‘I’m not hippy-dippy normally,” frowns Sean Dickson, seated across a pub table from his friend and collaborator David McAlmont, “but it does feel like this was weirdly meant to happen. There’s just … something.”
Certainly, the pair – who released their debut album as HiFi Sean and David McAlmont, Happy Ending, last Friday – were struck by each other decades before they actually met. When McAlmont returned to England in 1987, after years spent living in his mother’s home country of Guyana, his first introduction to the notion of “alternative” music was seeing a video of Dickson and his old band the Soup Dragons on The Chart Show. Meanwhile, in the late 90s, before he came out as gay, Dickson remembers seeing McAlmont on television, performing in a catsuit trimmed with marabou feathers, makeup and heels, and “feeling kind of proud in a way that somebody was actually doing that”.
