Sabres of Paradise’s Haunted Dancehall: Weatherall’s unearthly masterpiece

Plus Gyrofield, The Orb, BADBADNOTGOOD and more

Magranes by Alexandra Sans Massó

When Andrew Weatherall died in February 2020, most obituaries made more of his status as a DJ and remixer than his work as a producer of original music. And in a way this made sense: Weatherall was an inspired proponent of both arts and should be celebrated as such. But it also reflects the fact that Weatherall’s best original music came in groups, rather than as solo work. In fact, Weatherall didn’t use his birth name on an original record until 2006, when The Bullet Catcher’s Apprentice hit the shelves.

While I have a definite place in my deep-house heart for Two Lone Swordsmen, Weatherall’s duo with Keith Tenniswood, and especially the aquatic house of their Swimming Not Skimming EP from 1996, Weatherall’s best original album has to be Haunted Dancehall, the second (and essentially last) album by Sabres of Paradise, the group he formed with Gary Burns and Jagz Kooner in the early 90s. With the news that Sabres of Paradise are reforming in summer 2025 for live dates and Haunted Dancehall turning 30 on November 28, it feels like an apt time to re-enter the Dancehall.

First, though, came Sabresonic, the group’s 1994 debut album, a record that is both brilliant and utterly (perhaps irretrievably) of its time. I’ve written before here about the early progressive house scene in the UK - or what was then known as progressive house, anyway - with reference to Spooky’s debut album Gargantuan. Also known as dub house, progressive house was a polite and highly melodic take on the Detroit techno sound that leaned on Jamaica (kind of) for its low, melodious bass lines.

Sabresonic, Sabres of Paradise’s 1993 debut album, falls right into this territory. The album is best known for the classic Smokebelch II (Beatless mix), which ends the record on an angelic, ambient note. But this is far from typical of the Sabresonic sound, which is perhaps best summed up by Inter-Lergen-Ten-Ko (the name a sideswipe at “intelligent techno”), a mixture of hard-hitting four / four beats, pretty (and not so pretty) melodic elements and low-slung bass. 

This sound was, in many ways, a logical step for the fledgling Sabres of Paradise. Before joining Sabres (and after the group dissolved), Burns and Kooner were in The Aloof, a band who were big on the early progressive house scene, notably recording for the none-more-prog Cowboy Records. Weatherall was the big name in the Sabres of Paradise but Burns and Kooner had more hands-on studio experience and you can hear their influence in Sabresonic’s proggy leanings.

“The way that we worked in studio was Gary played everything: he played the bass, he played the guitar, he did the synthesisers, he did the keyboards, piano, percussion, melodica…,” Kooner explained in an interview with The Flightpath Estate's Adam Turner to mark the 30th anniversary of Sabresonic’s release.“I would take care of the programming and the drum machines and the engineering side of things. Andrew would come in with samples, records for inspiration, he would sort out the sequencing and the arrangements on the songs.”

Sabresonic, Kooner explained, was less an album and more a collection of tracks the trio had already recorded. “That's the sort of thing that we would do: ‘Alright we're finishing the studio, what should we do? Alright fire up the drum machine, stick a reverb on it let’s see where we go,” he explained in The Flightpath Estate interview. “That album [Sabresonic] was basically just a collection of things that we had sitting on the shelf.”

I love Sabresonic. But I grew up with the album and I can imagine it sounds dated to new listeners, given that no one really makes techno like this any more. Even Sabres of Paradise themselves disowned the record, deleting the original Sabresonic and putting out Sabresonic II in 1995. 

“Sabresonic II is the re-release of Sabres of Paradise’s first album which was deleted over a year ago at the bands request as they were unhappy with the overall quality of the record,” the Sabresonic II promo sheet explained. (In the Flightpath Estate interview Kooner suggests Sabresonic II may have been more of a contractual obligation with Warp, so this is perhaps best taken with a dose of salt.)

If this judgement of Sabresonic seems harsh, it is also a reflection of the vast step up in quality that was Haunted Dancehall. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two albums lies in their overall ambition. Sabresonic was a collection of existing songs, cherry-picked from the Sabres shelves; Haunted Dancehall was, in the words of Jagz Kooner, “the proper album for Warp Records”.

That in itself would help to explain Haunted Dancehall’s more cohesive feel. But the group’s second LP is, in addition, a loose concept album. The group apparently hired Irvine Welsh to write a song-by-song narrative connecting Haunted Dancehall’s 14 tracks, only to scrap the results and pen their own tale, starring a character called “McGuire”, at the last minute. 

I don’t know how many times I listened to Haunted Dancehall as a teenager but I can’t, for the life of me, remember anything of the story of McGuire. In a way, though, the fact that the story existed in the first place is more important than its actual content. Penning a narrative to connect their album’s songs suggests that the Sabres of Paradise were thinking big on Haunted Dancehall, creating a record of steely ambition that wasn’t in thrall to the sometimes mundane preoccupations of the dance world.

Just one year after Sabresonic was released, there is not a trace of progressive house to Haunted Dancehall. Nor does it sound like Robert Hood’s Minimal Nation, Plastikman’s Musik, Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman, The Prodigy’s Music for a Jilted Generation, Aphex Twin’s SAW 2 or any other of the big electronic records of that year.

That’s not to say that Haunted Dancehall was entirely out on its own. Tow Truck, with its chilling sirens, rolling breakbeat and James Bond guitars has much in common with the early Chemical Brothers EPs, which also came out in 1994, and The Brothers would remix Tow Truck the following year. 

The preponderance of breakbeats and live instrumentation on Haunted Dancehall, together with some really big hooks, almost makes it feel like the first record of the Big Beat era - notably on the number 56 with a bullet hit Theme - although this is a record that is far darker and more complex than anything Fatboy Slim or Bentley Rhythm Ace could ever create. 

Besides, I prefer to see Haunted Dancehall’s mixture of live instrumentation and electronic production as a continuation of Weatherall’s pioneering work with Primal Scream on Screamadelica, just a few years earlier. And, in fact, Sabres of Paradise supported Primal Scream on their Give Out But Don’t Give Up tour in late 1994, when I saw them at Norwich UEA.

The other big 1994 record to which Haunted Dancehall bears a passing resemblance is Portishead’s debut album Dummy. This is most obvious (naturally) on Portishead’s remix of Planet D, which appears half way through Haunted Dancehall, a skeletal, cinematic and extremely moody take on hip hop that you can imagine Beth Gibbons absolutely destroying or Mo’ Wax putting out on a hand-sprayed 12 inch. Planet D aside, though, what Sabres of Paradise share with Portishead is a sense of world building, using carefully crafted texture to keep the album together, despite its variations in genre, sound and mood.

Wilmot, the bubbling, almost jaunty, album centrepiece, which samples Black But Sweet by calypso singer Wilmoth Houdini, is entirely different in mood from, say, the jagged ambience of Flight Path Estate, the kind of song that feels like you need a tetanus shot just to listen to it. But they happily co-exist within the world of Haunted Dancehall thanks to the band’s consolidating use of dubbed-out effects and sonic space. 

As the album title suggests, dub is a key influence throughout Haunted Dancehall. But where Sabresonic felt rather superficial in its use of dub-inspired bass lines, Haunted Dancehall is informed by the loosely bedevilled spirit of dub, rather than by one particular sound. This - and an excellent running order, which builds towards the album’s middle then retreats to draw air, legacy of Weatherall’s skill as a selector - helps to make Haunted Dancehall a fantastically cohesive album, best enjoyed in one sitting.

This sheer listenability (and the fact that Sabres of Paradise were signed to Warp) also led the group to be lumped in with the Artificial Intelligence crew of home-listening electronic music. At times - notably on Bubble and Slide II and Ballad of Nicky McGuire, both of which remind me of Plaid in their combination of razor-sharp breaks and mournful, Detroit Techno melodies - this was a comparison that made sense. Sabres of Paradise were strong on hooks on melodies, giving the home listener melodic substance to get their teeth into beyond, say, the minimal loops of a Robert Hood record (great though that might be).

But Sabres of Paradise were too brash to really fit into the ruffled-brow world of IDM, too techno for the trip hop crew and too eclectic for the techno heads. How many other groups could bear comparison to Plaid, Portishead, Mo’ Wax, The Chemical Brothers, Big Beat and Primal Scream on one record and yet still not really sound like any of them? How many electronic groups could produce a song as jubilant as Wilmot and pair it with Haunted Dancehall, the album’s eerie closing song?

So what the hell were Sabres of Paradise? It’s not an easy question to answer. Sabresonic suggested a dance band; but Haunted Dancehall was wilder and more universal, both poppier and more experimental than their debut, the kind of record that demands its own slot in record shops. (And, given the number of remixes that Sabres of Paradise did around this time, they could have probably filled it.)

1995 would see the release of Sabresonic II, as well as Versus, a compilation where Haunted Dancehall songs were remixed by the likes of LFO, Depth Charge, the Chemical brothers and Nightmares on Wax. It is also home to the famous / infamous In the Nursery version of Haunted Dancehall, which was highlighted by Radio 1 head of music Christopher Price in 2011 as the kind of music that the station should play before cutting to a breaking news item, such as the death of the Queen.

There were, apparently, mooted plans for a third Sabres album featuring Ice T, Al Green, Tom Waits and Bobby Gillespie. But the group split before it could get its collective head around such a head-spinning array of guests, leaving Haunted Dancehall as both Sabres of Paradise’s crowning glory and tender farewell. We will never known where the Sabres of Paradise could have gone; but where they went on their second album was spectacular.

Some listening

BADBADNOTGOOD and Tim Bernardes - Poeira Cosmica

Lush, escapist, beautiful: Poeira Cosmica by BADBADNOTGOOD and Brazilian singer-songwriter Tim Bernardes, is what I needed this week, the beatific violins whisking me off to a better place than this, while the drums promise the gentle waltz of dignity. Do BADBADNOTGOOD ever fail? 

Cordae - Syrup Sandwiches (feat. Joey Badass)

Some of the best music sounds entirely effortless, a swan gliding along on the sonic surface while dirty great legs of production work kick away in the depths. Syrup Sandwiches, by Cordae (FKA YBN Cordae), is one such beast: the guitar loop is so casual the strings barely move air, the beat sounds like it is coming from the bottom of a summer rock pool and the chorus features a genius moment when Joey Badass adds a sung line to the spoken word with the insouciant ease of someone brushing a leaf off their jacket.

Gyrofield - Flower Burial

I’ve listened to a load of Gyrofield music over the past few months and I still couldn’t really tell you what kind of sound the Bristol producer makes. Flower Burial is a gothic electro stroll, with chaos tugging away at giant orchestral sweeps, the tiniest bit like Deep Burnt in elegance and vibe, if not really in sound.

The Orb - Perpetual Dawn (2024 version)

Let me be honest. The 2024 version of The Orb’s Perpetual Dawn, as found on their new Orboretum compilation, is not exactly 1,000 miles away from the original. The overall sound is slightly different and there are a spattering of new effects. But, to all extents and purposes, we are dealing with the same song here. And, given that this means one of the best house tunes of the early 90s, an absolute triumph of The Orb’s light-hearted, dub-influenced dance lurch, this is no bad thing. Orboretum also includes the scorching Orbital Dance Mix of A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld, which was remixed by The Orb themselves and has nothing to do with the dance duo Orbital, a fact I only discovered very recently.

Primal Scream - Ready To Go Home (Terry Farley, Wade Teo remix)

… and while we’re back in the 90s, how about this gem from Primal Scream, as remixed by Terry Farley and Teo Wade? Primal Scream will probably always be all about Screamadelica - aka the best album of the 90s - for me and this remix of Ready To Go Home hits many of those glorious notes, thanks to a gospel choir, rolling keyboard and occasional twinges of rock guitar. This is far better than it has any right to be.

Things I’ve Done

Line Noise - With TSHA

Line Noise interviews often feature producers with many years of heritage behind them. But I do also love speaking to new artists, such as this week’s guest, Teisha Matthews aka TSHA, whose new album Sad Girl is out now. We spoke about wedding DJs, being sad, Cher’s Believe and so much more.

The Cure - Songs of a Lost World

I reviewed the new Cure album for Pitchfork and Cure fans seem fairly equally weighted between those who think it was a fair review and those who believe that I am a total idiot for the fact that the album didn’t get a 10.0. Some people even emailed me to tell me how awful I am, which I suppose is a novelty in the world of social media. Anyway, you can make your own minds up. If we’re going for the whole best album since …. thing then I would call it the best Cure album since Bloodflowers, as there is NO WAY it is better than Wish.

Disco Pogo Issue 6

Disco Pogo is, as ever, a bastion of quality dance music journalism. For the latest issue, number six, I wrote about Manuel Göttsching (including words from Carl Craig!) and penned an opinion piece about history and dance music journalism. You can - and perhaps should - buy it here. BY THE WAY if there is anyone reading who works at a record / book store in Barcelona / near Barcelona and wants to do some kind of event around the launch of Disco Pogo’s new Aphex Twin book or the re-print of their Daft Punk book, both of which I contributed to, then I am ready and willing to talk nonsense for a good hour. So do get in touch. 

Line Noise - Tomorrow Comes The Harvest, Jeff Mills, Prabhu Edouard, Jean-Phi Dary

I know I mentioned this before but you can now see the video of this interview, should that take your fancy. And it should. Jeff Mills is very charming when he smiles.

The playlists

The exciting -  well, mildly exciting, to me - news is that my The newest and the bestest 2024 playlist, which contains all the best new music from this year, now has more followers than my more general Newest and the bestest list. This might be a lesson to me. Maybe it should be a lesson to me. Anyway, please follow one, the other or both.