LP, digital and CD posthumous collection withdrawn from sale shortly after release due to legal issues with the Weatherall estate.
Tracks thought to have been some of the last Andrew was working on before passing for playing out in his Phonox sets. Andrew's intentions to release these at all, their finished state, the format and alias to release them under is extremely contentious

Sleeve Notes by Kris Needs:
On the festering stretch of no man’s land between Streatham and Mitcham some kind of extreme social experiment seems to be in perpetual round the clock motion. Unhindered by fearful police, multinational gangs drink, argue and fight as blood from a butcher’s shop backyard flows over the broken Victorian back-alley cobbles somewhat flatteringly named Park Avenue Mews. Relentlessly plagued by fly tipped garbage joining carpets of glass caused by eastern European men routinely smashing their empty booze bottles, as darkness falls hookers descend as the tangible sense of unpredictable violent threat intensifies.

After making their way through this 21st century cesspool of parched humanity to an anonymous doorway, two figures hurriedly unlock padlocks on its gate then another two on the thick door it protects to reach the oasis of calm and creativity that lies within. It’s all part of the procedure for Nina Walsh and Andrew Weatherall while working at the former’s Facility 4 studio amidst an urban hell so brutal he won’t worry those close to him describing it. For added protection, Nina reinforces the walls of her converted stable studio with cage-like metal grid.

“It was a proper shithole,” says Nina. “You really didn’t know what you were going to be greeted with when you got to that place.” Even her restored vintage automobile Little Mo was ransacked (“The only time I ever parked it outside in the alley and the fuckers stripped all the chrome off”). Catching one street rat pissing against their door, Nina is forced to loudly threaten his offending manhood with a pair of scissors.

Thankfully, extra support comes from guitarist Franck Alba, who sometimes plays with W.R.F., although Nina’s friend Vince Ely, the ex-Psychedelic Furs drummer staying at a nearby second unit originally envisioned as Andrew’s DJing domain before reality kicked in copes less well with the nightmare modern Bosch painting he’s found himself in. Someone sheering the gate to their mews with an angle grinder doesn’t help.

The danger and garbage at least deters the hangers on that tended to invade Andrew’s other studio locations, partially prodding him moving to this next (and final) phase with Nina. “We were frightened of inviting guests in case they got mugged! There was certainly no hipster footfall as there had been previously. They wouldn’t fuckin’ dare go down there. I’ve since seen the size of their bollocks and they’re miniscule. It was the perfect studio but far from the perfect environment.” Unlocking and opening that front door to their studio haven felt, “like entering a portal. Once you were inside you could shut the door on the world.”


Unlike other albums recorded at Facility 4, Nina and Andrew feel driven by some kind of supernatural force to complete the startlingly cohesive new album taking shape in their joyful cocoon through 2019 into 2020. It’s the culmination of a creative relationship that started over 30 years earlier when they clicked at London’s earliest acid house gatherings, becoming partners then managers of their Sabres Of Paradise/Sabrettes labels before taking different paths by the late 90s. Already a highly accomplished musician, Nina had learned to build and operate studios by the time she reunited working with Andrew around 2011. Apart from outside productions (including Pete Molinari and Warpaint), collaborations including the Radiophonic Workshop and remixes from Confidence Man to Silver Apples, the duo recommenced running independent labels, including Moine Dubh and Andrew’s ongoing Bird Scarer. The pair forged Weatherall-credited albums Convenanza and Qualia together with starting the Woodleigh Research Facility, releasing 2015’s The Phoenix Suburb (and Other Stories) and 2018’s 127 To Facility 4, limited to 150 hand-crafted copies sold online and from Nina’s classic automobile Little Mo at a car boot fair.

Andrew’s morning journey to the studio across London on tube or bus had become part of his daily routine, acknowledged by Nina as his, “really special time because he could sit and read his books and not be disturbed. He was an avid reader.” It was that final stretch before the studio that could become perilous, whatever befell them inevitably impacting on their mood for that day. “We’d be in a particularly banging mood if somebody had attempted to mug me or set light to my car. I think a lot of the chug was us calming ourselves down; ‘Can’t handle much above 102 today!’”

Once safely inside Facility 5, Nina and Andrew started their working day by decompressing with coffee, jazz Woodbines and Andrew’s newspaper selection of all stripes. They might spend hours listening to music or simply talk at length, always accompanied by canine companions. At some point work commenced.

Sitting beneath a cloud of smoke, incense burning in his favourite milky pond back flow burner, Andrew positioned himself behind his Nina-customized computer set-up, dubbing ethereal synth lines or four note motifs over the micro-complex grooves, haunted melodies and well-placed “whizz bangs” she sends over that he also arranges into shape.

The music Nina and Andrew are creating behind the barricades takes extra resonance by referencing the state-of-the-art Function One sound system at Phonox, the Brixton club where Andrew conducted his monthly A Love From Outer Space rituals. Finally surfacing four years later, Phonox Nights sees Nina honoring Andrew’s wish to pay homage to the club that helped shape its sound.

“We had the massively privileged situation where we could get the Function One engineer to roll the bass off the entire club if we’d put too much on the track. We put what would become ‘Bone Pointer’ on and it was like ‘BOOM!’ We both knew straight away and got the engineer to just roll the whole club. Then on Monday morning at the studio it was, ‘Let’s sort that bass out!’ That’s what made it sound like an album. It laid down an unusual discipline and structure to the way we worked.”

Track names were left to Andrew, invariably at the last minute, leaving Nina filing their work under working titles like Yaknob, Yadick and Yatwat. Phonox Nights started life as eleven numbered tracks in the Yatool folder, opened when Andrew’s ALFOS residency started. Through Nina’s careful coaxing, Andrew finally ventured into operating machines to help him express his musical visions, helped by building him a computer linked to a vintage sequencer and software. “Now he could be more hands on, allowing me to mix the paint for his palette whilst he was painting the picture. Although I had to coax him at first, I could see he was getting the bug.” Nina allowed herself to think, “Yeah, I’ve achieved something here” when he asked, “Can I put ‘Programmed by Andrew Weatherall’ on the sleeve credits?” Qualia already, “felt like a very dear and personal work” because of its spiritual and musical connection with Nina’s late partner Erick Legrand, whose archive they plundered, paving the way for Andrew’s studio breakthrough. By Phonox Nights he’d pretty much cracked it.


The years since Nina and Andrew caught and bottled their unique muse in those relentless sessions have upped the resonance of the last album they created together, its emergence comparable to unearthing a wrongfully buried arcane treasure horde. Now the world can finally hear the extraordinarily beautiful music Nina and Andrew were creating in the heart of a diseased ghetto warzone; nine lustrous particle showers laced with iridescent melodies, bass-heavy grooves and extra-terrestrial dub clusters coursing and morphing to create a new strain of electronic chamber music. Although inevitably bathed in poignancy and reflective melancholy, tracks such as ‘One Part Disco’ also fly the sense of optimism and chilled triumph against the odds at the heart of the album that remains stunningly relevant now.

Andrew’s studio role-shattering keyboard explorations are evident throughout, subtly bolstering Nina’s intricately woven melodies and motifs (“He was more pads; I was more arpeggios and melodies”). Usually three or four notes, his contributions were often the last element added; “We had a joke saying we should do the one last one elephant. The One More Elephants were always just one keyboard, normally two, three or four notes, mainly pads.”

They’re there in the sleek acid majesty of the percolating title track, the string pads gracing ‘Cryptic Numeric’ or archive samples acquired through deep digging for ‘Infidelity of Time’’s spectral 70s cop show-dub collision. The same era’s space disco gooses ‘Wolves Don’t Chase Hope (They Chase Rabbits)’ (including Andrew’s descending synth chords), evocatively recalling the Sabres-Sabrettes era. “This is where we unknowingly slipped into 123bpm. Given my history with Sabrettes, maybe that 120 bpm limitation would frustrate me a little bit so I may have wanted to up the banger potential. It it is quite Sabresy.”

In contrast, ‘Church Of Burnt Offerings’ drapes rolling drums from Erick’s archive with translucent motoric flickers and the sense of time-stopping beauty that sets Phonox Nights among the most compelling gems in the bulging Walsh-Weatherall treasure trove. Nina reveals there were plans for the piece to somehow manifest at a Barbican event that sadly never happened.

‘Boots & The Pike’ reflects the set’s highly-personal nature, its rumbling bomber drone peppered with jagged ectoplasm swooshes, electro jittering synth and NYC deep house bassline relishing the bowel-evacuating bass frequencies road-tested at Phonox that underpin the set. Nina says the title comes from when Andrew, “would have his bag and his walking boots then he’d walk to ‘The Pike’. Was The Pike a pub? I’m not sure.”

‘Boots & The Pike’ and ‘One Part Disco’ (boasting Andrew’s darkly Detroit-flecked strings as the one last elephant) were named by Wacker at Andrew’s beloved Golden Lion at Todmorden after they asked if he wanted to contribute.

Perhaps the set’s most significant item, ‘Gates To The South’ was the last track Nina and Andrew recorded. Named after a Peter Cook and Dudley Moore term for Balham, where she dropped him off every night after work, it’s the only track requiring some posthumous micro-surgery, on the hi-hats. “It’s the last track he ever made, recorded towards the end of that last day in the studio. It was the last time I saw him before I talked him into going to hospital on the phone. He never came out.

“Creatively there was never any conflict because we had very separate roles in what we were doing and we trusted each other implicitly. We knew each other so well, there was a lot of reflection. In retrospect it felt like some kind of closure of a job well done. ‘Now where do we go from here? Shit, is it time to reinvent?’ Andrew wasn’t too good with cozy.”

Even if Nina wonders if Phonox Nights, “could well have been Andrew’s last album in the lower bpm style”, this masterfully constructed set now stands as the last music he completed before his untimely February 2020 death, bringing the curtain down on the beleaguered dream studio where they had spent much of the previous five years enjoying their mutual creative tornado.

“Phonox Nights was like the crescendo,” concludes Andrew Weatherall’s creative partner of over 30 years. “I know he was very proud of that album. As he liked to joke; ‘We’re getting quite good at this now, aren’t we?”