Andrew Weatherall
Musician, club DJ and producer famous for his remixes of tracks during the 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. He continued to fuse dance and rock music on Primal Scream’s LP Screamadelica, which in 1991 won the inaugural Mercury Music Prize.
Weatherall was an idiosyncratic figure, an intellectual and autodidact fuelled by a voracious intake, first of drugs, latterly of literature.
He regarded his work as a kind of hobby. He also made art, and cultivated a dandyish style of dress and hair which he described as “Edwardian road-mender”. After his early successes, Weatherall eschewed a conventional career, content to be an underground rather than mainstream presence.
He became involved in the proto-acid house scene – a term he hated – in the mid-1980s, after his eclectic record collection came to the attention of Danny Rampling, who invited him to DJ at his club “Shoom”. As Ibiza-influenced rave culture took off, Weatherall helped to start a fanzine, Boy’s Own. Then in 1989 he was asked to work with Paul Oakenfold on the club remix of Hallelujah.
He remixed New Order’s 1990 World Cup song World in Motion, making up for his lack of production experience with his knowledge of beats and samples.
The apogee of this was Loaded, only seven seconds of the original of which Weatherall retained, with Primal Scream’s blessing. The rest was Weatherall’s collage of sound. Much of Screamadelica was put together by him in the same fashion, turning a rock band into a dance act.
Andrew James Weatherall was born in Windsor on April 6 1963. His father was in business – but by the age of 12 he had tired of suburbia. Early 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 in the sixth form and soon after from the family home.
Failing to get into art college, he took a job as a furniture porter. He made trips to London, where he bought outré clothes which he tried to resell in Berkshire. Stints followed collecting laundry from hotels and cutting the grass at Windsor Safari Park.
Weatherall also 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 played as his opening track the theme to the film 633 Squadron. “People were running around the dance floor with their arms outstretched, doing airplane impressions,” he recalled. “The smoke parted and I saw the manager coming towards me. He just said: ‘F--- off ’.”
In the early 1990s, Weatherall’s 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, worked with Bjork, and continued to DJ, giving the Chemical Brothers their first booking.
He had had a band when young and in the mid-1990s began to make electronic music as the Sabres of Paradise, though once the group began to attract attention, he moved on to other incarnations, including Two Lone Swordsmen and the Asphodells. His first solo release, in 2006, was The Bullet Catcher’s Apprentice.
Based for many years in Shoreditch, Weatherall latterly moved his studio to a “reassuringly feral” industrial estate in Tottenham. There, he took inspiration from his library of 10,000 records, read the Guardian, but “balanced” it with the Telegraph: “I enjoy the cryptic crossword.”
He is survived by his partner, Lizzie Walker.