Andrew Weatherall R.I.P: ‘Loaded’ and the birth of Indie Dance
The cultural legacy of the pioneering DJ and producer discussed, along with some personal reflections by a long-time fan.
The death of an artist is a weird thing. It doesn’t bear comparison to the death of a loved one, with its monstrous sense of the irreconcilable. And yet, when what an artist does becomes so bound up with our own lives — such as creating the soundtracks to our best (and worst) times — there is an uncanny feeling of loss when they pass on.
I didn’t know Andrew Weatherall personally; he could have been a nice guy or an a**hole, I have no idea (tributes from his peers would suggest the former, thankfully). But I was shocked and saddened to hear the news of his death on 17th February 2020, aged 56, from a pulmonary embolism. It was a sensation not unlike vertigo. It dawned on me that I had followed his work quite literally since first getting into Dance Music as a teenager in the early 1990s. Regardless of how my tastes changed in the years that followed, and regardless of whether I was a casual music fan or DJ, Weatherall seemed to be a constant presence. It is hard to remember a year when he didn’t release at least one or two things to get excited about, be it an original work or remix, under his own name, or as part of Sabres of Paradise and Two Lone Swordsmen. It is strange to think that all this has come to an end.
My introduction to Weatherall’s work — like many people of a similar age — was through Primal Scream’s ‘Loaded’, a huge UK chart hit in 1990. This was not just the biggest commercial success of his career, but the track that will undoubtedly come to define his cultural legacy. Technically speaking, ‘Loaded’ was Weatherall’s remix of one of Primal Scream’s earlier songs, ‘I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have’. However, he succeeded in crafting something so entirely new out of it that the band chose to release it as a standalone work in its own right. It captured the zeitgeist of the time perfectly. The late 1980s and early 1990s had seen a rehabilitation of 1960s counter culture, possibly as a rejection of the more corrupt kind of decadence that had characterised the two decades in between. Iconic 1960s Rock artists such as Jimi Hendrix and The Doors were more popular than at any time since they were originally active, while the Hippy ideals of peace and unity found new expression in the Acid House and early Rave scenes. Primal Scream’s original track was an unabashed pastiche of late 1960’s-era Rolling Stones, though it failed to evoke much more beyond that. Weatherall took the bassline from the coda of the song and mashed it together with breakbeats and samples galore, including a soul diva vocal hook from The Emotions’ ‘I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love’, and the now-iconic “we wanna be free” speech by Peter Fonda in the cult biker film, ‘The Wild Angels’. The cut-and-paste aesthetic, meandering structure and use of disorientating FX drew from production techniques pioneered in Hip Hop, Disco, Dub Reggae and, of course, Acid House, the movement he was most closely identified with at the time. It was both retro and cutting edge, unplaceable and everything at once.
With ‘Loaded’, Weatherall had not just crafted a pop song unlike anything else in the charts but also effectively birthed the genre of Indie Dance. Of course, Dance Music and Rock had overlapped before, going back to the late 1970s with the Funk-Punk of Liquid Liquid and ESG, and in the Disco experiments of The Clash, one of Weatherall’s favourite bands. In the late 1980s, a whole host of Manchester Indie bands, such as New Order, The Stone Roses, The Fall and The Happy Mondays, had experimented with the rhythms, sounds and production techniques of Dance Music. But it was Weatherall’s sensibilities as a DJ that brought all of these to the fore on ‘Loaded’, creating the first true hybrid of Dance Music and Indie, in form as well as content.
Its effect was huge. Primal Scream would go on to incorporate remixing as part of the composition process itself with their classic album ‘Screamadelica’ in 1991, which included ‘Loaded’ and further contributions from Weatherall. Drum loops and dancefloor-friendly basslines became integral parts of the early 1990s Indie sound like never before. The DJ remix was suddenly the vogue thing to have on any E.P. Weatherall’s other remixes from around that time, such as ‘Soon’ by My Bloody Valentine and ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ by St Etienne, remain classics of the Indie Dance fusion.
But if Indie would rediscover the traditional rock band format with Britpop in the mid-1990s, then the psychedelic cut n’ paste spirit of ‘Loaded’ would continue in the genre of Big Beat. Artists from this scene such as The Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim would themselves go on to popularise Dance Music even further in the late 1990s, taking it from the clubs and into the music festivals. With this growing mainstreaming of Dance Music, so the new millennium saw another generation of Indie bands straddling the divide once more, such as The Rapture, Death from Above and LCD Soundsystem. At the same time, the emerging genre of Nu-Disco saw electronic artists paying homage to the sounds of Acid House and Balearic that had informed Weatherall when he made ‘Loaded’, with the likes of Tensnake even directly referencing the tropes of early-1990s Indie Dance. Continuing through to the present day, and the blurring of lines between Dance and Indie, not to mention Underground and Pop, is now commonplace. Music genres and subcultures are now more porous than ever. And ‘Loaded’ was a flashpoint for all of this.
After the Indie Dance zeitgeist, Weatherall would go on to explore more Electronica- and Dub-influenced sounds throughout the rest of the 1990s, most notably in the collaborative projects Sabres of Paradise and Two Lone Swordsmen (both with Keith Tenniswood a.k.a Radioactive Man), and their era-defining releases on the legendary Warp label. Outside of his production and remix work, he continued to be an in-demand and widely respected DJ. I was fortunate enough to see him play at Orbit, the legendary Techno night in Leeds, UK, in the early 2000s, where his set was reliably eclectic, yet as relentless as the occasion demanded. His productions in the new millennium, both solo and with Two Lone Swordsmen, had settled on a Dark Disco sound that drew on Post-Punk and EBM. If the sonic palette of his post-Millennium sound was narrower (relatively speaking) than his 1990s work, then its increased focus also ensured his work was consistent in both output and quality throughout this latter period. And it was this that kept Weatherall’s pioneering and prolific career part of my own musical journey, three decades after ‘Loaded’.
R.I.P.
