Happy Ending, the new album from “Hifi Sean” Dixon and David McAlmont is going to be a strong contender in best of 2023 lists.

It’s an absolutely gorgeous creation from start to end: a heady brew of Pet Shop Boys/New Order electropop, torch songs, lavish strings, house music, trip hop and more – with McAlmont’s voice channelling a uniquely British soul sound with echoes of the Terence Trent D’Arby and Omar, but at the same time leaning into the high drama of Bowie and Marc Almond.

It’s packed with extremely potent levels of both heartbreak and optimism – it’s pop music through and through, but with a palpable depth of lived experience that could only come from two men in their 50s.

Here’s the thing: the word “storied” has become a commonplace in music criticism lately, but Dixon and McAlmont each really give meaning to the term.

Both have had lives and careers so complex as to completely confound traditional narrative ideas of success, failure, redemption, comebacks and so on, but all of this has fed into the very human complexity of Happy Ending.

And there is something about who they are and the areas of music they operate in that have combined to give them the lasting creative skills and opportunities to express all this.

McAlmont has been omnipresent on the British music scene since the early 1990s. Born of Nigerian and Guyanan parents, he’s consistently upended ideas of a what a Black artiste “should” be.

An out and proud gay man blurring the boundaries between soul, indie and theatrical and filmic music, hugely literate and articulate but with a love of pop directness, his songs floated through a zone between Morrissey, Curtis Mayfield, Portishead and Shirley Bassey, causing no end of headaches for a music industry that wanted artistes easily bracketed and Black artistes trebly so.

Nonetheless, he wove his way into not just the music world but the wider arts establishment.

He’s worked with Paul Weller and Suede’s Bernard Butler, with composers David Arnold and Michael Nyman, and built a parallel career as an art and architecture historian: he’s currently responsible for a glorious meditation on beauty standards in Hampton Court, the former palace of King Henry VIII.

He’s renowned, too, as an essayist, both in formal publications and simply on his own social media channels.

Dixon, meanwhile, grew up on the outskirts of Glasgow, and was part of a wave of psychedelia-obsessed DIY indie pop that would birth influential bands like The BMX Bandits, Teenage Fanclub and his own band The Soup Dragons.

The latter got steadily more successful until a collision with the acid house wave saw them become emblematic of the “indie dance” explosion circa 1990 and touring the world with Deee-Lite (backed up by the P-Funk all stars).

Dixon got drawn more and more into dance culture, moving to New York’s Lower East Side, immersing in the notorious club scene of clubs like The Limelight, and forming a more electronic band The High Fidelity (hence the “Hifi” in his name now).

But all this time he was deeply troubled by his sexuality which he had hidden even from himself – and when he finally admitted he was gay in 2001, he had a breakdown.

A long period of personal and creative rebuilding started, including moving to London and focusing on DJing in the city’s after-hours gay clubs – which led in turn to the Hifi Sean recording alias, which grew into a disco/house-centred project that could encompass collaborations with no lesser names than Yoko Ono, Bootsy Collins, The B52s and many, many more besides.

The work with McAlmont started as just another collaboration among many, but their friendship and creative spark made more work inevitable, eventually leading to Happy Ending.

And somehow the timing seems just right for older artistes existing just on the fringe of the mainstream to make this kind of statement.

The duo’s blending of art-disco and unabashed pop, literary complexity and total directness, seems to fit neatly alongside other artistes in their 40s and 50s like Perfume Genius, Róisín Murphy and John Grant.

Happy Ending is a beautifully double-edged title. In a sense there is a glorious culmination here, in two musicians who’ve never quite fit in finding total confidence in their shared sound, working completely independently and with no need to make excuses for who they are to industry or media.

But these are people and artistes who’ve been through so many ups, downs and trips round the block, they know all too well that nothing is ever as simple as that – hence the endlessly bittersweet power of the album itself.

But in that there’s hope, too: in forging new territory for grown-up misfits, maybe this Happy Ending is also a place for new beginnings too...

All Images: Arber

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Writer | Joe Muggs

Joe Muggs is a writer, DJ and curator of many years standing, covering both mainstream and underground. His book 'Bass, Mids, Tops', covering decades of UK bass music, is out now via Strange Attractor / MIT Press, and you can subscribe to his newsletter at tinyletter.com/joemuggs.