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Cut To The Quick
- Issue #148 (Jun 96) | Interviews
- By: Rob Young | Featuring: Andrew Weatherall
- Printable version
Once upon a time, Andrew Weatherall was the out-of-control speedfreak of UK club culture. Now following a long cooling off period, he's reinventing himself with Two Lone Swordsmen as a purveyor of primal underground Electronica. Interview by Rob Young
Wev's Gaff: not what you'd expect, perhaps. People asked me when I returned from this assignment whether I'd seen any number of bizarre decorations, posters, bits of anatomy: all I saw was comfortable sofas, nice urban-pastoral paintwork, Ikea rocking-chair, a Carry On film poster...
And the records, of course. You could say Andrew Weatherall wouldn't be where he is now without those plastic roundels. There they all are, still unsorted after a recent move, racked on specially built shelving, stashed in a hallway-full of DJ boxes, and no doubt in other locations throughout the house as well. And in the middle of them all, coping with the various intrusions of our photographer and his assistant, is Weatherall himself: abdicated Lord of the Sabres Of Paradise in self-imposed exile; now cut loose from those duties, rogue and independent, as one of the Two Lone Swordsmen.
Weatherall, it seems, is - in the common parlance - "sorting himself out". His life and career have travelled an unusual ecliptic since exploding into the pop world in 1989 with his production of Primal Scream's "Loaded" and the group's subsequent 1990 LP Screamadelica. The record was hailed, in one of those banal pop-media superlatives, as 'one of the great albums of the 90s'. More crucially, it was one of the key moments in the rapprochement of the (once mutually exclusive) worlds of indie pop and club culture - and the fallout from that collision is all around us still.
A hard act to follow, then, and although now Weatherall reckons his contribution to the sessions was a small part of a supreme collective effort ("It was just random elements coming together," he says, "and I was just one of them that came in, sort of...bumping into doors"), Primal Scream sans Weatherall significantly went on to sink in a self-created mire of faded rock 'n' roll posture, providing the sleazed-out model for the current star-struck Faustian Pact signatories of Britpop.
"I'm a classic underachiever," Weatherall says brightly, reviewing his career to date. "It's like the old Peter Cook adage: someone asked him, 'What's it like not to have fulfilled your potential?' to which he replied, 'Thank fuck for that!'"
And the records, of course. You could say Andrew Weatherall wouldn't be where he is now without those plastic roundels. There they all are, still unsorted after a recent move, racked on specially built shelving, stashed in a hallway-full of DJ boxes, and no doubt in other locations throughout the house as well. And in the middle of them all, coping with the various intrusions of our photographer and his assistant, is Weatherall himself: abdicated Lord of the Sabres Of Paradise in self-imposed exile; now cut loose from those duties, rogue and independent, as one of the Two Lone Swordsmen.
Weatherall, it seems, is - in the common parlance - "sorting himself out". His life and career have travelled an unusual ecliptic since exploding into the pop world in 1989 with his production of Primal Scream's "Loaded" and the group's subsequent 1990 LP Screamadelica. The record was hailed, in one of those banal pop-media superlatives, as 'one of the great albums of the 90s'. More crucially, it was one of the key moments in the rapprochement of the (once mutually exclusive) worlds of indie pop and club culture - and the fallout from that collision is all around us still.
A hard act to follow, then, and although now Weatherall reckons his contribution to the sessions was a small part of a supreme collective effort ("It was just random elements coming together," he says, "and I was just one of them that came in, sort of...bumping into doors"), Primal Scream sans Weatherall significantly went on to sink in a self-created mire of faded rock 'n' roll posture, providing the sleazed-out model for the current star-struck Faustian Pact signatories of Britpop.
"I'm a classic underachiever," Weatherall says brightly, reviewing his career to date. "It's like the old Peter Cook adage: someone asked him, 'What's it like not to have fulfilled your potential?' to which he replied, 'Thank fuck for that!'"
Posted 27/03/07
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