History doesn’t record whether Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend turned up early enough to the Hammersmith Palais to catch the first band on. It was June 9, 1981, and they were both there to see U2, a year after the release of debut LP Boy. If they had arrived just after the doors opened, though – before a set from main support Altered Images – they would have been met by a monstrous, mutated loop of Demis Roussos.
“Gareth [Williams] had Demis Roussos going ‘I think I’m going out of my head… I think I’m going out of my head… I think I’m going out of my head’,” This Heat drummer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Charles Hayward tells Uncut today. “He pressed rewind as well while it was playing, so it was really weird. U2 then were just guys in leather waistcoats and nothing else on underneath, all that sort of nonsense, so the audience, who were just coming in, were definitely confronted by us.”
There’s perhaps no story that better sums up This Heat: confrontational, exploratory, uncompromising, pioneering and entirely in it for the music. A few months after that performance, the trio of Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams would release their second album, Deceit, on Rough Trade; and then, just as the post-punk scene seemed to be catching up to their doomy, clattering genius, they split.
In the decades since, though, their slim catalogue – debut This Heat, the “Health & Efficiency” single, Deceit, their Peel Sessions comp – has blown minds again and again: how could a group that began before punk have predicted post-punk, let alone goth, indie, math-rock, perhaps even electronica, jungle and (as much as the group hate the term) industrial?
It’s worth remembering that of course there was plenty of difficult, experimental music in the mainstream (or at least in the countercultural peripheries) long before post-punk: Stockhausen, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart, solo Nico, German groups such as Can, Kraftwerk, Faust and Neu!, the Canterbury bands, let alone the worlds of dub, free jazz and world music. If This Heat didn’t exist in a vacuum, though, few bands before them had combined their influences into so varied a stew. It wouldn’t be hyperbole to suggest that each track on This Heat could act as a template for a new band. “Not Waving”? Assemble your neo-folk outfit. “24 Track Loop”? Form a dance-punk group and sign to DFA. “Music Like Escaping Gas”? There’s your inspiration for a whole career in experimental drone.
While 1981’s Deceit is more accessible, with more recognisable songs, their self-titled debut – now reissued on vinyl to celebrate 50 years since the band’s formation – remains the purest document of the band’s mercurial talents. Its recording was a long process conducted over two years, in various professional studios and at home, often with one stereo mic in Hayward’s bedroom at his parents’ house in Camberwell, south London. There was live material too, particularly “Rainforest”, captured at their first gig on February 13, 1976, at The Three Horseshoes pub in Hampstead, north London, before they were even called This Heat.
The group had come together not long before that. Hayward had played in Quiet Sun with a pre-fame Phil Manzanera, and briefly with Gong, and appeared on Manzanera’s 1975 LP Diamond Head and on Quiet Sun’s Mainstream, recorded at the same time. Charles Bullen had met Hayward through a Melody Maker ad in the early ’70s, and the two had explored free jazz, European improvisation and world music – Bullen had an impressive record collection including a hefty chunk of Nonesuch Explorer Series – playing together in various projects such as Dolphin Logic and Radar Favourites. The latter were briefly managed by visual artist Gareth Williams and the three hit it off, with Williams’ enthusiasm, wild ideas and lack of conventional musical ability a useful addition to the skills of the two Charles’.
Together the trio set off into boundless experimentation, with a love of tape edits and discord, and a disdain for conventional songs. They chased the energy of an idea, rather than the recording fidelity, entering a kind of flow state only matched by Can or The Beatles – two other groups who experimented spontaneously in the studio, combining ideas from high and low culture with global influences.
“Rainforest”, then, a taste of the very earliest This Heat sound, is murky, free jazz clatter, with Hayward heavy on the cymbals and jittery organ drones cutting through the maelstrom. “Water” shows their time spent with those Nonesuch Explorer records, shifting from gamelan rattles to the kind of gothic drone John Cale was so adept at creating. Meanwhile, “Diet Of Worms” – referring not to the latest food fad but to a 1521 assembly of the Holy Roman Empire in the Rhineland city of Worms – keeps to the treble register with piercing, discordant organ and squawking reeds, not unlike Henry Cow’s more outré moments.
Each of these pieces have their own personalities and don’t outstay their welcome; and they act as useful interludes between the more rhythmic, up-tempo tracks on the record. There’s the opener proper, “Horizontal Hold”, which switches fidelities as it moves from churning noise-rock to sudden patches of silence, its caustic dub feel and pointillist guitar a future echo of The Pop Group. “24 Track Loop” finds the band taking a loping groove and subjecting it to all kinds of treatments – notably an Eventide Harmonizer – using the master tape and mixing desk like a primitive sampler.
Two of the most bewitching tracks on This Heat come when they mix these previous modes with lyrics and vocals. There’s “Twilight Furniture”, closing Side One with a hollow tom-heavy drum pattern, the occasional twang of guitar, eerie howls in the background and lyrical evocations of some tense, war-torn purgatory: “Ceasefire ends at midnight/Curfew starts at 10…” The haunting final minute finds the track overwhelmed by queasy, mournful strings.
“Not Waving” could almost be a Robert Wyatt ballad, yet it’s played so slowly that it stretches the boundaries of song. Over a harmonium-like organ and all manner of slowed-down and manipulated background recordings from all three members, Hayward references Stevie Smith’s poem in chilling lines: “Here I am in the ocean/Not waving but drowning… Learn to love the water/It will love you like there’s no tomorrow…”
The penultimate “The Fall Of Saigon” is the culmination of their explorations. Over clanking, mechanical rhythms that throw forward to Scott Walker’s later perversions, the group together deliver Hayward’s dada-esque lyrics set during the 1975 fall of the South Vietnam capital: “We ate Soda, the embassy cat… the ambassador’s wife had the liver…” For the last two and a half minutes, Bullen delivers an explosive, avant-garde guitar solo that’s as mesmerising and terrifying as the lyrical content. It bleeds and decays seamlessly into the closing computer burble of “Testcard”, which also begins the album.
50 years after the sessions began, one might expect This Heat to feel a little too familiar, perhaps even charmingly dated. Instead, it remains vibrant and surprising, and still far stranger than almost anything its disciples produced. Out of time, forever fresh.