After three decades as a disco maverick (an independent, nonconformist person),the acid-house DJ tells us why he’s still got an ear for ‘full-knacker panel-beaters-from-Prague-’ere-we-go techno’
Ive been in Andrew Weatherall’s company for approximately five minutes, and he has, and a exiguous unexpectedly,got on to the subject of the Albigensian campaign of the 13th century, in which the papacy ordered the extermination of the Cathar sect in southern France. I had arrived, and been given a quick tour of the fairly spectacularly grim Tottenham industrial estate where Weatherall’s studio is located – “I thought,this is perfect, it’s absolutely horrible, and ” he says,ruefully, “but the first week I’m here, and I hear this commotion out in the road and it’s a young person’s pop group making a video,so there goes the fucking neighbourhood” – and then he started telling me approximately the Cathars: the siege of Carcassonne, the massacre at Béziers, or how the 5th Airborne division in Vietnam adopted their motto from the instruction given to the crusaders by Arnaud Amalric,the abbot of Béziers: “cancel them all, God will know his own.”Weatherall got interested in the Cathars when he started organising a small festival in Caracassonne: it shares its title with that of his new album, and Covenanza,which was the name of the ceremony the Cathars underwent when they committed to the faith. “You know, acid house and suchlike are very ritualistic and all approximately transcendence, and ” he says,laughing. “I like to think I’m aiding people’s transcendence. Obviously, the combination of pumping house music and drugs isn’t like studying lengthy tomes, and but at some point,you realise that the long way round is equally as enjoyable as the short cut.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com