RIP To The Chairman

I’ve felt numb since I heard that Andrew Weatherhall has died. It’s difficult to overstate the profound affect he had on me, and the people around me, in the early 90s. His music and attitude gave him an almost godlike aura at the time – he’d be horrified if he’d heard anyone say that, but he unquestionably changed our lives.

The first time you heard Loaded you knew there was something special going on, and the Bocca Juniors and those two almost perfect Sabres of Paradise albums and the never ending deep, deep remixes, like Soon and Only Love Can Break Your Heart; they all helped to cement his place as the absolute guv’nor. An unimpeachable presence in the musical universe who only ever did what came naturally, there was never anything forced or contrived in his work. Going to see him DJ was always a total experience. You never knew exactly what you were going to get but you knew it would, at the very least, be amazing.

In the late 90s I started working at a label called Fuel whose offices also housed some studios, one of which was occupied by Weatherall and his then-engineer and 2LS partner Keith Tenniswood. My office faced their studio, and if I was lucky, which happily I was a lot of the time, they’d leave the door open and I could hear them conjuring Two Lone Swordsmen sorcery as a fug of the most incredibly potent skunk wafted out of the room. Often Andrew would come to the studio after a record shopping spree and we’d have the absolute privilege of hearing him having a bit of a tear-up on the decks.

All this was mainly around the time of A Virus With Shoes and Tiny Reminders, (although the vagaries of the Fuel operation meant we left the studios before they’d finished Tiny Reminders). Both those albums, naturally, have great memories attached… memories I’ll treasure even more now. As time went on, after the Fuel days, I saw him every now and then knocking about in radio stations, clubs and festivals and he always said hello and spent a minute asking what I was up to. He was a genuinely nice man who had time for people.

His influence on me musically, the stuff I like and listen to but also the stuff I made dossing about with mates in bedroom studios, was so much greater than anyone else. The gargantuan breadth of  music he wanted to share with everyone was pretty much without equal. All the brilliant little secret bands he was in like Rude Solo, Blood Sugar, Klart and the like and stuff like Asphodells and Woodleigh Research Facility were all so different but almost without exception brilliant to the last.

He really was one of the best DJs you could hope to hear, whether he was playing techo, rockabilly, dub, electro or some crazy-ass lo-fi underground thing from 1978 that only five people knew about, it was gonna be good,  it was gonna make you want to hear more and to search out new things. He gleefully opened doors for anyone who was interested. Even just this weekend I was catching up on one of his NTS radio shows I’d missed and have yet another extensive list of music that I need to buy all because of him.

My Twitter and Facebook feeds are both rammed full of laments to Weatherall’s passing right now, which is testament to the massive impact he had – there really was no one else like him, he was a huge cultural force and you can’t say that about many people…

Rest in Peace Mr Weatherall, you will be sorely missed.

This Might Be It – Giant Drag at the Deaf Institute January 30 2020

It’s been almost seven years since Giant Drag toured the UK in support of long-delayed second album Waking Up Is Hard to Do. And by Giant Drag, I really mean Annie Hardy, sole constant member and the singular force that gives Giant Drag their mercurial essence.  In the intervening years, Annie has endured the loss of a child and a partner and released an astonishing solo album that was as fiercely defiant as it was despondently heartbroken.

Now back under the Giant Drag moniker with new member Colin Deatherage taking Micah Calabrese’s dual drum and bass berth, it’s obvious that a reinvigoration and renewal has taken place. Feted almost as much for her between song badinage as for the music, tonight the Deaf Institute is treated to a mischievous stream of consciousness that takes in angels, porn, near-death slow-motion tour van high-jinks, loser boyfriends, psychic projection, Greggs crispy, flaky crust goodness, weird English names (Harry Piles!) feminism, celebrity fanny flashing and more besides, all keeping an enraptured audience thoroughly amused.

But it is the music we are here for, and we are not disappointed. The set weaves through the band’s entire catalogue starting with a stripped back Stuff to Live For that shows, despite her prodigious love for cigarettes, she still has the kind of voice that can make you weep, infused with raw soul and emotion. Perhaps she can’t hit those high notes with the clarity of old, but the roughness adds a mesmerising depth. Loser boyfriends and drug songs (Garbage Heart and Smashing) bring us to the first of three new songs, Devi Inside. Returning to the loser boyfriend motif that peppers her work, Devil Inside is all chiming riffs and heavy switch-ups that illustrate a songwriter clearly back in her best form.  Old favourite This Isn’t It leads into an acoustic solo section that is briefly held up as Hardy has forgotten her acoustic guitar. A ramble about blood types and Instagram stalkers introduces I Was Right (Funeral Song) followed by a paean to water and a musical four-way that mashes up Springsteen, John Denver, Giant Drag and, especially for tonight, a touch of Morrisey.

With Deatherage back on stage they launch into Swan Song, and it’s our privilege to witness Annie truly lost in her own music. Her guitar playing; teasing fragile melodies, big chiming hooks, rawk shredding and beautifully constructed progressions that could only be her, is truly spellbinding and should be given much more praise. But when your wit’s as razor sharp as Hardy’s the six string will always take second place.

Two more new songs apparently received from the eleventh dimension follow. Lately sounds as if it’s been in the set forever and self-proclaimed favourite Battle Cry is quintessential Giant Drag, all racing, giddy riffs and heady vocals. A circuitous story of Annie as a precocious eight-year-old having a song stolen by a boyfriend twenty-years her senior introduces their always sublime cover of Wicked Game before the band bring the show to a close with their defining hit from 2005, Kevin Is Gay.

Giant Drag, and especially Hardy, have never really had it easy but based on tonight’s form it feels like that could be about to change and all the years of promise are finally going to pay off.

Photo of Annie Hardy stolen from twitter user @plutoRevenger because I was so transfixed I only took one picture and it was blurry