Hifi Sean on new album ‘Twilight’: “I’m still doing what my heart follows”
Introduction
Valentine’s day, saw the release of sister album to ‘Daylight’, ‘Twilight’ from DJ’S Hifi Sean and David McAlmont, which is also released on Plastique Recordings. The album flows through twelve night-time tracks, beginning with fellow DJ, ‘The Blessed Madonna’ on the opening track, ‘The Comedown’. A very fitting edition to the vibe here, after her own album release back in October 2024, ‘Godspeed’, we’re all on a comedown!
The album follows of course, the hit single releases, ‘Star’, ‘Goodbye Drama Queen’, ‘High With You’, and ‘Sorry I Made You Cry’, the last of which arriving with a brand new music video. ‘Twilight’ is also (just like ‘Daylight’), released on vinyl and CD formats – the vinyl is released on a ‘Purple Midnight’ vinyl, alongside a 7″ flexi disk with the track, ‘Driftaway Dub’, and a signed art print too!
Our last meeting with Hifi Sean covered his 2023 ventures with The Soup Dragons, vinyl/single releases and live headline tour, including collaborations with B52’S frontman, Fred Schneider. The physical releases around this time, were quite literally at the highest quality, especially for 7″ singles – with vibrant colours and heavyweight vinyl, both the ‘Daylight’ and ‘Twilight’ vinyls, really shine. Hifi Sean, a very busy man if we do say so indeed! For this interview, we deep dived and focussed on Hifi Sean’s diverse musical career. Touching upon, his creative process, collaborations with David, the challenges of social media, and his excitement for future projects.
The Interview
TTM: Sean, you wear so many different hats, you’ve been everywhere and done everything!
HIFI SEAN: I had a band after The Soup Dragons, called The High Fidelity, which is another you can delve into. It’s all on Bandcamp, but it’s actually not on streaming, which I need to do. But yeah, there was The High Fidelity, and we all were given, it was kind of like at the start, and it shows you how long ago this was, we were all given, email addresses by the guy who was running our website at the time.
Everybody in the band had an email address like, Hifi Sean, Hifi Paul, HiFi Ross, Hifi Adrian. About a year later, my friend asked me to DJ Glasgow Art School with a really close friend of mine Alan. And then we, we started doing it every Thursday night. So we decided to start a club called ‘Record Players’, which ended up running for about five years.
His DJ name was ‘Hush Puppy’ at the time. He said to me, “You need a DJ name” And I’m like, “Can I not just be Sean Dickson?” And he went, “No, no, you’ve got that email thing!”. Because, not many people had email addresses at that point, and that’s where Hifi Sean came from.
That’s how Hifi Sean, ‘the artist’, came about. I was making club records from DJing. I made an album called ‘FT’ back in 2017 which featured Crystal Waters, Yoko Ono, Fred out the B52’s. It’s where I met David, and we became close friends. And look at us now, three albums, the new albums out, and it’s all going excitingly well!
TTM: How do you know when you have a great connection with a fellow artist?
HIFI SEAN: I know when a record’s good, when making it, and I can’t put my finger on it, and I’m sure a lot of artists feel the same as well, but you just get that little tingle, that little buzz, you just get really excited, and you turn into a child. That’s the thing I love about making music. It makes you feel young. In my head, I’m still 17. I’m still making records that my 17 year old self wanted to make. It was insane working with somebody like Yoko Ono.
I kind of tried to think of a concept to give me a kick up the ass. So I thought, I’ll just ask lots of really interesting people who are all very unique, if they’d want to make a record with me, and I’ll make an album. So everybody on that album does their own thing, but they’re also very, very unlike anybody else. There’s not another Yoko Ono, there’s not another Crystal Waters. Everyone was just saying yes, it was insane.
When I asked Fred, I decided I’m going to New York. I want to meet Fred. I want to be in the studio with Fred. We went out the night before. We didn’t have a clue what we’re going to record. Took him to the to the West Village, and got really drunk, and he got a notepad of paper out, and he’s like, “what are we going to write about?” And I just went “truckers”. “Let’s write about truckers.”
TTM: Do you think it comes down to experience too?
HIFI SEAN: I’m not experienced. I always think it’s really funny when people talk about my career. I’m not careerist. I’ve never sat down and thought, right, this is what I’m doing. And in a way, it just kind of looks like a career, but it was all made up. You’re only here once. You might as well do everything and anything that you want to do.
TTM: You’re so present on social media, it’s good to see, but it’s such a mind game, isn’t it?
HIFI SEAN: Yeah, everybody struggles. Basically, because you don’t feel that you can know if people are seeing your posts, you’ve got all the algorithms. It’s all about money. It’s like to post something now on social media and put money behind it… actually it kind of demeans you as an artist sometimes, because you feel a bit of a slut. You feel like you’ve got to oblige and fall into that category of making a dick of yourself. And I kind of refuse to do it.
TTM: It does give us all the false illusion that we’re all connected. Björk, was talking the other day about how Spotify and streaming services are some of the worst things to happen to the industry, it’s a similar situation.
HIFI SEAN: The big issue for independent artists, is where artists on major labels, the major labels pay a lot of money to these to these platforms, so they have, like a fast track. So, it’s a bit like when you go to the airport, you go through the posh lane to go on the plane faster. These artists are just kind of walking through straight onto the plane. Whereas all of us are standing on a five mile long queue at customs. And it’s exactly that analogy. It never used to be like this, and it’s getting harder and harder.
It really worries me that there’s going to be so many young people that decide I don’t want to do this, you know, I can’t do this. I can’t make a living. They’re up against this digital machine. The heyday was MySpace, because MySpace wasn’t policed and wasn’t controlled. A really good example of that was Lily Allen. The Queen of Myspace.
TTM: You and David have produced a whole art/lyric book for ‘Twilight’, can you tell us more about that Sean?
HIFI SEAN: Nobody’s ever done that before. It’s crazy. It’s the third album we’ve released. As for every album of those three albums, we released the lyrics and a beautiful art book a month or a few weeks before the album came out, which totally came from when I was a teen.
I lived in Bellshill, which was like, about, 10-12 miles outside Glasgow. So I used to do that thing, going into town on a Saturday afternoon to buy my records, and then on the train trip home open the records and read the lyrics in the inner sleeve.
And it introduced you to this world, and then when you go home, you put your music on and read them. So it’s like, I always had that thing about lyrics and music being kind of like two entities. David loved the idea because, David writes the lyrics, and our friend Arber, the artist, loves the idea as well, because he gets to present each song with an image. He does all the videos as well. But, I mean, why has nobody ever done this before? But the good thing is, if anybody does do it now, we can say we were first!
TTM: We’ve got the physical release of ‘Twilight’ as well, and it’s on this really beautiful lavender/purple vinyl, isn’t it?
HIFI SEAN: The problem is, I’m colour blind. Both these albums, ‘Daylight’ and ‘Twilight’ have been really quite difficult for me, because they have both the colours that I have problems with! I had to keep asking, is that purple, or is this red, orange or yellow?
I’ve said this a million times in Tesco when buying bananas, I might look to the person next to me and go, “Is this yellow or green?”. Usually, people walk away from me slowly. I have texted pictures of bananas to my husband and asked what colours they are, because I have a real problem with buying unripe bananas thinking they’re yellow.
I suppose I’m really proud of all the content we’ve done physically, it’s really beautiful, and we’re really lucky to have Arber, working with us, and he’s worked with us from from the beginning.
If you listen to the start of ‘Daylight’, it’s got the little mantra, ‘Daylight’ becomes ‘Twilight’. So it’s, kind of like a cyclic 24 hour, you know? I’ve played ‘Daylight’, and then I played ‘Twilight’, and then I played ‘Daylight’ again to see if it works. Totally works.
TTM: A 6 month turnaround is so insane too!
HIFI SEAN: Try writing 24 songs and recording them and producing them in six months! We were writing, uplifting, joyous songs, and also writing these darker songs. So it was like, why don’t we do it as two separate things? And we did it. We did it. During the summer, I was mixing the winter album, and then during the winter I was mixing the summer album. I don’t think anybody’s ever done this. I don’t think anybody’s released, an album, brother and sister album, in the space of six months. It originally was supposed to be the first day of summer, first day of winter, but we couldn’t work it out like that. So we thought Valentine’s Day was a really nice way to release a sexy, nighttime album for the lovers!
TTM: What do you think of the club scene Sean? Are there club influences going into this album?
HIFI SEAN: ‘Daylight’ had reviews mentioning it being a club influenced album. I didn’t hear that at all. I just thought it was a kind of like a psychedelic soul pop album. ‘Twilight’, has just been like that, but more down tempo and and once again, you know, we’ve had people, some reviews, saying it’s like a chill out album, like post club album, which I didn’t expect at all. They always say that the person that finds it hardest to describe their own music, is the people that make their own music. I would likely be the worst person to write a review of my own album.
I get the thing about ‘Twilight”s a coming back from a club type album. It’s really, soft and gentle and warm. It had to be because, ‘Daylight’ was so bright and sunshine. I was on the motorway one night, it was literally one of those drives where, you didn’t see anybody else on the motorway, and I put the album on, and it was such a thrill, to experience it in that situation.
TTM: Overall, what can we expect from the album?
HIFI SEAN: The album opens with a song called, ‘The Comedown’. We want you to feel like you’re coming down from, what was the last track on ‘Daylight’, ‘The Show’, which was the end of the show, big explosion. We wrote this song with The Blessed Madonna, and she narrates a section as well. The song was based around the fact that your heartbeat is roughly the same BPM as dance music. So we wrote the song on top of a heartbeat, and that’s what she talks about, “I can hear my heart beating like a drum.”.
So it’s a beautiful way to start the album. Actually I think it’s one of my favourite tracks on the album. Next track is ‘Twilight’, which is based around lots of strange, twisted choral voices. My dogs, Fred and Barney, are on the record. Actually, they’re old boys now. They’re 14 next month, and I wanted to kind of immortalise them on vinyl, so I thought it’d be a beautiful thing to do. It’s a really beautiful moment in the record, because the tracks are all about escaping to safe spaces. And my safe space is the graveyard that I walk my dogs in. So that’s where it was recorded. The boys were running about in the graveyard, barking, and I recorded them and then put them on the record. David has his favourite bird song at that section as well. There was a lot of a lot of kind of unusual production skills that I’ve always wanted to do that I managed to play around with this one. It’s the best produced album I’ve ever made. Making an album of all these little lullabies that just kind of slowly drift over you.
TTM: What was the reaction like to the listening party of the album?
HIFI SEAN: It was insane. People loved it, they totally got the vibe within the first track. Either it’s one of those albums you either get or you don’t get. It’s got a space. I think it’s one of those albums people will reach out to when they want to feel calm, which is nice, because we need music for different emotions. Some days you want to walk down the street with your headphones on and just feel safe warm, you know?
TTM: Is that kind of reaction not a testament to both your own, and David’s talents and experience?
HIFI SEAN: We’re on the same page, which is a huge, which is beautiful, because that doesn’t happen much. We have this unspoken synergy that seems to happen. I’m just, incredibly blessed to work with such an amazing artist.
TTM: Are you excited for the future, Sean? The magic, could that happen again?
HIFI SEAN: Yeah, I’m excited. I’m always the person that is more excited about the next thing. Yeah, I’m already in my head thinking about what to do next. This year I’m going to make a lot of club tracks, because I’ve kind of had that on the back burner whilst I’ve been doing all this stuff. I’m doing lots of remixes with people. I’ve got a few dance records coming out. Myself and David have already got ideas about what to do next, and I’ve got some exciting electronic records coming out as well. I can’t stop, I can’t stop thinking music. Genres are not a thing for me, I don’t think in genres. I just think of sound, sound bites and sonic capabilities and I think that’s what ‘Twilight’ is. Very proud of it.
TTM: How do you feel about the club scene nowadays? So many venues are closing down. How do you feel about this whole vibe that’s going on at the minute?
HIFI SEAN: Everything has peaks and troughs, and the troughs usually lead to more interesting things that come from it. I think social media has a lot to do with it as well, It’s just so boring. We’ve seen it all a million times. Stop posting. Nobody’s interested. There’s all different forms of club music. It’s not all about building, a ‘banger’. Kind of feels like it’s becoming homogenised by what you see and what you hear on social media.
TTM: Revisiting The High Fidelity just briefly, I was shopping at a record store and came across this single, and I knew exactly who it was, do you recognise this track?
HIFI SEAN: Oh that’s ‘Addicted To A T.V.’. Yeah, I recorded that in my bedroom! That record a really funny story. It was originally on a Japanese label, the guy from Tokyo phoned me and wanted to hear it. I played it down the phone, he went, “yeah, yeah, put it out.”. I’ll tell you a mad story about the video, right? This record, like no had no money behind it. It was the first single by The High Fidelity, which, at that point, The High Fidelity was just me. There was a campaign going on by an electrical store, called Dixon’s. There was this campaign going on, and you could buy anything you wanted out the electrical store, and then if you didn’t like it, you could take it back like eight hours later if you wanted to. So I thought, let’s buy loads of video equipment. So we bought video cameras and stands and lights. Next day, we made a video and then on the Monday, we took it all back, and it was about two or 3000 pounds worth of stuff, and they had to give us the money back! We made the video, and I got my friend to edit it, and at the start of the video, it says….
TTM: Thinking back to that time period, in the 90’s with The Soup Dragons, if yourself in 1990, could see where you are now and see what you’re doing today, would you be proud?
HIFI SEAN: I completely would, because I’m still doing what my heart follows. A lot of people I’ve seen over the years fall to the wayside because of how difficult it is. A friend said to me once, “you’re really lucky that you’re still making music after all these years.”. I’ve been doing it since I was 16 or 17.
"I'm proud that I've stayed true to myself all along."
In May, Hifi Sean & David McAlmont will be opening for Erasure’s Andy Bell on his solo Tour, ticket’s are available here!
“In York, Birmingham and Manchester, the brilliant Grammy-winning US DJ and producer Dave Audé will be starting the party with a dedicated DJ set.
At all the other shows, our opening act will be Hifi Sean & David McAlmont, one of the most interesting and exciting collaborations around, who will be opening the show with a special live performance.” – Andy Bell
