Rapier grit

Keith Tenniswood and Andrew Weatherall’s 2 Lone Swordsmen partnership is best known for its offbeat house and razor-sharp electro, but they’re going to surprise a lot of people with their seventh album, Wrong Meeting.

Its predecessor, From The Double Gone Chapel, marked their tentative steps away from samplers and software and towards guitars and drums, and saw Weatherall step up to the mic for the first time in 15 years. A largely understated, downbeat affair, it would have been easy to dismiss it as the sound of two electronic producers flirting with rock were it not for the follow-up.
This time, the duo delve deeper lyrically and musically: Weatherall’s troubled private life provided the inspiration and, in some instances, the source material for the bittersweet vignettes and tragic-comic narratives, while the accompanying murky, bluesy soundtrack makes nods to Nick Cave and The Fall as well as rockabilly legend Billy Childish.
Occasionally, it gives way to the Swordsmen’s warped indie pop songcraft, as on the album’s closing track, ‘Get Out Of My Kingdom’.
“I’m glad that you like ‘Kingdom’ because it was wrenched out of the darkest abyss of my private life. It’s tinged with sadness because of a breakdown,” Weatherall says cryptically. “What breakdown? Put it this way – everything broke down in the past few years, even my car! Let’s just say that the past few years weren’t the best in my life on every level. I was heading for an enormous train wreck and everything was a shambles. I suppose now I'm capitalising on my misfortune, venting my spleen.”
While Andrew is reluctant to explain exactly what happened, he admits that his fondness for cocaine exacerbated some of his problems. He says that for the first time in a long time, he's now clean.
“Drugs are parasitic. There was a line I read last year: ‘Addiction is merely nostalgia for the irrecoverable glory of the first time’. That summed up where I'd been at for years.”
Exorcising his demons wasn’t an entirely negative experience. It facilitated the Swordsmen’s transition from anonymous studio act to fully-fledged live band with Weatherall as its front man and it allowed him to develop his lyrical skills – the Nick Cave-esque rumble and Jeckyl and Hyde narrative of ‘Rattlesnake Daddy’ being one of the resulting highlights. He feels that he can now dip in and out of that ‘dark place’ for inspiration, but can retreat unharmed and without baggage whenever he wants.
“Without narcotics, I can go there for the afternoon, have a walk around, but come back when I’m ready,” Weatherall explains.
So what was it like performing in front of thousands of people at festivals like Glastonbury instead of the faceless task of DJ-ing?
“I hadn’t sung in 15 years, so it took a while to get used to,” he explains. “DJing is hard work if you do it properly and I’ve never shied away from hard work. I was a labourer after I left school, but singing is more difficult. You’re offering up your soul to thousands of people. But it’s a good way to face up to your demons. I’d been an opinionated so-and-so for years and I felt like I’d been sitting in my studio moaning, but had never backed up my words.”
Although Wrong Meeting could project them into the mainstream, it'll be released as a limited-edition vinyl box set, with just 1,000 copies available. A second CD of new Swordsmen material will be issued later this year, but he doesn’t seem too bothered that mainstream attention will elude Wrong Meeting.
“We’re great at shooting ourselves in the foot,” he laughs. “We only wanted to release 1,000 copies of our first album. Warp went mad, and it ended up selling five or six times that amount.”
Anyway, given Weatherall’s trials and tribulations, being in the spotlight is probably the last thing that he needs.
“Being famous keeps you out of the studio and it would be impossible to lead a normal life – I’d probably end up in a situation where I’m writing songs about how awful it is to be famous like every other pop star,” he says.