Andrew Weatherall
Musician, club DJ and producer famous for his remixes of tracks during the 1980s acid house era
ANDREW Weatherall, who has died of a pulmonary embolism aged 56, was a musician, club DJ and producer most widely known for his remixes of tracks at the end of the acid house era of the late 1980s.
These included the Happy Mondays’ Hallelujah and Loaded by Primal Scream. Weatherall continued to fuse dance and rock music on Primal Scream’s LP Screamadelica, which he oversaw and which in 1991 won the inaugural Mercury Music Prize.
Weatherall was a determinedly idiosyncratic figure in British music, an intellectual and autodidact fuelled by a voracious intake, first, of drugs (“I used to be quite an enthusiastic lysergic adventurer”) and, latterly, of literature. This ranged from the poetry of John Betjeman to histories of the Albigensian heresy.
Though no dilettante, he preferred to regard his work as a kind of a hobby, thereby retaining his enthusiasm and creative energy. He also made art, and cultivated a dandyish style of dress and hair which he described as “Edwardian road mender”, modelled in part after Augustus John, of whom he kept a photograph in his wallet. His array of tattoos included one which preserved the words to him of an Irish trawler captain: “Fail we may, sail we must.”
After his early successes, he eschewed a conventional career in the business, content to be an underground rather than mainstream presence even as his contemporaries brought electronic dance to a mass audience.
As Ibiza-influenced rave culture began to take off, Weatherall helped start a fanzine, Boy’s Own. Then in 1989, he was asked to work with Paul Oakenfold on the club remix of Hallelujah, arguably the definitive tune of the ‘Madchester’ sound.
He also remixed New Order’s 1990 World Cup song World in Motion, making up for his lack of production experience — “the confidence of ignorance”, he reflected, in the words of Orson Welles — with his dance floor-derived knowledge of beats and samples.
Andrew James Weatherall was born in Windsor on April 6, 1963. “I didn’t have a bad upbringing,” he said later — his father was in business — but by the age of 12 he had tired of suburbia.
Early rebellious influences included the David Essex film That’ll Be the Day and glam rockers such as T-Rex. He was expelled from Windsor Grammar School while in the sixth form and soon after from the family home. Having failed to win a place at art college, he was forced to take a job as a furniture porter. Stints followed collecting laundry from London hotels and cutting the grass at Windsor Safari Park.
Inspired by producers such as Brian Eno and Martin Hannett (who worked with Joy Division), Weatherall began to collect records. These were paid for in part by what he called “pharmaceutical distribution”, until the police almost felt his collar.
Offered his first gig as a DJ, he decided to make his mark by playing as his opening track the stirring theme to the film 633 Squadron. “People were running around the dancefloor with their arms outstretched, doing airplane impressions,” he recalled. “The smoke parted and I saw the manager coming towards me. He just said: ‘F**k off ’.”
In the early 1990s, Weatherall’s highly distinctive remixes included tracks such as Saint Etienne’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart and Soon by My Bloody Valentine. He produced three songs on Beth Orton’s debut LP.
Andrew Weatherall, who died on February 17, is survived by his long-term partner, Lizzie Walker.