Ruled by Passion, Destroyed by Lust

Andrew Weatherall may have been an impossibly prolific and brilliant producer and remixer from the late 80s on, but it took him a while to step out of the shadows and perform on record. He didn’t release under his own name or sing publicly until 2006’s Bullet Catcher’s Apprentice, but it was really this collaborative album with Timothy J. Fairplay when he came into his own. The album is a fantastic, slowly-chugging moodily crypto-Balearic fusion of post-punk, rockabilly, dub, acid house, The Cure, The Fall, New Order, John Betjeman and all sorts of other good things, with Weatherall archly musing on cities, sleaze and ageing in a half-conversational chant. Its centrepiece is a cover of A.R. Kane‘s “A Love From Outer Space” — the song which gave Weatherall and Sean Johnston’s long-running club night (or “gnostic communion”) its name — which perfectly captures the sense of existing in a long lineage of misfits.