Andrew Weatherall interview: ‘If I’d carried on, I’d be on life support’

On the eve of a new solo album, DJ and acid house pioneer Andrew Weatherall reflects on his heady career with Fiona Sturges

Until recently Andrew Weatherall was based in Shoreditch, where he’d been for 20 years, but then the hipsters arrived (Charlie Forgham Bailey)

I’ve arranged to meet the musician, DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall at his studio in an industrial estate in north London.

Until recently he was based in Shoreditch, where he’d been for 20 years, but then the hipsters arrived, bringing with them waxed moustaches and massive rent hikes.

So, Weatherall has moved to Seven Sisters, a place that is a considerably cheaper and, he says, “reassuringly feral”.

But as I walk towards his studio, I find part of the road closed off while a group of pale-faced young rockers shoot a music video. I phone Weatherall who comes out to find me. “Unbelievable,” he says, surveying the scene. “I thought I’d left all this behind.”

At the studio a few minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. It’s a property developer who has been sent over by the landlord for a valuation. Weatherall rolls his eyes. He isn’t, it’s fair to say, a big fan of gentrification. “On the other hand,” he says archly, “you can pick up a very lovely artisan sausage.”

This desire to keep his distance from all that is fashionable, to remain on the outside looking in, has informed Weatherall’s career for 30 years (he’s 53).

He came to fame as one of the key DJs of the acid house era in the late Eighties and early Nineties, while providing remixes and production for the likes of New Order, Beth Orton, Happy Mondays and Primal Scream; his input on 1991’s Screamadelica turned it into the defining album of the era.

Since then, he has never stopped making music. He DJs around Europe three weekends out of four – he’s currently booked up until September – and, when the mood takes him, he produces the odd album.

He worked on Fuck Buttons’ Tarot Sport and, more recently, The Twilight Sad’s No One Can Ever Know, though he refused to take payment on the latter since his contribution consisted of instructing them to just carry on doing what they were doing.

(Charlie Forgham Bailey)

This year is already shaping up to be one of his most fertile: hot on the heels of an album by Woodleigh Research Facility, his collaboration with the singer and electronic artist Nina Walsh, next week he releases Covenanza, a charmingly idiosyncratic collection of woozy electronica and post-punk.

It’s technically his second solo LP though whether an album goes out under his own name or another depends on who he’s working with and, he says, which way the wind is blowing (along with Woodleigh Research Facility, there have been LPs in the guise of outfits Sabres of Paradise, Two Lone Swordsmen and The Asphodells).

“I don’t start a project as such, I just make music every day and see what happens. I’m usually three-quarters of the way through an album when I officially start making it.”

Following his rave-era glory days, it’s interesting that Weatherall never attained the “superstar DJ” status of, say, Fatboy Slim or Calvin Harris; that, he says, is entirely by design.

“That sort of carry-on was never for me,” he reflects. “It’s a lot of work, once you go up that slippery showbiz pole, and it would keep me away from what I like which is making things. I mean, I had a little look in the early Nineties. I stood at the bottom of that pole and looked up and thought to myself ‘The view’s pretty good. But it’s very greasy and there are a lot of bottoms up there that I might have to brush my lips against. So, maybe I’ll give it a miss’.”

This professional reticence has extended to meeting his heroes. He was once invited to meet Brian Eno, but he couldn’t face it. “When I listen to Here Come The Warm Jets, it still sounds like it’s come from the future,” he explains.

“I wanted it to stay part of that mysterious world. I don’t want to remember a stilted dinner that I had round Brian’s house.”

Weatherall has described himself as an amateur musician, though he wonders now if “enthusiast” is a better description. “You know how Victorian gentlemen would have a passion outside of their trade? This is like a hobby, but also a job.

I’ve found a job I like and I’ve found a level that I like. I’m a big fan of Eddie Marsan, the actor. He just gets on with it. There’s no bollocks. He’s not flashy. I like that.”

Weatherall may have avoided the showbiz end of the business but that didn’t preclude him from enjoying the chemical benefits.

Yet nowadays, aside from his beloved weed, he’s mostly given up the drugs: “It’s not too dramatic to say that if I’d carried on at that level and gone into the upper echelons, there’s every chance that I’d now be in a haze of morphine in a private Swiss clinic being kept alive by a machine.”

Along with his own albums, Weatherall still does a lot of remixes – he and his manager pick and choose from the requests that appear in his inbox.

That work comes in, unbidden, still seems to be a source of surprise, a throwback to his late teens when he began playing records at clubs and assumed the work would soon dry up (his day job at the time was moving Chesterfield sofas up flights of stairs).

Just before “Loaded”, the first single from Screamadelica, came out, Weatherall was still applying for jobs on the business side of the industry, and visited London records about an A&R position with a test pressing under his arm. On hearing it, his interviewer said there was no point pursuing the job as the record was going to be massive.

He puts much of his professional longevity down to the fact that people will always want to go out and dance. He was reading a history of psychedelics recently, which described a Greek ritual from 2000BC that involved a square room, coloured lights, smoke and music.

“You know, I love Silbury Hill, in Wiltshire,” Weatherall reflects. “There’s a theory that because it was chalk and had a moat around it, people would congregate for these night-time events.

"They would put flames around it, and it would reflect on the water, so there would be a light show and smoke. Essentially, nothing’s changed and it never will.

"The basic need for transcendence is part of the human condition, and has been for thousands of years.” He grins broadly. “If I can help people get there, then all the better.”

‘Covenanza’ is out 26 Feb on Rotter’s Golf Club