We're Gonna Have A Good Time...

Flowered Up - Weekender (Weatherall's Audrey Is A Little Bit More Partial Mix)

Almost exactly a year ago, erstwhile White Noise contributor and all-round good egg It’s A Sin wrote a post about Flowered Up’s awesome baggy epic ‘Weekender’, perhaps one of the greatest songs of that whole damn era. In the comments that followed the post, I promised to dig out my copy of the Andrew Weatherall remixes. Well, a mere 12 months later and after much painstaking searching (you try finding a white label in a spineless black sleeve amongst three gajillion slabs of vinyl), I have finally managed to locate the bugger, and slapped up the even more epic 17-minute 'Weekender (Weatherall’s Audrey Is A Little Bit More Partial Mix)'.

Around this time (1992), you could never be quite sure what you were going to get from Weatherall. Already bored of his reputation as acid house producer du jour following the huge success of his work on ‘Screamadelica’, he had taken to turning up for DJ slots and spinning sets solely of dub reggae classics, much to the frustration of all the ravers turning up hoping for a night of hedonistic, hands-in-the-air, laser reaching excess.

Luckily for Heavenly and the boys from Flowered Up, Weatherall decided to play nicely, turning in a fabulous dancefloor friendly remix, taken straight from the (old) school of ‘Screamadelica’. Completely ignoring Liam Maher’s vocal and most of the other key components that made up the song, Weatherall, ably assisted as always by his Sabres cohorts Kooner and Burns, opted for an elongated intro, isolating the backing singers ‘We're gonna have a good time…” refrain, over cascading percussion and an incongruously serious piano riff. Midway through, the remix shifts gears into party territory as Weatherall drops in the cowbell from Run DMC's 'Peter Piper', and calls round Jazzie B's house to borrow a clubbed-up Soul II Soul-esque hip-hop beat, with call and response male/female vocal exchanges, and finally locates some of the original elements of the song in the mammoth guitar riff.

I haven't been to a festival for ages, but the remix title, 'Weatherall's Weekender', got me thinking that that was something I would definitely shell out some money to attend. A full weekend of live acts and DJs chosen solely by the man himself, plus he could DJ with all his various hats on. Promoters take note...

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Joe.