HOW high is Sean Dickson today? Pretty high, actually. Some 18 floors above London in fact. He’s at home in his flat in the east of the city talking to me on Zoom.

You join us as he is showing me the view. It’s impressive. I can see the Shard out one window, I tell him.

“And you can see the Olympic stadium as well,” Dickson adds, turning his laptop to give me the full 360 degrees.

This is where he lives these days. Lives and works. It is where he recorded his new album, Happy Ending, a collaboration with the singer David McAlmont, one of the great English voices. Who needs a fancy studio?

Well, Dickson – who these days calls himself Hifi Sean when he’s putting out records or DJing – did in the past. On his 2017 album Excursions, for example, which saw him work with the likes of Yoko Ono, Crystal Waters, his old Bellshill mucker Norman Blake and, for the first time, McAlmont.

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“I never invited him up to my flat to sing because I thought that was a bit cheap,” Dickson recalls. “When I did that album I hired studios to make it look professional, whereas now … I would drag Yoko Ono up here to sing.”

He has settled for McAlmont alone this time around, though “settled” is hardly the appropriate word for the voice that soars and swoops all over Happy Ending, gilding the crisp compilation of beats and blips that Dickson brings to the mix.

Add some Bollywood strings, recorded by an 80-strong orchestra in Bangalore, and the result is a mixture of 21st-century torch songs and dancefloor fillers full of decadence and defiance. Dickson has described it as a “psychedelic electronic soul soundtrack”. He mixed it himself at night in a beach hut in Camber Sands.

“When we set out to make the album, one of the discussions we had was that you can’t deny beauty and you can’t argue with beauty and beauty doesn’t go out of fashion, so let’s just try and make something that is beautiful,” Dickson suggests, offering a decent mission statement for the album.

“To be honest, working with David you can’t really do anything but beautiful.”

You can interpret the album’s title Happy Ending in a number of ways (and no, I didn’t mean that). But one of them might apply to Dickson himself. Because it suggests that, with Excursions and now this new album, Dickson is very firmly back making music again. This is good news. Because there was a time – nearly 15 years in fact – when he didn’t.

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“I remember waking up one day thinking, ‘I haven’t made a record for 14 years. That’s insane. I need to do something about this or I never will.’”

And so he did.

We’ll get to the why of that long gap later, but right now Dickson seems a man at ease with himself and life in general. He’s chatty company, happily chasing down any tangents that occur to him. When I ask him the origin story of the new album it takes him some 10 minutes to answer, but only because he’s wandered off to discuss why it’s easier to describe himself as being from Glasgow when he’s down south, how the sound of bands in their early days are defined by their limitations (he uses The Soup Dragons as his example) and how the song Kiss shows why Prince’s knowledge as a producer influenced his songwriting – “He knew how he was going to present the sound. The vocal was dry. There was no bass. He had it all in his head” – before working his way back to the phone call during which McAlmont and Dickson finally agreed to make an album together having already written a couple of songs.

He takes a breath, smiles. “That’s a very long answer.”

It’s the answer of a man immersed in music, though. He always was.

Mention the word Bellshill to Hifi Sean and he starts talking about Cross Barbers. “That was the epicentre of Bellshill for me. That was a record shop where you got your haircut. The record shop had a staircase to the barbers. My dad said the only way to get me to the barbers was to say, ‘I’ll buy you a record.’”

The first album his father bought him was a Burt Bacharach LP. He can still lovingly describe the cover art. Bacharach – like Prince – is one of the many things he bonded with McAlmont over.

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“David goes, ‘That’s where you get that melancholy from. You seem to write melancholic songs, even though you don’t know you are doing it. Even the euphoric stuff sounds melancholy.’

“We went to see Burt Bacharach a few years ago. It was so funny. There was me, David and my husband Mike, and at the first track we all cried. It was so emotional.”

What he also remembers about Bellshill, he says, circling back to the question, is that everyone he knew seemed to own Never Mind the Bollocks by The Sex Pistols and Saturday Night Fever by The Bee Gees.

“That was always a big thing to me. You can like anything then. From a very young age it was, ‘Yeah, I’m going to like punk music and I’m going to like disco music.’”

You can hear how that played out in the music of The Soup Dragons, an indie guitar band who embraced sampling and dance culture and had a huge hit with I’m Free in 1990, accompanied by Junior Reed and a gospel choir they found in the Yellow Pages. A loose cover of the Rolling Stones classic, it was the sound of that summer. Before it was released, the band were happy to get into the top five of the indie charts. I’m Free would do a little bit better.

“I remember phoning our manager on the Tuesday to get our midweek,” Dickson recalls, “and he said, ‘It’s 28.’ And I thought, ‘Oh great, that’s us finished.’ He went, ‘number 28 in the big charts. You’ve got to do Top of the Pops on Thursday.’

“I remember all of us running around to this bar in Motherwell, just sitting there, looking at each other going, ‘Oh my God, we’re doing Top of the Pops.’

“We went to Top of the Pops on the Wednesday and it was shown on Thursday. I remember doing my usual thing of going into Glasgow on a Saturday with my girlfriend at the time for a wander and I couldn’t go anywhere. There were people following me, there were people coming up with cigarette packets to sign. Literally, in the space of 24 hours, your life just completely changed.”

Success led to tours with the likes of Dee-Lite and even INXS before the band disbanded in 1995. Dickson formed another band, The High Fidelity, but, increasingly in love with dance music, he moved to New York in the late 1990s.

He was married with a daughter by then, but in 2001 he came out. He left his family and then struggled to cope with what he had done, eventually suffering a breakdown. In the circumstances, understandably, making music took a back seat, though he continued to DJ.

He says now that he had lost all his confidence at that point. In his music or in life in general, I ask?

“It was a total life confidence. It wasn’t easy … I was a married man with a child. I kind of had to get out of Glasgow because everybody knew my business.

“At that time I was running a party at the Glasgow Art School. I was still playing music. I just lost the confidence in being that person who’d walk on stage and present music. I was a bit shy about what I had just done to my life. In a way I liked the anonymity of DJing.”

That desire for anonymity went on for a long time. But he was still messing around with making music at home. Eventually he felt confident enough to put it out into the world again.

Happy Ending is just the latest joyous result. “This album has taken me back to being that kid I was at 14, 15,” he says now, “in my bedroom with a portastudio, a synth that I still have and a drum machine, listening to Martin Rushent productions, being in awe of how he made records.

“With this it was just me and David in this room, him singing – lying on the couch sometimes, doing the Marvin Gaye thing – and me sitting at this desk making the music and then me locking myself away on a little cottage down on the beach with my two dogs and mixing it. And it felt like I was back to that person I was all those years ago.”

Endings and beginnings, they’re not so very far apart, really. The story of Sean Dickson’s musical adventure is the story of friendship, whether it was back in Bellshill hanging out with his mates, or sitting in his kitchen with David McAlmont decades later.

“Just two friends hanging out. And look what’s come from it.”

Happy Ending is out now on Dickson’s own Plastique Recordings label. The vinyl version is being co-released with Last Night From Glasgow