He has a new album called Happy Ending but Soup Dragons’ Sean Dickson’s new music is a glorious beginning.
The Bellshill musician and producer/DJ who now goes by the moniker Hifi Sean has teamed up with David McAlmont, who had huge hit Yes with Suede’s Bernard Butler, for their first album together which is released today.
How did you meet?
When I did the Ft. album in 2016 with guest artists like Yoko Ono and Crystal Waters.
Before that I hadn’t made an album for 15 years. I was lost in the weekend life of DJing. I’d lost all confidence as a singer so decided to get other people and asked David.
I gave everyone three songs to choose. We booked a studio in Brixton and met for the first time over a coffee in the cinema next door.
We got on like a house on fire. We recorded Like Josephine Baker and he came to my DJ gigs and I went to
his jazz club gigs and became best mates.
Once we were having a drunken heated conversation about Prince and I said you couldn’t write songs like him unless you were a producer.
David was like “prove it” and I put down some drums and chords and he sang over it.
It turned into Hurricanes which is on the album. The next week we wrote something else and I said we should make an album. He kept me waiting overnight, saying, “I’ll think about it.” Later, he told me he wanted to do it but was trying to act cool.
While it’s taken us a while to release the album we haven’t been working on it all the time, maybe eight months in total.
Is it music then lyrics and is it a 50/50 split?
David does 99.9 per cent of the lyrics. I’ll send David music ideas and he’ll walk down the road singing on his phone and send me something back on WhatsApp.
One time we did things differently. I’m obsessed with song titles. I don’t write lyrics nowadays. On my phone I’ve got about four years’ worth of song titles.
I’d done some music and he had to come up with lyrics so I showed him all my song titles and he took the ones he liked and turned them into lines for the verses – that was The Fever on the album.
How would you describe the music?
It’s a weird place for me to be because now I’m known as a DJ so people expect me to make music for dancefloors.
I’ve never been one for rules. Back in 1990, when Soup Dragons made Mother Universe, it was quite aberrant for a scratchy indie band to make a dance record.
We were at the forefront of what became indie dance. Mother Universe was the first ever record to be called indie dance. A music newspaper called it that because they were trying to slag us off. Now it’s a respected genre. For the new album with David I’d describe it as electronic soul or to give it it’s full title psychedelic electronic soul.
Do you sing on it?
I do backing vocals but I’m not a lead singer any more. I’ve been asked to guest sing on other people’s records recently and I’ve said no.
Maybe further down the line me and David will do a duet like Peters and Lee.
Where did you record it?
In my flat a the top of an east London tower block and mixed it in a beach hut on Camber Sands.
We had zero budget and did it ourselves, apart from six tracks which include an 80-piece Bollywood orchestra in a film studio in Bangalore.
In the late 90s, I had a band called Hi Fidelity and we went to India to the same arranger and film studio. I contacted him again for this album and he agreed.
But the album is recorded on my laptop and most of the music is by me, although we brought in friends like Pink Floyd bassist Guy Pratt, who played on the title track.
Is this album a one-off?
We are making the next album at the moment.
Will the Soup Dragons ever reform?
We released a compilation at the end of last year called Raw TV Products – Singles & Rarities 1985-88.
There’s now talk we might play some gigs again which is a shocker and will mean I might be singing those songs on stage again.
It’ll be the original band – Jim McCulloch, Sushil K Dade and Ross A Sinclair.
● Hifi Sean and David McAlmont’s Happy Ending is out today.
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