It might seem unusual, at first: British folk/pop auteur Sean O’Hagan padding Here Come The Rattling Trees—his latest outing as bandleader of the High Llamas—with several breezy musical snippets that work as either introductions or codas to delicate, fully realized songs. But in fact, the project first coalesced as a narrative the singer scripted about his South London neighborhood of Peckham, where a local working-class recreation center was being threatened by snooty gentrification. But it quickly morphed into a full-scale production that he staged at a Covent Garden theater—hence the inclusion of rising and descending motifs. O’Hagan will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new High Llamas feature.
O’Hagan: Driven by something other than what you know.
There is no denying that approaching what you practise in a different way, as a novice, freshens the eventual product or outcome. So it was that I was on a bicycle—in Peckham—when I chanced upon a corner conversation between an elderly woman in a wheelchair, and a younger one standing. The subject of discussion was a recent visit from the gas man (the meter reader from the utility company for those who may not know). There had been some kind of doorstep misunderstanding, an altercation. As the women spoke, the tale achieved epic proportions. Claim to counter claim, punctuated by, pointing fingers. “He said … and I said back and he said so I said again … ” and over and over. I can not believe that this encounter was any more than a polite-but-tense exchange. “If I can not gain access today, Madam, when can I? Or can you supply a meter reading yourself?” End of story. No drama. How dull, it won’t do.
However, the joy of turning the everyday, the mundane, these tiny parcels of narrative, into chronicles, well, it’s irresistible. It’s what we do. We all invent something from nothing. So from passing comment, to storytelling, to theatre, and then maybe to cinema, the momentary becomes monumental, the transient becomes tremendous.
As I rode off on the bike, I knew that a clutch of stories that had been entertaining me for years would be the beginning of the next High Llamas project. It would start as narrative and then there would be music, then performance, and maybe then, a record.
