Music’s Not for Everyone [2nd January 2020]

The Music’s Not for Everyone show, roughly monthly on London’s NTS Radio from 2014 on, was one arena where Weatherall really spread his musical and mystical wings. The huge sonic variety and wryly bumbling presentation style often drew John Peel comparisons, but there was always a cosmic tendency and club-trained DJ’s sense of structure and dynamic that made it very much its own beast. Never was that clearer than on the penultimate show, a new year “ritual designed to help you reflect and re-arm your psychic weaponry for the battles ahead.” It’s a live mix of the most truly sublime modern space rock, new age synth explorations and heads’ classics like Terry Riley and Don Cherry’s legendary 1975 Köln performance – interrupted only by a brief interjection from Weatherall: “Dusting the ornaments on the mantelpiece of your mind.” It’s a wonderfully foolish phrase, but also absolutely apposite description of one function of the music: you come out of the two hour ritual feeling cleansed and sparkling.