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WORDS David Carr PHOTO Simon Russell Sean O’Hagan
has been a constant in my life, even when I didn’t know it. First as Microdisney, then as a member of Stereolab when Lætitia Sadier and Tim Gane dominated the headlines. It wasn’t even his first album as The High Llamas, but Snowbug which properly grabbed my attention and I became a devotee, discovering I’d been a fan all along. After battling illness during COVID he’s back with a new album, Hey Panda, and I got a chance to speak to one of my heroes. Why is the album called Hey Panda? Were you feeling a little endangered? Endangered, very good, no. So many of the releases at this time go back to the pandemic. During the pandemic I was reasonably busy. Busy, I was actually on chemo. I was recovering from cancer at the time. So, I had a strange old time and people said to me, “Wow, what a great time to have cancer, you didn’t miss anything.” Yeah! I was entertained every day by a panda from a zoo in China somewhere, who ate huge, giant carrots every day, huge. This animal had a great personality, and he ate the carrots like they were like cigars, they were half his body size these carrots, and I used to watch him every day, and I got to think that social media has been the defining characteristic of the last 20 years. There’re endless debates as to ‘Is it a good thing or a bad thing?’ and ‘what’s the eventual outcome?’ And I really warmed to the idea of TikTok, mainly because it was owned by the Chinese, and hopefully it’s owned by The Communist Party (I hope it is, that’s a much better story), and the fact that there’s actually huge communities all over the world. Obviously, it’s a platform for polarisation, but it’s also a platform for avoiding conflict, just basically reaching out to people who might enjoy this one thing somewhere else in the world. It could be quite a good thing and that’s sort of controversial. So, I was really close to this panda, that’s basically the size of it. Panda and his carrots and my admiration for this panda, and it’s just such a gift of a name. Hey, Panda. I just love the postJ Dilla world and I think it’s a much more interesting world than the preJ Dilla world. You’re obviously a fan of Fryars work. What specifically do you think he brought to the Hey Panda production? Ben Garrett (Fryars) is a massively talented, wonderful songwriter and a very fast, insightful producer. It was 2018, making God Melodies, when a big change happened for me. I’d always kind of loved hip hop and R&B, but never thought I had the language or the ability. The idea of a man in his 60s, just trying to reach something like that was cringe worthy. I just thought I love this stuff and I genuinely believe that. A Tribe called Quest, J Dilla, MF Doom and those people were massively huge and while we were all sort of messing about making retro lounge music, this stuff was going on and we kind of missed it a little bit. I just love the post-J Dilla world and I think it’s a much more interesting world than the pre-J Dilla world. I kind of wanted to have access to it. I just wanted to make this one record that has a contemporary R&B feel. You’ve collaborated with your daughter Livvy before, but it must have been a pleasure to have her play such a big role in the album. Yeah, by the way, just going back to Ben, he basically opened that whole world of R&B up and the other person who opened it up to me was Livvy. She’s got an amazing ear and she’s a great songwriter and I literally go to her with ideas and say, ‘is it any good or not?’ And she’s like, got a great A&R head. She seeks out this strange little world of lo-fi hip hop which is just exploding and there’s all these people out there making this bedroom hip-hop and it’s amazing. It’s beautiful. So, I have her on the record and she has this voice, which is a voice that is beyond definition, really. So many voices have a signature or a character. She’s almost transient in her delivery, it was just a pleasure. It was wonderful. I love this coterie of younger people who gather around when I’m making records. On a recent podcast episode you talked to Paul McDermott about Hawaii and the fact it was highly conceptualised. Could you say the same thing about Hey Panda or is it a more casual affair? OK, conceptualised, insofar as I wanted to sort of escape from my own sort of self-referential world. I mean most people thought The High Llamas were slightly untouchable figures playing with the right ‘60s influences and the right Brazilian and West Coast influences and I wanted to kind of escape that because I’m so buzzed by contemporary music. Conceptually, if it’s anything, it’s a record that’s saying thank you to this generation. But there are two themes that run through it. One is animals and the other is learning difficulty, not being able to learn classically, academically being a slow reader and not being able to do exams and achieve, which I couldn’t do. I left school with nothing, with no paper in my back pocket and called onto a building site at barely 16 and got a job in 1976 and I’ve never been able to study. But I love to read at my own pace 25