Warp announce the re-release of two defining albums of mid-Nineties electronic music, The Sabres Of Paradise’s Sabresonic and Haunted Dancehall. With the full collaboration of surviving members Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, and in partnership with the estate of the late Andrew Weatherall, they’re being reissued in new, CD and double-LP “classic” editions, remastered by Matt Colton. The new remasters are available on digital services from today as a preview of the pristine audio contained on the forthcoming vinyl and CD editions.
The releases come alongside their first tour in over three decades. The live version of The Sabres Of Paradise – an incarnation that never featured Weatherall (he preferred to DJ either side of the band’s sets) – is back on the road, playing venues from London’s Fabric to Sydney Opera House via a summer of festival appearances. As Kooner and Burns explain, there’s not so much unfinished business – The Sabres Of Paradise ran for as exactly long as they needed to, winding up after a final live show at Tokyo’s Liquid Room in May 1995. But there is new business.
“We want to promote the albums,” says Kooner, “and try and cement Andrew's legacy even more by doing festivals where there'll be a lot of younger people there. They can get to see what The Sabres Of Paradise were about. And hopefully you'll turn those people onto the music that we made 30 years ago, when quite possibly a lot of them weren't even born.”
Three decades on from the release – within 13 months – of their two seminal albums, Kooner and Burns recall a time of productions, remixes, rock’n’rave gigs and cupboard-under-stairs studio intensity, the excitement around the band fast-tracked by Weatherall’s production on Primal Scream’s era-defining Screamadelica (1991). Sabresonic (October 1993) and Haunted Dancehall (November 1994) duly emerged from a feverish time, when the threesome gravitated from remixers-for-hire (Flowered Up, Future Sound Of London, Galliano, Yello and many more) to fully-fledged artists.
Signing a record deal with Warp meant The Sabres Of Paradise had to get an album together, and quickly. Luckily the shelves in their studio were groaning with DATs. Or, as Kooner puts, “we did have a body of work that we had recorded” – plus, Burns adds, “we revisited a few things”. R.S.D., for example, started out as a commission for an advert for Red Stripe lager (the title stands for “Red Stripe Dub”) – an afternoon recording session that also yielded Wilmot and Tow Truck.
As for Still Fighting, the opening track on Sabresonic, it was “built from” Primal Scream’s Don’t Fight It, Feel It – the Screamadelica track on which Weatherall felt “there was still mileage to be had,” recalls Kooner. “But obviously, when we got in the studio, we twisted it into something else.”
Then there’s the track that became arguably the defining track of Sabresonic: Smokebelch II, a 256-second, sublime, almost pastoral masterpiece. It began as a cover of Lamont Booker's LB Bad track New Age of Faith. “Andrew loved that tune, because it was a big Shoom tune,” says Kooner. “But there was no sense of 'this should be a single,’” adds Burns. But then, in a club in Brighton, “Andrew played it on an acetate and the place went bonkers.”
But there was no time – or, even, inclination – to rest on their laurels. In 1994 Kooner and Burns took The Sabres Of Paradise band on the road, supporting Primal Scream on their Give Out But Don’t Give Up tour. Then, back into the studio to make the album that would become Haunted Dancehall. That meant working on the demos of Tow Truck and Wilmot, and revisiting another older track, Theme. Gnarly, symphonic jazz-funk, it was written for the soundtrack to the 1994 film Shopping, a would-be gritty British indie now more notable for being the moment where co-stars (and future husband and wife) Jude Law and Sadie Frost first met.
It also meant Planet D, a new track known as Planet Distortion before Sabres handed it off to Portishead, then riding high, to create a remix. As for the closing title track, it was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, specifically the scene where Jack Nicholson is alone in The Overlook Hotel’s big, eerie ballroom.
“The strings were EQ'd so it sounded like it a gramophone record playing at the other end of a haunted ballroom,” says Burns.
“In fact originally, the track was called Haunted Ballroom," clarifies Kooner. "Then when it came to it, Andrew was like: ‘Haunted Dancehall definitely sounds better.’”
Three decades on, Sabresonic and Haunted Dancehall are having their moments in the sun again. Likewise The Sabres Of Paradise as a live outfit. Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns have reassembled all their old band mates – Rich Thair (Red Snapper, The Aloof), Nick Abnett (The Aloof) and Phil Mossman (LCD Soundsystem) – for a tour that will take them all round the world.
“We just thought: it’s time to go back and revisit this,” says Kooner. “To let people know that it was a pivotal moment in time, not just for us, but for a lot of other people as well. These are albums that really stand the test of time. People need to hear them live. Andrew, of course, wouldn’t be with us onstage. But we like to think he’d be standing in the wings, giving us the nod.”
