Hifi Sean and David McAlmont: 'It’s crazy to think we’ve only been making albums for two years and we’ve made three'

As returns to making music after a lengthy absence go, former Soup Dragons frontman Sean Dickson’s 2018 album under his DJ alias Hifi Sean was an auspicious affair. Amid mutiple contributors were Yoko Ono, Bootsy Collins, Alan Vega of Suicide and Crystal Waters.
Hifi Sean and David McAlmont. Picture: Rob MartinHifi Sean and David McAlmont. Picture: Rob Martin
Hifi Sean and David McAlmont. Picture: Rob Martin

But one of the standout tracks, Like Josephine Baker, featured the soaring voice of David McAlmont, a singer best known for his 1990s collaboration with ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler.

Suitably encouraged after their first meeting in the studio, the pair began discussing a longer term project. Now, after releasing two albums within 18 months, they have a third scheduled for next year.

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“To me it made sense,” says McAlmont of their musical bond. “Some people have called me a serial collaborator and that’s because I’m a daydreamer, really. I have lots of ideas swimming around my head but I never get off my a*** and do anything about them until someone like Sean or Bernard comes along and says, ‘hey, do you want to do this?’ That’s when I go, yay.

“Whilst we were doing Like Josephine Baker I really liked Sean’s capability. He’s kind of a walking example of how much the making of music has changed. He’s got it all on an amazing machine, I thought this is really nifty. His ability to surprise me hasn’t really changed, he’s still blowing my mind what he comes up with, but when I heard what he was doing for everybody else I thought this would be a really nice fit for something long term, and he was thinking the same thing.

“We didn’t say as much to each other until a certain point, but then once we said so and we started speaking to each other about what life had been like for us in between the glittering 90s and the noughties there was plenty of identification with each other.”

As an experienced producer, Dickson cites Prince as an example of what he had in mind in sonically. “After Like Josephine Baker, the first track that we sat down and recorded in my living room after a drunken afternoon was following a conversation about Prince,” he says. “I’ve always had this theory that Prince wouldn’t have been able to write the songs that he wrote if he wasn’t a producer because producers write songs in a different way to people who are not producers, because you write the songs with the idea of what it’s going to sound like, you think of ways of how to present it in a special way.

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“Prince would do little things like leaving a bass guitar off a record. Kiss is a very good example, if you were to play in a normal arrangement it would just be a 12-bar blues song, but he had this concept of stripping it back. It was one of the first records to be played on radio where it didn’t have any effect on the vocal, it was 100 per cent dry, and little things like that make the record sound unique. So we had this conversation and (David) said, ‘Show me what you mean’ and I got this drumbeat going and these keyboards with no bass and that song is actually Hurricanes off (their first collaborative album) Happy Ending.”

Hifi Sean and David McAlmont. Picture: Rob MartinHifi Sean and David McAlmont. Picture: Rob Martin
Hifi Sean and David McAlmont. Picture: Rob Martin

He sees it as “like a modern version of how you start a band when you’re 16 or 17...we were kind of electronically jamming, making music and then we became a band”.

Unlike previous collaborations that he’s been involved in, McAlmont says there there has been “a lot of rewriting” of songs, adding that he thinks that’s a measure “how relaxed” their working relationship is. “There have been plenty of times in the past where I could have redone something but I didn’t have the nerve or the courage because of who I was working with, but with Hurricanes that happened – that ended up sounding more Prince-like. With Happy Ending, we did that in December 2016 and I thought, no, we can do better here. Sean was flapping about in the kitchen doing something and I changed the melody and the words and then we just did it all in one take.”

“I think the thing about us is capturing moments,” Dickson says. “I think we’re grown up enough now not to milk something until it’s dead. I’d rather have something that is 80 per cent good…that 20 per cent of the danger in it is the thing that keeps it exciting.”

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The Skin I’m In, McAlmont’s powerful reflection on the Black Lives Matter movement, came about as they were wrapping up the recording of their first album. “This one you’ve ot Sean doing that really mournful backing vocal which reminded me of Marvin Gaye. Actually the whole musical thing made me think of What’s Going On, so I thought I should do something political, and I do write the occasional rant online about something that displeases me politically and ti was shortly after that night during the Black Lives Matter riots that (Donald) Trump came out of the White House with a retinue and stood in front of a church with a bible upside down.

“Oh my God, is this the manifestation that people have been speaking about, is this the moment where the mask has completely slipped and we see him for what he is? So I wrote something about that...and adjusted it to Sean’s music.”

As their partnership gained momentum, their second album, Daylight, was a record that “wrote itself”, Dickson suggests. “The whole ship just steered a different way and all of a sudden it was three weeks of intense songwriting between the both of us. Some days David was getting two tracks from me, I was just writing so fast.”

“And I was returning them as fast as they came,” says McAlmont.

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So prolific were they that Dickson began to question if he was “just in a happy place now, thinking the world is just great and it all sounds amazing because I’m normally quite bipolar, I’m either really happy or really down...am I just feeling the Daylight sensation?” He decided to test the songs by listening to them on some earphones while out running. “It was amazing, it literally felt like it was an intervention from somewhere that helped us make this record – not a religious one, it just felt like the cards were on our side for once and everything was falling into place,” he says.

“Happy Ending was like lab, though,” McAlmont says. “There was a lot of groping around in the dark...like, who are we, what do we sound like, what are we going to be. But once that was finished, it just cleared the space. I knew I had a really good understanding having done all of the tracks on that album of what Sean wanted. It took me a while to learn the lesson of leaving space because I’m Mr Yadda Yadda, give me a piece of music and I go la-la-la-la-la, but Daylight, it was like, no, shut up, allow these bars to be. I don’t think that was the case on Happy Ending nearly as much as it was on this one and the next one.”

Conceptually, McAlmont says Daylight was the antidote to the downbeat themes of Happy Ending. He explains: “The first album’s working title was Space Age Soul, Space Age Blues and to me, that sounded like dystopia, the world’s gone bad and we’re all going to die. Daylight is the album where we got over that, we were feeling a bit more positive about the future, and once we wrote Sun Come Up it was like, let’s make it all about sunshine and summer.”

The follow-up, Twilight, is already in the bag and is a companion piece, they say, to Daylight. “It was a really nice thing to have a concept of two albums,” Dickson says. “It’s crazy to think that we’ve only been making albums for two years and we’ve made three. We’re about to release the third album in February, so we’ve done 36 songs in two years and supposedly that’s not the model, you don’t do that, it’s harder to get interviews, it’s harder to get on radio because there’s just too much of a body of work. But before Daylight was made we sat down and said let’s do Daylight and let’s do Twilight because we seemed to venture into two worlds with our songwriting, it’s either euphoric or it’s quite sombre, so it’s like night music and day music.

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“Artists always say they like their newest piece of work, but honestly, I’m completely besotted with Twilight. I think when people hear Twilight they’ll hear Daylight in a different way.”

The album will be out on Valentine’s Day, February 14, Dickson reveals. “Originally the concept was we were going to release Daylight on the first day of summer and Twilight on the first day of winter, but the problem is they are actually quite close together, and these days you release taster singles and so on. Valentine’s Day is still winter and the album is very romantic, so it just felt perfect to make it an album for the lovers.”

HiFi Sean and David McAlmont play at Oporto, Leeds on November 14.

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