The Sabres of Paradise: Andrew Weatherall and the Evolution of British Dance Music
by Daniel Finn
What kind of dance music is this?
The Sabres of Paradise formed in London in 1992, right as British dance music was splintering in different directions, and their music seemed to pull from almost all of them.
The group brought together Andrew Weatherall, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, with Weatherall already an important figure through his DJing and his work with Primal Scream, particularly “Loaded” and Screamadelica.
But the timing is important here.
The huge rave culture that had brought different crowds and sounds together was beginning to break into more distinct scenes. Jungle and hardcore were developing their own identities, techno was getting harder and more minimal, while labels like Warp were pushing electronic music beyond the dancefloor.
The Sabres of Paradise lived somewhere in the middle of all of this.
Their first album, Sabresonic, arrived on Warp in 1993, pulling together techno, house, dub and ambient music without settling comfortably into any of them.
And Sabresonic wasn’t only an album. It was also their London club night, where Weatherall and guests played everything from hard techno to dub. The crowd crossed different parts of underground culture too, which makes the club an important part of understanding the music. These weren’t genres developing separately. DJs, producers and clubbers were constantly moving between them.
“Smokebelch II” probably explains them better than anything, particularly the Beatless Mix, where almost everything you normally associate with a dance record disappears, yet the atmosphere and sense of movement remain. It later appeared on the first Café del Mar compilation in 1994 and became closely associated with the chill-out culture of the period.
Then came Haunted Dancehall in 1994, where they pushed even further through dub, techno, samples and cinematic sounds, with additional production from Portishead and Mr Scruff.
I think that difficulty in putting a name on their music is exactly why I’ve enjoyed going back through it. The Sabres of Paradise capture this brief period after rave had exploded, when the scene was breaking into new subcultures but the boundaries between them still felt loose enough for a group like this to exist.