HiFi Sean and David McAlmont: ‘Seeing Andy Bell on TV in a rubber leotard set me free’

‘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”.

There are other curious coincidences about their partnership. When they met, says McAlmont, they bonded over a mutual love of Bollywood soundtracks, music they had discovered independently on different sides of the world. Dickson first encountered Indian film music while living in Glasgow’s West End in the 80s, then an area rich in video shops that specialised in Bollywood films. For McAlmont, the sound was a memory of his childhood. “I was in South America, so there was slavery, and after slavery was abolished, you had indentured Indian labour, so the population of Guyana is 48% African, 50% Indian. In the late 70s and 80s, when we got there, my uncles took me to Bollywood cinema all the time. Singers like Lata Mangeshkar and Amitabh Bachchan I know really well. It’s kind of a time capsule for me.”

Accordingly, six of the tracks on Happy Ending come decked with strings courtesy of Bengaluru arranger Dr Chandru Jois, part of a kaleidoscopic range of sounds on offer. McAlmont’s incredible vocals range from jazz-inflected to Guyanese patois; Dickson’s music variously touches on pounding house, Prince-y electro-funk, retro soul and cinematic ambience. If anything, it’s even more eclectic than Dickson’s last album as Hifi Sean, 2017’s Ft., which featured guest vocals by everyone from house divas Paris Grey and Crystal Waters to Yoko Ono and Suicide’s Alan Vega.

In person, you can see why their collaboration works so well: it’s pretty obvious that the pair are close friends. Dickson talks nineteen-to-the-dozen (“I always do when I’m nervous”) and, in his baseball cap and sweatshirt, looks exactly like a DJ, which he is, while McAlmont exudes something of the thoughtful, reserved air of an academic, which he is: when not singing, he’s a course master at the Architecture Association Interprofessional Studio. Their conversation keeps slipping into recollections from years of shared experiences: writing sessions in Dickson’s high-rise east London flat, fuelled by “banging away through loads of prosecco, like a hen party”; nights McAlmont spent in the DJ booth at after-hours gay clubs where Dickson was playing “the 6am to 10am Monday morning slot”; the Christmas Day they spent together when Dickson, who once shared a manager with Wham!, learned that George Michael had died long before the news was made public, but elected not to tell anyone in case he ruined the day and instead, as McAlmont puts it, “sat there with this face on, saying everything was fine when you asked him what was wrong”.

Both have reinvented themselves several times. Dickson began his career making electronic music in his bedroom (an album he recorded aged 14 is apparently set for release soon, much to his astonishment), turned to “psychedelic rock’n’roll” – in a variety of forms with the Soup Dragons and explored chaotic lo-fi pop with the High Fidelity before becoming a club DJ and producer. McAlmont’s career has been even more varied: he’s worked in the realms of soul, jazz, electronica and alt-rock and with everyone from Michael Nyman to David Arnold to Duffy.

And both have had fleeting, idiosyncratic brushes with mainstream success. Yes, McAlmont’s glorious single with Suede’s Bernard Butler, was a Top 10 hit in 1995, but McAlmont cut a singular, even groundbreaking figure amid the blokey climate of the times. In 2023, we’re used to mainstream pop stars expressing their sexuality or gender fluidity, but you really didn’t get many gay Black frontmen with a penchant for blue lipstick and flamboyant costumes at the height of Britpop.

“I came back here in 1987, having kind of suppressed that side of me for a long time – I’d been in Guyana, been in the Pentecostal church, good Christian church boy,” he says. “The first thing I see on British TV is Erasure – Andy Bell in a rubber leotard. And that, for me was like: Wow, OK, I’m free. And there had been the whole glam rock, Bowie thing – it wasn’t new. So I thought, when I do it, no one will notice.

“What I didn’t expect was how being Black was going to be a thing. I think the fact that I was a Black person doing it was like: ‘Oh, this is different’ – but even so, there was Sylvester before me. And,” he smiles, “I was doing it in a contained environment. It’s easy to go on Top Of The Pops in blue lipstick – I wasn’t walking down the street like that. I thought: OK, it’s time to perform, so let’s bring that now. And then putting on my duffle coat and going home.”

Meanwhile, if Dickson feels nervous at meeting the press, it might have something to do with the treatment the music papers meted out to the Soup Dragons. Their sound moved towards drum machines and sampling after the band began attending an acid house night in Glasgow, and they scored a huge hit with a cover of The Rolling Stones’ I’m Free, only to find themselves dismissed as bandwagon-jumping opportunists mimicking Primal Scream’s similar shift in direction. In fact, as Dickson wearily points out, the Soup Dragons’ first excursion into indie-dance, Mother Universe, had come out months before the release of Loaded, and their album Lovegod predated Screamadelica by over a year. “And I still get people saying we copied Screamadelica,” he sighs. “I’ve nothing against Bobby Gillespie and all that, but I’ve got to spend the rest of my life trying to justify my history, because some twat in a music paper decided that I did something that’s factually inaccurate. Once a week, on social media, I’m pulling up some twatty Stone Roses fan and having to tell them what actually happened. I should have stood up for myself more at the time.”

But within a few years of the Soup Dragons’ split, Dickson had bigger problems to contend with than muddled chronology and dismissive journalists. He’s wary of talking about his experience of coming out as gay – his daughter, he says, rang him up after a recent radio interview “going ‘I never knew that! I never knew that!’, and that wasn’t right” – but notes that “it wasn’t all unicorns and rainbow flags”, which is an understatement. He was married, his wife pregnant, when he became involved with a man online, who it turned out was, in modern parlance, catfishing him: the ensuing fallout led to a nervous breakdown, a suicide attempt and Dickson briefly being sectioned.

It’s an experience that at least partly inspired Happy Endings’ soaring Beautiful, a kind of optimistic note-to-self that Dickson wrote in the midst of his breakdown, set aside while he rebuilt his life – moving to London, reinventing himself as a DJ around the capital’s gay clubs without mentioning his musical past and ultimately meeting his husband – then gave to McAlmont to finish. Elsewhere, there are nervy protest songs inspired by what McAlmont calls “the Animal Farm moment” of Donald Trump’s notorious 2020 photo op outside a Washington church during the Black Lives Matter protests, a track sung in Guyanese patois, and a clutch of songs that celebrate hedonism. “I think there’s something in the fact that we’re both gay,” says McAlmont. “I’ve done plenty of great collaborations in the past, I’ve been really spoilt, but they’ve never been gay before. I think that I probably thought, ‘I don’t know if I can get away with that in this scenario,” whereas with Sean, that’s not an issue.”

Which brings us to Hurricanes, a song so no-holds-barred in its depiction of pleasure-seeking that even Dickson’s husband pronounced it “disgusting”. McAlmont says it was just a reflection of his life pre-Covid. “I think we all hated 2016, right? Bowie, Brexit, Prince, Trump, Victoria Wood, George Michael. I freaked out – it felt like the rapture. You know the narrative of the rapture where all the good people get taken out and then the great tribulation gets visited on Earth by The Beast? So, my attitude was: ‘We’re all going to die – I’m going to be a punk.’ And my version of punk was … that. Then the pandemic happened and I had an epiphany: OK, right, I don’t want to behave like that any more; 2016 happened but we’re all still here.”

They’re keen to emphasise that Happy Endings isn’t a one-off: a follow-up is in the works. “It’s not A Project,” nods Dickson. “It’s more like what I did when I was 16, 17 and started a band with my mates. I mean, can you be a band when there’s just two people? But that’s what it feels like: I’ve just started a band with my friend.”