Sean O’Hagan: ‘That lovely, beautiful humanity I had with Cathal Coughlan in those later years was amazing’

In their final months together, whenever they felt strong enough, Cathal Coughlan and Sean O’Hagan would sit and talk. As the clock ticked and the world outside bustled by, the old friends and former bandmates reminisced about their early days in Cork, the transcendent soft pop they made as the critically lauded Microdisney, and the surprises life would hold in store in the decades that followed.

“I was diagnosed in 2019 with bowel cancer – went straight to hospital, just before Covid. I was operated on. Most of the next year was chemo,” says O’Hagan, the songwriter and producer who, as the driving force behind both Microdisney and High Llamas, occupies a hallowed space in Irish music.

Coughlan, O’Hagan’s musical foil in Microdisney, whose heartbreaking almost-hits include Town to Town and Gale Force Wind, was unwell, too. He would die in May 2022, at the age of 61.

“He had prostate cancer, which he thought, ‘Oh, this is really normal for a guy my age to have.’ He wasn’t panicking. He was working,” says O’Hagan. “And then there were hints of, ‘This isn’t going well.’ Complications kept cropping up. While I was recovering, I was feeling lucky in myself that I was recovering. Cathal’s condition was getting more and more complicated. We spent a lot of time together during that period, when he was going through the worst of his treatment. Lots and lots of time ... He spent a lot an awful lot of time with me and my family. I spent time with his family as well.”

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[ Cathal Coughlan obituary: Singer and songwriter who never stopped exploring musical frontiers ]

Two years later O’Hagan is on the mend and has returned with a new High Llamas album, Hey Panda. It’s a new chapter for the singer and a departure from the old-school vibes threaded through classic High Llamas moments such as their 1994 single Checkin’ In, Checkin’ Out, where he conjured with the spirits of Steely Dan, The Beach Boys and Brazilian bossa nova.

“I’m 64. Let’s be completely honest: it’s strange a guy of 64 is still making records,” he says. “I don’t know how many more records I have in me. I said, ‘Well, this is the record I’ve always wanted to make.’ [Previously] I didn’t feel I had the language. I didn’t have the confidence. I thought I’d be overjudged. I avoided it.”

He was very conscious about Hey Panda having two feet in the present day. Thoroughly modern, its influences include the indie prog-rocker King Krule (with whom O’Hagan has worked as arranger and producer) and the avant-garde R&B artists Tyler, the Creator; and Frank Ocean.

The lyrics draw on his experiences of chemo – the sense of being in many places at once. “Some of the observations are from Cork, from when I was loading trucks as a young man. Some of the observations are from Cornwall of the present [where he spends some of the year]. It’s like reaching back to the past and the present. It’s what happens when you’re on chemo. Your brain works in a completely different way.”

O’Hagan started High Lamas in 1992, four years after Microdisney broke up. He saw the project as a riposte to the dominant musical trends of the time, grunge in particular. He wanted to celebrate older influences: soft pop, krautrock, John Barry orchestral pop.

If not original, it was certainly fresh and exciting. Billboard heralded High Lamas as “a new breed of popsmiths going back to such inspirations as Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach and Phil Spector”. Rolling Stone praised them for finding inventive ways to build on old sounds. And the Beach Boy Bruce Johnston paid quirky, though sincere, tribute, describing O’Hagan as “the highest Llama for all”.

“When we made Gideon Gaye [their second album], the biggest bands were Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. I was obsessed with Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle. And Fred Neil,” he says, referring to the cult experimental record from 1967 and to the American folk singer who wrote Everybody’s Talkin’. “These strange little records. I was still retro. I was still looking back. I was trying to do it in as interesting a way as possible. All the montage segues – that was very much trying to reflect things like Can and stuff like that. I loved all that.”

O’Hagan grew up in Luton, north of London, moving to Cork in his late teens. There he befriended Coughlan at a New Year’s Eve party. Shortly afterwards they started Microdisney, a vehicle for O’Hagan’s lithe melodies and Coughlan’s hyperintelligent, scorched-earth lyrics, which took pot-shots at religion, traditional Irish music and British journalists mangling “Cathal”. (“She’s trying to pronounce my name,” he sings on Town to Town.)

They had soon gained a local following – helped by their habit of blowing U2 offstage on the several occasions they opened for the Dubliners. But Cork in the early 1980s was no place for young men with big dreams: when the economy cratered and the Arcadia, a local music venue, shuttered, Coughlan and O’Hagan relocated to Britain.

In London, with a different line-up, Microdisney signed to the independent-music powerhouse Rough Trade – where they were soon eclipsed by their labelmates The Smiths. Paradoxically, Rough Trade has today emerged as a champion of Irish music and is the home of acts such as Lankum, Lisa O’Neill and, through its imprint River Lea, John Francis Flynn.

“This current or contemporary association with Lisa O’Neill and Lankum is very, very typical of Rough Trade,” says O’Hagan. “They take the turn nobody expects, always. To a certain extent, in doing that, they are brand-setters. They set the brand in a weird way. I’m speaking corporately about this – but this is a compliment. All I can say is their A&R is impeccable. Bless them. It’s absolutely fantastic.”

Feeling slightly unloved on Rough Trade, Microdisney would sign a two-album deal with Virgin, a major whose roster included Culture Club and The Human League. In 1987 they came close to breaking into the charts with the sublime Town to Town – it stalled at No 55 – but their big moment never quite arrived. Sensing their opportunity had come and gone, they called it quits. (Microdisney would come back for reunion shows in 2018 and 2019.) Coughlan formed the more hardcore Fatima Mansons; O’Hagan went retro with High Llamas.

[ Cathal Coughlan: ‘Microdisney ran its course. Let’s just leave it’ ]

In a way, High Llamas were Microdisney all over again. Their biggest-selling album, Hawaii, charted at 62, while Checkin’ In, Checkin’ Out, for all its ubiquity on independent radio, peaked at 96. But just like O’Hagan’s previous band, modest sales were accompanied by ecstatic reviews: the Washington Post praised Hawaii’s gentle wistfulness; the Guardian likened O’Hagan to the country-pop maverick Lee Hazlewood.

The acclaim brought High Llamas to the attention of Brian Johnston of The Beach Boys, who suggested that O’Hagan mediate a reunion between the American group and their former creative leader, Brian Wilson. In the mid-1990s both Wilson and The Beach Boys were undergoing a creative rehabilitation; O’Hagan would join the latter on stage in California, performing Sail on Sailor and Heroes and Villains.

He also spent time with Wilson, with whom he shared a passion for complex arrangements and beautiful melodies.

“It was 1996. He was exactly as I imagined he would be. I say this in the best possible way: he was like a child. Anything you suggested, anything you said, he reacted with surprise and excitement. He would jump up from his seat, literally run around the room and then sit down. And think about what you said, assimilate what you said – and make commitments.”

O’Hagan smiles wistfully. “You’d have a situation where you’d have five people in the room: Melinda [Wilson’s wife and manager, who died in January] being one of them. They hadn’t been married that long in the 1990s. Lovely woman; had absolutely his best interests at heart. You’d have a couple of executives from Richard Branson’s new label, V2. And me. We’d be discussing the possibility of a Beach Boys record featuring Brian Wilson again, which hadn’t happened for a very long time. He would make a commitment – ‘Yes, let’s do this’ – and start talking enthusiastically. And then there would be other people who would say, ‘Well, Brian, we need to think about this. We can’t make commitments.’”

O’Hagan never had much confidence as a lyric writer, partly because, with Coughlan in Microdisney, he was collaborating with one of Irish music’s great wordsmiths. But he digs deep into his personal experience on Hey Panda. A running theme of the album is his dyslexia and his experience of being written off at school as a lost cause.

“Being dyslexic in the 1970s and having to leave school because I couldn’t do exams – normally, I wouldn’t write about that. I’m really easy and happily writing about that now. Stone Cold Slow is about that. The very last phrase of Toriafan is ‘Make what you can, make what you can.’ It starts: ‘Show me again and again – to see is to do is the way a few of us learned ... It’s okay.’ Which is about kinetic learning,” O’Hagan, referring to learning through physical activity.

“The world is made by the victors. People who do well academically are the victors. They create a syllabus and an agenda. People who struggle with academia kind of play catch-up all the time. I’m trying to make a point: intelligence comes in many ways. The Water Moves is about being in an exam hall and feeling awful and a failure.”

While he was completing the new High Lamas album, O’Hagan also participated in a documentary about Microdisney, The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, named after the 1985 LP generally regarded as their masterpiece. The film, directed by Julie Perkins, recently aired to acclaim on the BBC. Much of the footage was recorded shortly before Coughlan died. Watching it back was an emotional experience for O’Hagan.

[ Cathal Coughlan and Microdisney: ‘Outsiders in the UK because they were Irish, outsiders in Ireland because they weren’t from Dublin’ ]

“We were being interviewed. That was so strange. Towards the end of [Coughlan’s] life there were rapid interviews, so to speak. None of us knew how close it was. We didn’t know. The last time I saw him I thought, I might not see you many times again. But I didn’t realise I wouldn’t see him again [at all]. I was writing [Hey Panda] at the time. By that time I’d got over the chemo. I was working again. I remember my head hurting: the stress of that does actually leave you with pressure in your head.”

In his years fronting Microdisney and Fatima Mansions, Coughlan had a well-deserved reputation as the angry young man of Irish music. Over time he mellowed and came to appreciate his upbringing in Cork and his heritage as an Irish person.

“At the end, those later years, he loved Ireland, he loved family, he loved history. He was still inquisitive. Falun Gong Dancer [from Coughlan’s Telifís side project with the producer Jacknife Lee] is a great example. That song is incredible. That lovely, beautiful humanity that I had with him in those later years was amazing. Obviously, that was there as a young man. Sometimes, as a young person, you hide things. You perform.”

When it was announced that Coughlan had died, there was an outpouring of grief but also of admiration for what he had achieved as an artist. “How would he have felt?” asks O’Hagan. “He would have felt loved and proud.”

Hey Panda, by High Llamas, is released by Drag City