“It was the trumpet that did it. Nevermind chasing after ethereal angels or earthly skirt . Chase that tune, scour the shacks, pester the sound boy…”
Hitching home for Christmas in (I’d guess) 1994 I snagged a ride, to be quickly taken less by the car than by the music the guy was playing. With little prompting as he drove he keenly elaborated on it. Crossing the South Downs, the car repeatedly climbed from and sunk back into valleys thick with white Winter mist. As whiteness yet again rose to surround us, and with the spectral sounds still playing, he broke off and turned to me. “Actually”, he said, “you died back there, by the roadside, and I’m taking you to Heaven”. It seemed quite convincing at the time.
And that music was ‘Bat out Of Hell’ by Meat Loaf… no, I kid, it was the one up there in the title - ‘Haunted Dancehall’ by Sabres of Paradise. I soon availed myself of my own copy, which I found to be on some new label called Warp. Who knows? Maybe they’ll go on to do other things. I played it to death and would soon propound to anyone that however great Andrew Weatherall’s much-acclaimed production on ’Screamadelica’ was, ’Haunted Dancehall’ was the real deal.
Earlier this week I got home from work to find he had died, despite being barely older than me. I dug the album back out, to find it does a wondrous double thing. It’s hugely evocative of the Nineties, bringing a past world back into being between your ears. And yet it’s not just the memory trigger of a bubblegum pop song, forgettable but fixed to a point in time, it sounds as great as when I first heard it in that mist-sailing car.
Though the album’s instrumental throughout (bar one outbreak of wordless harmonies), one track’s called ‘Ballad of Nicky McGuire’. Though that word has come to signify a slow song, the number cheesy DJs reserve for the end of cheesy evenings, its original meaning was a song with a narrative. And this title combines with the short text excerpts accompanying each track on the sleeve (ostensibly from some larger work which doesn’t actually exist), suggesting this is all part of a broader narrative we’re only getting glimpses of. And if that doesn’t sound a standard thing for dance music to do, we’re just getting started.
For that elliptical sense, of something delivered through hints and suggestions, is as much there in the music. Before House hit, Weatherall had been part of the Post Punk scene. Which had almost universally taken to Dub as a liberating force. And in many ways this is the ‘Metal Box’ of dance music, absorbing what dub did rather than reproducing some of the surface effects. Which, above all, was its sense of space. This wasn’t music which hit you in the chest but passed straight through you, leaving you wondering what had just happened.
Dance music had been all about either venerating or simulating the feeling of being in a club, depending on where you were when you heard it. “Everybody’s in the place, let’s go!” was a typical line. Significantly, with ’Bubble And Slide’ this album starts with someone leaving a club, the pummelling rain mixing with the echoes of beats in his mind. One way to listen to it is as following McGuire’s route home after that club, a psychogeographical journey through the capital’s night-time streets. (Well I did first hear it on a journey.)
The spiritual geezer, the rhyming slang visionary, the character who can have a revelation in a greasy spoon cafe, who was to become such a Nineties figure, perhaps reaches his apogee here. McGuire is as dedicated to his hedonistic lifestyle as a monk is to his chanting. He doesn’t go out to socialise or pull, but to become one with the infinite beat. (“McGuires steps were solid over Battersea Bridge. London bridges at dawn, fuckin’ magic, who needs fuckin’ India or somewhere, no toilet paper and loads of poncey beatnik types.”) And it remains quite a solitary affair. Other characters are alluded to, but the nearest we come to meeting one is a taxi he exits muttering “fascist wanker”.
And this co-existence of the everyday with the spiritual is kept up in the title. On one level, London’s clubs and bars are McGuire’s haunts – in the sense of his hangouts. But it also evokes the way ostensibly everyday places can be suffused with significance. (Imagine for example going back to the street you grew up on, and trying to see it as just a street.)
Some are wont to dismiss dance music as one-note, then go back to listening to Muse with very little sense of irony. Well not here it isn’t. Like the streets of London, there’s little telling what’s coming round the corner. ’Flight Path Estate’ is as spacey as spacey gets, the ’Forbidden Planet’ soundtrack on ganja, while ‘Tow Truck’ is a great lost spy-fi theme tune. But there’s more here than just musical variety.
Much of the enjoyment of rock music comes from the feeling of group cohesiveness, a bunch of people acting as one. I’ve quoted Robert Fripp before: “It has nothing to do with self-expression, it has to do with a group mind.”While much of the enjoyment of electronic music conversely comes from a more literal sense of one-ness. As I said of a Squarepusher gig: “It’s like its finally become possible to go inside someone's head, and finding inside it an infinite space filled with impossibly grand and huge architectural constructs. Like there's no intermediaries between thought and action.” Like taking a fairground ride through someone else’s synapses. From several-into-one to the multifariousness of the singleminded.
These are two quite different paths to take. But incredibly ‘Haunted Dancehall’ can slip from one to the other and back, sometimes within the same track, as if it allows for no such distinction. Though everyone (including me) focuses on Weatherall’s contribution, the Sabres were a trio, also involving Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, which may have allowed them to morph between studio artists and band at will.
I’m old enough to remember the “rock is dead” era, where dance was supposedly set to come along and replace its bloated excess with something more communalising. And of course the dance scene is now stuffed with superstar DJs, often playing the very same arenas as rock stars and for the same amounts of money.
Andrew Weatherall never did that. Restlessly creative, he retained the punk ethos so much more than those who just stuck rigidly to the form, like they’d had one idea their whole lives. His back catalogue is essentially a whole series of side-projects from a day job he always refused to take up. These took unexpected tangents, and ranged from the awesome to the… well, not so awesome. (With some I’m still yet to hear.) Yet he always followed his own inclinations, never tried to create a career for himself. He had the phrase “fail we may, sail we must” tattooed on his arms, the rulebook of rule breaking. He was one of the good guys. He will be missed.
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