From the explosive rise of Acid house to the analogue meets digital chaos of modern production, few artists have carved a path through the underground like Nina Walsh. A long-time creative collaborator and kindred spirit to the late, great Andrew Weatherall, Walsh has remained at the beating heart of leftfield electronic music for over three decades.

Her fingerprints can be found across labels including Sabrettes, projects such as Woodleigh Research Facility and countless tracks that pushed boundaries and redefined the genre. In this exclusive and deeply personal interview with Iconic Underground Magazine’s Mike Mannix, Walsh traces the journey from her wild early days in London clubs to the final days of recording with Weatherall and beyond.

What unfolds is more than a history of shared records — it’s a story of synchronicity, resilience and a friendship built on sonic experimentation. With humour, vulnerability and brutal honesty, Walsh lets us into her world — one foot in the past and both hands firmly on the faders of the future.

Nina Walsh & Igor Fang
Photography ref Nina Walsh

Mike Mannix: What’s the craic Nina?

Nina Walsh: This last year has mainly revolved around my mum being in and out of hospitals and care homes; trying to make her comfortable and be there for her. Sadly, she passed away in April.

Mike Mannix: I’m really sorry about your mum, Nina — that must have shaken your world. Has working on your upcoming book Punkadelic  offered any spark or comfort, or are you giving yourself space before diving back in?

Nina Walsh: It’s now going to be a book of two halves.

I haven’t wanted to revisit the sort of darkness I’ve had to deal with since Andrew’s passing

It has been very, very challenging. We’re going to publish the first half of the book up to the point where we ceased running the Sabres of Paradise and Sabrettes labels. The second half will be Slab, the start of my solo work, Two Lone Swordsman and the various projects Andrew and I would phase in and out of together. Before we ended up with the studio where we recorded Woodleigh Research Facility and Andrews albums, including Convenanza and other things like remixes.

Franck Alba & Nina Walshplaying with Tesla’s Firefly frequencies

Mike Mannix: That makes total sense, Nina. It sounds like an incredibly emotional journey — and one that deserves to be told on your own terms

Nina Walsh: I think I was meant to be in that part of Andrew’s life. We’re kind of soul travellers and he’s still very much around me.

I can feel the energy every time I fire up the studio

Moine_Dubh130 photography John Barrett

I’ve got his picture up on the speaker and I swear I see him smile at me sometimes when I fire up the machines. I can hear him going ‘Yeah, about time.’ If I’m kind of, “where does this go, here or there?” I will ask him and usually get those answers.

Mike Mannix: When did you start writing the book?

Nina Walsh: Kris Needs is writing it although it features some of my diary entries and a lot of me talking.

Mike Mannix: When was the idea floated to you then?

Nina Walsh: When I was living in Dorset in 2022 and he’s been writing it ever since as it’s still an ongoing story. My friend Anna Hashmi, who I used to study film at college with,

asked if I would like to tell my story of Acid house because I managed to corrupt her when we were there

She now runs a  production company in LA, making films and documentaries.

I suggested she have a look at the book so she’s encouraging us to get the bloody thing finished. She’s got the first seven chapters. It’d be quite nice if it came out in film format as well.

Mike Mannix: That would be a wicked documentary. What were the first parties/clubs you went to?

Nina Walsh: The first clubs I went to were the Wag, Mud Club and the Warehouse in Camden. We were very naughty teenagers, myself and Anna Haigh, who was later in Flowered Up. She was my best friend at school from the age of 7. Anna and I used to go to Spear of Destiny gigs in London and end up covered in bruises from being in the wrecking crew.

We’d get stranded and couldn’t get home. In 1987 when I was about 16, Nikki Holloway organised this trip to Ibiza and I wanted to go so found the money to pay the deposit. Then my mum got wind and put a stop to it so I never got to go on that first Ibiza trip. But then we did start going to Shoom at the Fitness Centre.  Thank you Jenny and Danny [Rampling] for letting me in.

Mike Mannix: You met Andrew at Shoom, didn’t you?

Nina Walsh: Yeah, Andrew, Cymon Eckles, Terry Farley and the whole Boys Own Crew. We were all in the right place at the right time; there were so many opportunities. That’s how I got the job at London Records in club promotions.

Mike Mannix: Did you know in your gut this was one of those moments?

Nina Walsh: Yeah, I think we all did. We all knew that we were in this bubble the authorities couldn’t recognise so you felt you were safe and could just take on the world and do anything you wanted

We had incredible freedom for a year or so before the authorities started wising up to what was going on!

Mike Mannix: You and Andrew were so deeply embedded in the scene from the early days — promoting, running labels, spinning records — but when did that turn into actually getting hands-on with the music itself? Was there a moment where the roles started to shift and Andrew realised, “Right, I’m producing now”?

Nina Walsh: Andrew and Primal Scream transformed everything! He’d never sat down and said ‘I want to be a record producer’. It was all very organic the way it happened. There was never a plan for anything that Andrew and I did, it just happened.

I got a job at London Records doing club promotions then later bringing the Boys Own productions label to Pete Tong at FFRR

As it developed, the label didn’t particularly resonate with me or with Andrew so he took a bit of a step back and I left and started working for Youth running his WAU label with Warner Brothers.

When Youth’s music started going a bit Goa-trance, which has never been my favourite thing, Andrew and I were like ‘fuck it let’s start our own label’. Our first signing was Kris Needs’ Secret Knowledge. It escalated quite quickly and as I got into the more sort of banging side of the music it was totally natural to get sister label Sabrettes up and running.

Nina, Andrew and Lil Mo. Photography John Barrett

Mike Mannix: You were winging it…?

Nina Walsh: That’s how we rolled with the whole Sabres thing! We didn’t have a clue what we were doing. It was a chap from On U Sound, Bobby Marshall, that said ‘I think you need Weird Pete’ who got us out of a bit of shit basically and we had to start running it like a proper record label.

We were just caught up in the whole thing of getting music out to people, absolute passion for music and the scene!

To be honest, we didn’t have time or the inclination for the labels anymore because everything was starting to go digital. It wasn’t much fun having to learn computers, it was not rock and roll anymore. You weren’t out with the vans talking to record shops and pinning up little displays and convincing them they needed to chart return your releases.

It had become almost like an office job so we dissolved that and carried on putting records out but a little bit left of centre, just focusing on the bits that we always loved about running record labels.

Andrew set up the Flight Path studio in Hounslow with Jagz and Gary. They were doing a mix and he said ‘We need a female vocal do you want to come and do one’ and I’m like ‘Well I’m not a singer but I’ll have a go.’ So I went over there and put a vocal down.

That was the very first time I ever did anything like that

I don’t even know what the track or the mix was called. I got more into doing the music stuff that way with Andrew.

Nina Walsh

With the music making side of things, I never felt comfortable being at the mercy of a sound engineer all the time so I started taking a load of old records to the Tape Exchange in Notting Hill and swapping them for bits of musical equipment and putting a studio together and learning how to do it myself.

When I was a kid I’d always written poetry. I’m also a private person so if I’m learning how to turn that poetry into songs it’s going to be a bit cringy in front of people so

I needed to be able to do it by myself and find what I was doing without that sort of being embarrassed or having to compromise

First of all I got myself a little four-track recorder. I had this DJ mixer that had a sample button on it and then I upgraded to an AKAI S950 sampler so I had a proper sampler but I still wasn’t using computers. I upgraded my four-track to an ADAT digital multi-track and then used it to stripe one track with SMPTI code to sync everything up.

Mike Mannix: You clearly had that self-starter energy early on but given how tough it was to stay afloat while learning the ropes, how did you navigate that period of figuring things out technically and financially? Was there a moment that really shifted things for you creatively or professionally?

Nina Walsh: Yeah, obviously it’s quite difficult to sustain a living while you’re learning to do all this so I had to sign on. When they started giving me a hard time I found the Institute of Music and Technology College in New Cross which was a different borough to me.

Photography – John Barrett

I managed to find out that I could get what was called a cross-border reference, so I went in there with all this information, ‘cross-border reference Jesus Christ’, to study at this college and got it. I could already do it but it got me off the hook with them and they paid me more money to go there, which was brilliant. I did the City and Guilds in music production and

Andrew was listening to all the stuff that I was doing but I wasn’t releasing any of it

I was just playing and recording it.

WRF_Steph Bomba

When he asked me to do a remix for him I put my big girl’s pants on and thought ‘Right okay I’m going to sing on this remix; I’m going to completely do the opposite to what he does’. He was stripping people’s vocals off and I just kept one little loop of his original then wrote a song over the top of it called ‘Tiny Reminders.’ He loved it and Warp Records loved it so they put it out as a seven-inch single and then we just started working more and more together.

I’d like to think that me doing that gave him the confidence to sing because after that he started singing too. Then we started singing together and it was really quite beautiful hearing our voices together. We just kind of developed that over the years really. I think that’s why Kris included ‘Rollercoaster’ in the title of my book; we were just riding it and always working on and off with each other over the years.

Now I was pushed back to the computers, for some it was painful to watch the way I worked. I struggled with that as well.

I was very much analogue but it was actually Thrash from the Orb and a combination of Mat from Pod and Charlie May from Spooky who were watching the way that I worked

They loved it but all of them said ‘You could make your life quite a bit easier, you know’. All three of those chaps really helped me to integrate computers into the way I was working and I learnt a hell of a lot from them

Mike Mannix: Once you got past that hitch with the computers did the rest just fall into place?

Nina Walsh: It did, yeah. There were quite a lot of manuals in the bathroom! I get a little bit freaked out with digital mistakes cause I think I’ve fucked the computer. I hate all that stuff, it’s not something that comes naturally to me, reconfiguring soundcards, latency problems etc.

Mike Mannix: So music was clearly baked into your upbringing — how did that early curiosity shape the way you approached production later on?

Nina Walsh: Yeah, we all got the chance to play an instrument in my family. I used to play the oboe when I was at school so I could read and play music and then my brother started playing piano and I used to annoy him by learning his homework before he could learn it. I could already read music so he’d come back and I’d be doing his homework on his piano so he put a padlock on it and then locked it in his bedroom. I was quite an annoying little sister but really it was the guitar I wanted to play and then eventually I was allowed to have guitar lessons.

Andrew brought me in to do some production on some bands that had guitars and female vocals (War Paint) because he knew that I was pretty good with guitars and vocals as I had spent so much time recording myself. We decided we were going to do the Convenanza album after that.

We’d be waiting for session musicians to turn up so we’d start working on another track, usually a dance track for fun and that’s how Woodleigh Research Facility started

There was no plan for that either; it was just something that was killing a bit of time and it was good fun. They actually sounded pretty cool and it was like ‘shall we do some more of that then?’

Mike Mannix: There’s been so many synchronistic pivots in your career?

Nina Walsh: Where I’d had my studio for eight years, they decided they were going to turn it into ‘pocket apartments’. I had to temporarily move my studio back to my flat, which was in Woodleigh Gardens. So we started working from Woodleigh Gardens, and that became the Woodleigh Research Facility.

WRF

Youth lived just down the road and had this cabin in his back garden. I did a deal with him for six months where we moved the studio into this cabin. In exchange, I was cooking for the artists that he had recording there. We’d be doing a day of oompty boompty in the back garden then

I’d be cooking stuffed salmon for Boy George or aubergine parmigiana for The Jesus & Mary Chain. The whole situation was quite surreal

Mike Mannix: Was it a labour of love?

Nina Walsh: Sometimes things would really come together and Andrew would reassure me that, ‘I know we’ve only spent a day or two on this, he’d say, but we’ve actually spent 30 years.’ It’s quite unfathomable what’s come out of that scene really.

Mike Mannix: When you shifted into that dedicated studio space, how did it reshape the way you worked together — both creatively and practically? Did having that setup give you more freedom or introduce new tensions?

Mike Mannix: Tell us about Phonox Nights, the last album you and Andrew worked on together. What was the creative process like on that project, and how did your roles in the studio complement each other by that stage?

Nina Walsh: Yeah, that was the very last thing we did. I recorded all the actual sounds in the control room then I would load up a hard drive and deliver it to him in the programming room. How I’ve described it in the past is I was kind of mixing the paints for his palette, and he was painting the picture. There were no guitars on this album but the occasional overdubbed synth line from Andrew. I couldn’t build a dance floor track the same way that he did because

he was physically out there every week playing to these crowds. He knew how long he could push a breakdown for and exactly when to change gear

The difference between our arrangements is he’s always had quite long intros and outros because he wanted to mix them in his DJ set and he wanted tracks nobody else had. We were creating tools for his trade, basically.

Mike Mannix: That’s no different from you walking into the studio and hearing guitarists playing and going, ‘okay, I know what needs to be done here’ because you’ve got that ear. He had that ear from being in a fucking sweaty club all the time. He was a brilliant arranger.

Nina Walsh: Absolutely brilliant arranger. I seem to remember hearing one of Primal Scream say exactly the same thing in their documentary; ‘He was a brilliant arranger.’

He knew exactly what he wanted and where he wanted it; always heavily influenced by the previous weekend’s club that he’d been playing

There was no real plan as we were making all these tunes. It was me who said, ‘Andrew, we need to make some kind of plan because it isn’t sustainable. It’s lovely and we’ve got all this fantastic music, but no one can hear it.’ Plus I needed to pay my rent. So I suggested we put some of it out digitally and started talking to !K7 Distribution about setting up a label.

In the short term, we planned to put stuff out ourselves digitally. We were just going to do it on Bandcamp then Claire at Rotter’s Golf Club stepped in and said, ‘We like putting records out, we’ll facilitate it’. We should have just held back and given it all to !K7 and all the digital but we didn’t, which was a bit of a mistake, So the plan was to give !K7 the physical.

We put some digital out and meanwhile were having meetings with !K7, who were drawing up the contracts.

The day that we were signing the contracts, Andrew phoned and said he couldn’t be there as he wasn’t feeling too well

I ended up finalising the deal on my own, as !K7 knew what Andrew’s wishes were as did I.

I had a feeling at the meeting and said to Adrian and Will from the label that I needed to phone Andrew, I think something is wrong. I phoned him and he sounded really, really terrible so I suggested maybe he should go to the hospital and get checked out.

I never saw Andrew again,

although I did get regular humorous text and updates from the hospital on what he was being fed and all the various “hurty bits”.  He passed away just two days later.

Mike Mannix: So quick, what a sad devastating loss, and then you had to deal with the fallout after his passing? That must’ve been such a sudden and heartbreaking shift — not just losing a close friend and creative partner but also being left to carry the weight of that shared vision on your own. How did you manage to navigate both the emotional and practical aftermath of Andrew’s passing?

Nina Walsh: Yeah, I mean, it’s a real shame, and it’s not uncommon when somebody passes. There’s a lot of very heated and confused emotions. I’ve seen it happen before, and I had an inkling that something may transpire.

I hadn’t anticipated just how intense and nasty it was going to get though

Mike Mannix: That’s incredibly moving — to have just completed the album together, only for him to pass days later… That must have made the release feel even more sacred. What did it take for you, emotionally and practically, to make sure that his name stayed on that record and that the work was honoured in the way it deserved?

Nina Walsh: Oh, we finished compiling it that week. It was the first time that we said, ‘right, we’re going to do an album’ and it was recorded as an album. We finished compiling it on the Thursday ready for the meeting with !K7 on the Friday. It was literally just a few days after we finished compiling it. This is why it was so important for me to honour him with this recording and why I went through what I did.

It cost me quite dearly mentally and financially to make sure Andrew’s name was on the album because I had to fight and fight and fight, but I did it

Nina Walsh Andrew Weatherall Woodleigh Research Facility

I’ve got very understanding lawyers because they were just stunned by what was going on. So was I as well. It’s one of those albums that could just keep on going. It would just keep selling but the pressure got so intense I took it down after a month. I may reissue it one day.

Mike Mannix: That sounds like a beautifully raw and honest way to honour Andrew’s legacy — and to keep the spirit of your collaboration alive. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your story, and all that incredible music and insight with us, Nina. It’s been a genuine privilege?

Nina Walsh: I’m trying to carry on in the spirit of how Andrew compiled the digital releases. In February, I started releasing the twelve three-track EPs I’m putting together, one for each month of the year under the name Maximum Vaultage, which is a deliberate misspell of voltage.

It’s just a matter of getting very stoned, locating all the finished mixes in our ‘for sale’ folder and listening back to a load of very cool music. It’s an extremely healing experience.

That’s also kind of why I felt the need to share some of my experiences in the book I’m putting out as well, just sending it out there to the universe before someone, somewhere attempts to rewrite our history, if they haven’t started already

Nina Walsh doesn’t dwell in nostalgia. Her gaze is forward  even as her work reverberates with memory. In her words and her music, there’s a balance — grief and celebration, chaos and clarity, the glitch and the groove. Her story is a reminder that true artistry doesn’t always follow a plan — it evolves, often unexpectedly, through persistence, love, and connection.

As new digital releases roll out month by month and long-lost mixes are finally shared with the world, Nina’s mission is clear: keep the spirit alive. Keep the wires buzzing, the speakers humming and the story honest. And really, what better way to honour the past than by turning it up — loud, proud, and unfiltered!