Uncompromising producer and DJ shunned fame for respect of his peers

Andrew Weatherall, who has died of a pulmonary embolism aged 56, once described his work as a producer, DJ and remixer as a ‘‘series of beautiful, totally futile gestures’’. Music-making was not a career, he insisted, but a ‘‘hobby’’ that he pursued as the 21st-century equivalent of an amateur Victorian gentleman.

Despite such self-deprecation, Weatherall helped to change the face of modern music with his cutting-edge work for groups such as Happy Mondays, New Order and Primal Scream. His mastery of acid house, techno, electronic dance and trip-hop styles earned him the nickname ‘‘the

Guv’nor’’. Yet he was anything but a dilettante, often putting in a

12-hour day in the studio, then driving to a club

100 miles away to deliver an all-night DJ set.

His production on Primal Scream’s 1991 album Screamadelica, with its mix of indie rock and dance music, made him one of the most in-demand producers of the age. Idiosyncratic and uncompromising, he took the basic tracks recorded by the group and deconstructed them at the mixing desk, adding new elements and desecrating existing ones.

The result was as much Weatherall’s creation as the band’s. ‘‘Looking back, my arrogance makes me wince, but I would never have had the confidence to do it if I didn’t have that kind of attitude,’’ he said.

The album kick-started the band’s career and won the first Mercury prize in 1992. ‘‘I could have cleaned up after Screamadelica,’’ Weatherall surmised. He might have gone on to produce U2 or the Rolling Stones, but the prospect of fighting with record labels and bands over creative control looked ‘‘tiresome and vexing and like it might involve me having meetings with people I don’t want to have meetings with’’.

Instead, he opted for a diverse array of collaborative projects of his own, released under names such as the Sabres of Paradise, Two Lone Swordsmen and the Asphodells. Artists who asked him to produce or remix their work were vetted rigorously. Beth Orton, Paul Weller, Moby and Manic Street Preachers were accepted; many were rejected.

He took a similarly singular approach to Djing. He was in at the launch of acid house and could have become a superstar DJ. Yet he despised the commercialisation of what began as an underground scene. ‘‘I thought, ‘DJS? Heroes? Are people really that desperate?’ ’’

Fearing being painted into a corner, ‘‘listening to very clever computer programming and not much else’’, he again turned his back on the mainstream, leaving the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim to enjoy chart success in a style that he had pioneered. ‘‘It’s a lot of work, once you go up that slippery showbiz pole,’’ he said, ‘‘and it would keep me away from what I like.’’

Andrew James Weatherall was born in Windsor, the son of a businessman. At an early age he identified music as his escape from ‘‘a very nice but dull middle-class upbringing’’.

He started with the glam rock of T.rex and had just hit his teens when punk exploded. His parents banned him from listening to the Sex Pistols, so the band’s records were ‘‘smuggled in and hidden under the bed’’.

He began singing in a local post-punk band, sporting ‘‘a bleached Hitler Youth hairdo’’ and devouring not only music, but also literature and film. A voracious autodidact all his life, he would litter interviews with references to William Burroughs, Franz Kafka and the essays of Francis Bacon. ‘‘I’m quite proud of the fact that I made the first disco record to mention Hans Fallada and Robert Walser,’’ he once boasted.

By the mid-1980s he had started Djing. ‘‘I just got a really good record collection together, to the point where people started to say, ‘Why don’t you play this at our party?’ ’’ When acid house erupted he was ‘‘in the right place at the right time’’. Performing in clubs and at warehouse parties and illegal all-night raves, he embraced the culture enthusiastically, including its drug of choice, Ecstasy. ‘‘[The era] was like having a holiday,’’ he enthused. ‘‘I’d been in the dark post-punk world of shadows and neon in the rain. And suddenly I’ve been given this drug that makes me love everybody.’’

Weatherall, who is survived by his partner, Elizabeth Walker, continued to run club nights and an independent record label, preferring the respect of his peers to the acclaim of the masses. He also documented rave culture with the fanzine Boy’s Own and sometimes wrote as Audrey Witherspoon.

He would tell how his first studio work came in 1988 when he assisted Paul Oakenfold with remixing Hallelujah for the Happy Mondays. ‘‘I was really scared. I’d never been in a recording studio before and didn’t know how the machines worked.’’

However, he was destined to spend much of his life in a studio. ‘‘I don’t ever start a project as such,’’ he said. ‘‘I just make music every day and see what happens.’’ – The Times