become a beautiful community space and nature reserve, then we sat down in a pub for this interview. Sean is a strange mix of vulnerability, bubbly ebullience (I generally try to avoid exclamation marks in articles, but he’s someone whose “!”s you can actually hear), and hard won resilience. He’s still extremely sensitive about how he’s perceived, and prone to relitigating times when he feels that The Soup Dragons were unfairly treated by the press - but at the same time, he’s enormously self-aware about these tendencies, and about how his coping mechanisms have kept his creative flame going. As you’ll see, he’s hyper-analytical, but in a way that looks at things afresh constantly - and unusually for someone who’s been through as much as he has, free of therapy-speak, even when talking about neurodivergence. He does have a strong tendency to follow trains of thought wherever they take him (as do I, hence the length of this conversation), but a strong sense of narrative too, so everything does get back to the point eventually.

My old editor from The Word, Mark Ellen, has a theory that people get trapped emotionally at the age when they first get famous - and there may be something to this. Certainly Sean has the passion, excitement and nerves close to the surface of a 17 year old, even as he wears middle age well: he is after all now reconciled with his family, settled down with his husband and dog in their London flat with a cottage on the coast, and steadily working as a DJ, producer and occasional educator. He’s extremely keen that his music keeps moving forwards, but at the same time he’s increasingly revisiting the past. That very week some Soup Dragons reunion gigs had just been announced, and Sean had also confirmed that a Greek label is going to issue on vinyl a cassette “album” he made himself with a drum machine and keyboard as a pre-Soup Dragons 14 year old Human League and Soft Cell fanatic, and has just rediscovered - plus a resurfaced clip was doing the rounds on “the socials” of The Soup Dragons out of their minds on LSD being interviewed on breakfast TV in 1990 which he found quite hilarious. He was also just embarking on more music with McAlmont plus a Hifi/McAlmont tour, new Soup Dragons songs and reissue programme, starting to work as a commercial mastering / mix down engineer for hire, and writing/production on a dance megastar’s album… all of which he was talking about nineteen to the dozen before we even started the recording. So there are a lot of dots to join… and a lot of angles to view the culture from. Settle in as this is a long one, but a good one!

There he is: wearing middle age well!

OK Sean, so today we're less interested in the big events and dramatic shifts in your life...

Yeah that has been done to death a bit! [laughs]

...and more in the cultural context you were working in. How what you did fit into the culture and subculture around you. Now just before I started recording, you were talking about your very first music making as a teenager, and that's as good a place to start as any. So you were in the... outskirts? of Glasgow, is that how you’d put it?

12 miles outside. Periphery. What they used to call Bellshill in those days was a “satellite town”.

And we're talking early 80s, you and your friends were getting into making music. Was that for its own sake or was there something that you wanted to be part of in doing that?

I've always told this story... in this town, our record shop was a barbers. Your parents, to get you to get your hair cut, would buy you records. You had to walk through the record shop on the ground floor – well, tiny little thing, really a bar with records – to get to the barber upstairs. And my dad at a very young age realised I was fascinated, not with the music, but the whole physicality of a record and putting it on a machine and hearing music come out. So he used to buy me records of my own to get my haircut – and I still have those records. My first album was Burt Bacharach, and my dad told me I chose because I went through the LPs and I just liked the leather-effect pretend embossed cover. Or my dad would buy me things he thought I'd like, bizarre stuff like Frank Sinatra records because dad liked him. But then as you get older – eight, nine, ten, 11, 12 – you start realising there's people you see over and over walking into that record shop, then you start going into the record shop on your own when you don't even need a haircut, and you start even meeting people. I remember seeing a few people older than me, and even people who were in bands. There was a lot of anarchist punks at that time, and there was a trailer park with caravans... trailer park! [checks self, laughs] – it was bit of derelict industrial land with a couple of caravans where they lived. And they always kicked around the record shop, it was on the crossroads that was the epicentre of our town, and it was called The Cross Barbers. That crossroads was the place you'd hang around, and that's where I met Norman [Blake]¹ and Duglas [T Stewart]², we started hanging out with these older people – and I noticed they all had two albums, they had Never Mind the Bollocks and they had Saturday Night Fever. From a very young age, I couldn't understand why these two completely opposite albums were such big things, and that's where you start to put two and two together with things. And for me that meant realising it wasn't really about the music style as such but about the energy that the music gave off to people and what they were getting from it. Also, to me, these guys, who were punks and a bit crazy, liking these two records gave you the right to have your own mind about music as well, if that makes sense...?

Sure! But again, did you want to be like them? Was there a sense you wanted to be part of a scene?

Well, John Peel was a big influence. You have to remember, John Peel played everything, not just a genre but hit you from all over. And as I say, there was a big thing of people watching: suddenly you start connecting people in your town – before social media it was just about clocking them, how they acted, what they were wearing, did they go into the record shop? That's how I met Norman, and he introduced me to Duglas, then for a little while we were like the holy trinity in the town. For a few years we hung out in each other's bedrooms having completely bizarre plans on the world – we'd invent bands and make cassettes of them. Sometimes it'd be together, sometimes not – like the electronic one I told you about when I was 14, that I just found: I just decided I was going to be this made-up artist, and created the whole thing. For myself. I don't even remember if I played it to them. But more generally music just bonded all the cool people you knew, so at that age you were trying to fit into that aesthetic of what you thought was cool, and most of all that meant playing music. For some reason in my early high school years I was good at accounts – and your parents look for something like that, like “RIGHT, you're going to be an accountant” – but I wanted none of that and deliberately failed all my accounts exams just for the reason there was no fucking way I was going to be an accountant. But I really put the hours in with music!

14-year-old Sean’s “album” - now kicking myself I didn’t think to suggest he called himself LOFI SEAN for the reissue.

And was there any sense of other cultures influencing you? I'm guessing a smallish town in Scotland then was fairly white...

Yeah. There were a few Indian and Pakistani cornershops, but otherwise it was predominantly white, I think it's fair to say it was a white working class culture. It was an old mining town, on my dad's side of the family they're all miners and worked down the pits, they shut the pits down when he was a boy.

So you wouldn't run into other music, other cultures just in your everyday life – which'd mean anything different could only come to you via radio, TV and the record shop?

Well, my dad was in the RAF and had been in Cyprus, and he brought back a lot of jazz and blues records. I did have a 7” of the song “Fever” by Earl Grant, which has been a huge influence on my production, it's the best version of “Fever” ever³, I played it to David and he was just “holy shit, why've I not heard that version”. It's all played on bass notes of the piano, DONNGG DONNNG – and if you listen to our current album, there's loads of bass piano, that's a direct influence from my dad's record. He had a few soul record too. He heard all those records on the radio out there.

Was there any time when you started to think the songs you kids were playing in your bedrooms fit into something else out there? Like, did you suddenly go “aha we are indie!”?

We would play the local hotel, put on a little night there. In the BMX Bandits early days we used to go and busk, too. You'd go in to busk on a Saturday, and there was a lot of record shops in those days, so just the same as in Belshill you'd spot who went in and out of each one, then you'd start to connect to them, and that's when you started to realise what their scenes were, that there's such a thing as indie, that there's people into the same things as you, that there's a scene or a tribe out there. That's when we met Bobby from Primal Scream, for example, though this was in his Mary Chain days. So yeah, when you get to 15, 16, 17, you can go out on your own a bit, go into the city, and when you come back to Belshill feeling like you're connected to the scene in Glasgow, then you become the epicentre of that scene in Belshill. You'd brought back knowledge, but also people from Glasgow would start coming all that way – twelve miles! – to come to our little parties in the hotel.

Did you ever sense there was anything unusual about your little town, or did you assume everywhere had an abundance of bands like yours?

Well the Jesus & Mary Chain came from East Kilbride which was really nearby, about three miles from Belshill – so they were a huge catalyst. When “Upside Down” came out on Creation, it was a massive record, even more so in our area. Everybody had it, and it had their home address on it, which was just down the road, and confirmed the fact of “fucking hell you can do this, you can come from where we come from and just put out a record”. I wanted to do it, and put my home address on the back – if you look the first Soup Dragons record you'll see it's there. Which was the wrong thing to do because of course it got in the indie chart and my mum was like [frustrated snarl] “what've you done, you've got more letters... and more letters...”

Was that your first sense of being plugged into something that went beyond Glasgow and its surrounds then?

Well the first thing we did was a flexidisc, because Sushil the bass player⁴ ran a fanzine called Pure Popcorn which was quite kinda infamous in the whole Glasgow scene, and he put a flexidisc of the first track we ever recorded in the studio. Cost £80! We put it on a flexidisc along with The Legend, who became Everett True⁵ – and it got single of the week in the NME. A free flexidisc got single of the week! Then the NME contacted us and asked us to come to London, and we went “Oh OK whatever", came, met this guy – and they gave us three or four pages, a huge interview! We didn't have any songs, we had one track! John Peel played our one track off the flexidisc, then John Peel called my house, I was in bed, my mum shouted up “John Peel's on the phone for you!", she didn't know who John Peel was, handed me the phone and it was a production assistant going “This is John Peel's office, will the Soup Dragons come and do a session?” I was 16, 17, and I went “We don't have any money to come", she went “Oh OK,” and put the phoned down. I just thought, well that's that gone, then they phoned back half an hour later, they said “we've just spoken to John, he's DJing at Queen Margaret university in two weeks' time, would you go and meet him?” I thought, well OK, sure, so me and Jim went along, and as I've told so many times, he greeted us with a great big hug, then handed me an envelope with £150 in. I said “I can't take that!", he said “I'm not giving it, you're giving it me back at some point.” So it really was just down to him.

I'm so struck by the physicality of all this. Letters in the post, folding fanzines, flexidiscs going into people's hands...

It was very organic. At no point up to this point did we try and promote ourselves at all. 100%.

I guess you didn't stop to think of the weirdness of someone at the other end of Britain ending up hearing your record by this circuitous route because... well, it was normal?

Exactly. Because it had never happened before. Looking back it's crazy how this stuff was handed on a plate, but because I'd never been in that position before, I never knew any different. It's truly bizarre to think this whole succession of things happened over the space or two months which ended up with us having a manager that used to co-manage WHAM! I think at that point it was just hilarious to us, just going along with it because why not? Then BMX Bandits kicked off, off the back of Soup Dragons, then Norman started The Boy Hairdressers – Teenage Fanclub wouldn't be for a few years more after that – and honestly we'd created a scene that we didn't even know we were doing. You're just doing you, then suddenly everyone tells you it's a scene!

OK the other thing that leaps out here is the importance of gatekeepers. While on the one hand, yes it was spontaneous and democratised i.e. anyone could print a fanzine, but on the other, John Peel and the NME had immense power.

I used to call John Peel a “shit filter” because he blocked off the shit and gave me what I should be listening to.

Well he did actually read every fanzine, or at least make a deranged effort to....

I've told this before, but years and years later, when I became quite close to John I went up to his house a few times, because he used to do the show there towards the end of his life. I'd been the night before to do some kind of session, with an Omnichord – he was the person who instigated the Omnichord thing, he told me I should make an album with Omnichords, so I said “If you'll write a song with me” and he did write a song on The Omnichord Album. Anyway we were sat round his kitchen table the next morning and I saw with my own eyes what went on in John Peel's world. Postman turned up with one of those huge sacks you see coming out the back of vans, obviously John knew him well, so it was “Hi Andy” or whatever, then John just started emptying the sack out next to the kitchen table, and while he's having breakfast and talking to me, he's sorting them into piles. I asked him what they were and he went “OK, these are to listen to, these are maybes, and these are... nah.” I looked him in the eye and asked him “What is it that keeps you doing this after all these years?” – and he looked straight back at me, very serious, and I still get chills thinking about it, and said “The next record I hear might be the best record I've ever heard!” I was just, [brain exploding mime] PWOFFFF! That just sums it up, that one line – why I do it, why he did it, why everybody does it, really! The next record you hear might be the best record you've ever heard. It's a drug! It's looking for the next high, the next fulfilment of the thing you got when you first thought you'd heard the best record ever, the buzz of that, you spend the rest of your life chasing it...

One of the running themes of Bass, Mids, Tops has turned out to be that the people with the creative longevity are the people with that addiction – it keeps them fresh and enthusiastic, but it also makes them bloody minded, sends them haring off after the maddest things, and therefore leads to pretty circuitous career paths.

It's also a thing of fulfilling your dreams. There's a certain amount of that in it, of fulfilling what you think is going to be the best record you've ever heard. For John, of course, it was that “Teenage Kicks” thing, the fact that when he heard it he just keeled over. For me, I've got quite an old car, so I don't have a button you can press where you can automatically Shazam things – so there's been times I've been on the motorway, where I've had to pull onto the hard shoulder to Shazam things that are on 6 Music or whatever. But of course before, it wasn't that instant, you really had to dig to find things. And yeah in that moment he said that to me, the whole of it made sense, it was really profound to me.