Saint Etienne, Andrew Weatherall Only Love Can Break Your Heart - A Mix of Two Halves (1991)
Raise a glass (or spliff) for Andrew Weatherall. Long before algorithms or even Web 1.0 could tell you what was cool, he was spinning it on pirate radio and dark East London basement, redrawing the boundaries of outsider dance music, the genre whose patron saint he’d eventually become..
A New Romantic with dub in his blood and punk in his bones, Weatherall had a sixth sense for where music could go if you gave it room to breathe. Few tracks capture that early vision better than his 1991 “A Mix of Two Halves” refix of Saint Etienne’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”, itself a shimmering, jangly cover of Neil Young’s classic, gently warped by Weatherall into something weightless, stoned and utterly dank.
Where the original floated on airy nostalgia and Sarah Cracknell’s iconic vocals, Weatherall laced it with sub-heavy basslines, skittering drum machines and a dubby spaciousness that felt both intimate and expansive. It wasn’t quite house, not quite pop, only faintly Balearic, but it held all those textures in deep harmony. He slowed it down, stretched it out, and made space for emotion on the dancefloor. The song’s central melody—and Cracknell’s ethereal voice—don’t appear until more than five minutes in, following a hypnotic prelude of heady ruminations. In Weatherall’s hands, heartbreak didn’t just hurt; it grooved.
Over thirty years later, it pulses with that same strange magic: a postcard from another time, somehow still addressed to the present.
Start the conversation
Become a paid member of The Rest to gain access to the comments section.