Sean Dickson was scared when he made his first Hifi Sean track. “I’d not made music for nearly 15 years,” he says, “and I was terrified about it!” But everything is going swimmingly. Having just turned 50, Dickson has a bona fide hit with the gospel-house of Testify, which managed to be big both in Ibiza and on Radio 2, a successful album, Ft., featuring a host of his musical heroes, a beautifully remixed version of that album ready for Record Store Day and another record under way featuring a full Bollywood orchestra. But for most of this century he wasn’t sure he’d ever return to music.
Dickson grew up in Bellshill, just outside Glasgow. He was musical from childhood, and his parents encouraged this, first with classical guitar lessons then, when he became obsessed with Soft Cell, by buying him a Roland TR-808 drum machine and SH-101 bassline generator. Indie pop was the name of the game in his teens, though, when he befriended fellow Bellshill boys Norman Blake and Duglas T Stewart. The three would “invent a new band every week to play at the local hotel”, often with outrageous names like the Child Molesters. Eventually this separated out into Stewart’s BMX Bandits, Blake’s Teenage Fanclub and Dickson’s band the Soup Dragons.
The Soup Dragons’ “psychedelia on no budget” made them John Peel favourites. But, as for fellow Scots guitar-janglers the Shamen and Primal Scream, acid house opened up new worlds. Their first indie-dance track, Mother Universe, got club play and saw them booked at a Glasgow acid night – “we got paid in 20 ecstasy tablets!” But in 1990 their semi-cover (“I just sort of guessed the lyrics and made it up as we went along”) of the Rolling Stones’ I’m Free crossed over. Top five around Europe and top 40 in the US, it put them right in the heart of the era’s madness.
Dickson fell ever deeper in love with club music, and in the mid-90s ended up living in New York’s Lower East Side. “Pre-Giuliani’s clean-up, still really rough. We’d see limos queueing round our block, buying cocaine for Wall Street guys.” He immersed himself in the club scene: “the Limelight with the club kids and [notorious promoter and later murderer] Michael Alig, a slide down from the balcony, complete debauchery... I hung out with loads of drag queens, which was always a good way to get into clubs. I loved the energy of the gay scene, but I wasn’t even gay... then.”
In fact Dickson was married with a daughter – but through the late 90s, as he toured with his more electronic band the High Fidelity, he felt more and more unhappy, until finally he admitted to himself he was gay. In 2001 he came out, left his family, and went into a downwards spiral. “I was consumed with guilt because I’d hurt people I loved,” he says. “I cut friends off because I assumed everyone blamed me. I stopped doing music. For two years I lived in a fire-damaged council flat, not fixing anything up... then eventually I had a breakdown.”
He was sectioned for a week, somehow forlornly clinging to hope by singing Yazz’s The Only Way Is Up to himself over and over. DJing was his only remaining comfort, and for the next few years it was all he did: he got a council flat exchange and moved to London, and started playing after-hours parties on the gay scene. “I love playing at 8am,” he says, “because you can really play with people’s heads. I was partying all night too, at first, but after a while I saw the damage it did to people, and started getting a good night’s sleep before going out to DJ – and found that I still enjoyed it just as much. I just lived in that world, away from everything else, and that was me for years.”
Slowly Dickson regained confidence, made new friends and reconnected with old ones, and met his now husband. Once he’d broken through the initial fear of producing new music, he approached the Hifi Sean project with a “why the fuck not?” attitude, putting out calls to ask his heroes to be on it. And they said yes: not just friends like Norman Blake, Bootsy Collins and David McAlmont, but house legends Paris Grey and Crystal Waters, and the likes of Yoko Ono, Fred Schneider of the B-52’s, and Suicide’s Alan Vega. Poignantly, the album’s finale, A Kiss Before Dying, is the last thing Vega ever recorded: he died the very week that Ft. went into production.
That reminder of mortality has added to a sense of urgency that was already strong once the album got under way. “I’ve had to forgive myself twice,” says Dickson. “Once for the hurt I’d caused people, and then again for the time I’d wasted away from music. I carry a big burden from all of that, but I’ll tell you what: I’m not wasting any more time now.”
Excursions, featuring remixed songs from Ft., is released on limited vinyl for Record Store Day on 22 April
