Tuesday, February 18, 2020

RIP Andrew Weatherall

My feeds are convulsed with mourning the like of which has not been seen since Bowie.

56 is way too young.  (In fact, he was only a month or two older than me).

Some tunes from that long Moment of convergence with the zeitgeist Weatherall had at the start of the 90s.












The most famous coordinates for that Moment are these obviously










More tunes from the long moment of indie-dance and baggydelica











After the Moment, Weatherall had a long, productive, varied career, increasingly not remixing or re-producing other people's music, but making his own, with various partners. \

A bit later came another significant intervention - one that was not so much in tune with the zeitgeist (or retro-zeitgeist) as slightly premature and therefore clairvoyant: 


                                   

That came out in 2000 and was thus very early in terms of the postpunk revival. I seem to recall the contents and the title were inspired by memories of the Hacienda in the 1980s - a reference to what time you would drop the acid, i.e. 9 pm, for it to kick with peak effectiveness timed to the peak hour of dancing (that peak occurring quite a bit earlier in those days because most clubs would only be open until 2-AM - this is well before the big loosening up of club hours in the early 90s which allowed for all-night rave-style clubbing.).

1999 was when I first thinking back to postpunk, actually digging out the early Scritti records and things like that - so it's interesting that at our remote distance we were going through the same "back to my roots" reckoning with earlier self syndrome. Well, as I said, we were almost exactly the same age.




3 comments:

Ian_s said...

The 9 O'Clock drop was actually a reference to a ritual Andrew Weatherall, Cymon Eckles & their friend Phil Goss had. On Friday nights, regardless of what they were doing or where they were, they would have to neck a tab. They would then meet up later that night and go out - by the times they got to Heston Services on the drive to London, they would know if the acid was any good.

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

oh right

driving on acid, jeepers

Anonymous said...

Hi, I don't think the One Dove - Fallen Dawn/Dusk were anything to do with him, think they were self produced by OD. Best mixes I think