Andrew Weatherall came of age through post-punk, soul, disco and the culture of obsessive record collecting. By the later 1980s he was writing, DJing and moving through a London underground where clothes, football, fanzines and music overlapped. He became part of the Boy’s Own circle, whose fanzine and parties captured the strange social chemistry forming around acid house.

His association with Danny Rampling’s Shoom placed him close to one of the scenes through which the Balearic spirit of Ibiza was translated into British club culture. Weatherall’s sets never treated Balearic as a strict genre. The point was permission: records from different worlds could work together if the mood and the room made sense.

That philosophy carried naturally into remixing. Weatherall’s versions of records by artists such as Happy Mondays, New Order and Saint Etienne approached the original material as something that could be dismantled and rebuilt for another environment. He was not simply adding a drum machine beneath a song; he was using club culture as a new way of hearing it.

The most celebrated example became his work with Primal Scream. His remix of I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have became Loaded, and his production contribution to the 1991 album Screamadelica helped merge psychedelic rock, dub, house and the euphoria of the post-acid-house moment. The album won the first Mercury Music Prize and became one of the era’s defining records.

That success could have made Weatherall one of the industry’s safest high-end remixers. Instead he repeatedly moved sideways. The Sabres of Paradise, the Sabresonic club and Warp releases allowed him to explore darker electronics, techno and dub. Later, Two Lone Swordsmen with Keith Tenniswood pursued machine music that was often stranger, colder and less commercially obvious.

Labels were another form of curation. Sabres of Paradise and later Rotters Golf Club allowed him to put records into circulation and build contexts around them. His collaborations expanded through the Asphodells with Tim Fairplay and the Woodleigh Research Facility with Nina Walsh, while solo work including A Pox on the Pioneers, Convenanza and Qualia showed that he remained creatively restless.

Weatherall was also a broadcaster and conversationalist. Later NTS shows and Music’s Not For Everyone became extensions of the same lifelong practice: taking listeners somewhere they had not expected to go. Rockabilly, dub, techno, post-punk, odd electronics, spoken word and obscure records could coexist because the connecting intelligence was his taste rather than a genre tag.

He was widely loved for the way he resisted self-importance. Interviews were full of jokes at his own expense, book references, historical tangents and aphorisms about avoiding careerism. Friends described him as a polymath, but also as someone who remained excited by a good record regardless of whether the wider industry thought it fashionable.

Andrew Weatherall died on 17 February 2020, aged 56, following a pulmonary embolism. The shock was intensified by how active and curious he still seemed. Tributes came from every corner of British music because he had crossed so many of them without ever fully belonging to one.

His legacy is not simply Screamadelica, important as that record is. It is the example of a career built around taste rather than status. Weatherall made following your curiosity look like a serious artistic discipline.