Records Revisited: This Heat – This Heat (1979)

Whenever someone uses the term post-punk, they usually refer to bands like Gang of Four, Joy Division, The Fall, or Public Image Ltd. They think of angular—slightly funky, but too dry to actually be groovy—guitar riffs and of tight rhythm sections that march on relentlessly while someone shout-sings angrily over them. Maybe some additional keyboard sounds, or even dub elements. But barely anyone thinks of the band that probably best represented the post-punk situation: This Heat.

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This Heat
This Heat
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The punk movement strove to destroy rock’n’roll but ended up reducing it to its core elements: blues-based chord progressions, amps all turned up to eleven, unhinged debauchery. Post-punk adapted its do-it-yourself spirit, and combined it with rigorous experimentalism, eschewing most rock tropes—including, in some cases, the guitar. In this sense, This Heat were post-punk before punk even emerged: When they formed in early 1976, the Sex Pistols had yet to play at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall.

Drummer Charles Hayward was a member of Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera’s Canterbury prog-rock band Quiet Sun when multi-instrumentalist Charles Bullen came in to replace the bandleader. After the group’s demise, the two formed a three-piece with non-musician Gareth Williams. Shortly thereafter, This Heatstarted recording music in the cold store of a Brixton meat pie factory. An early demo caught legendary radio presenter John Peel’s attention, but their self-titled debut LP took them two years to complete.

Freie Experimente über Proto-Sampling

This Heat was released in 1979, the same year in which post-punk classics like Unknown Pleasures, Entertainment!, Live at the Witch Trials, and Metal Box came out, but is barely ever mentioned alongside those records. That makes sense: Its eleven pieces—the first of which is completely silent for 47 seconds—were culled from different studio and live recordings that the three collaged together. The end results hardly resemble songs, and the ones that have any lyrics do not make immediate sense.

This literally unheard-of music proved that while everyone wanted to destroy rock’n’roll, This Heat were the only ones who achieved that goal.

In other words, This Heat was the most radical post-punk album of 1979. After the silent opener »Testcard«–one of the two pieces with that name on the record—the band explodes into »Horizontal Hold,« a chugging beast with a heavy low-end, occasional dub elements and a jagged approach to detuned funk guitar that makes The Pop Group sound like Jackson Five. It offers no discernible structure, just variations in intensity—and a guitar solo that took all the right lessons from the Buzzcocks’ satirical two-note solo in »Boredom.«

Following their motto »All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four-hour alert,« This Heat plow further through »Not Waving,« a 7 ½-minute-long exercise in applying musique concrète-techniques to what could even be considered songwriting. Its eerie soundscaping best exemplifies the deconstructivist approach of the three, who manipulated recordings in ways that amounted to a sort of primitive proto-sampling while entering in a dialogue with the free improvisation movement, as the next piece »Water« amply proves.

More of a manifesto than an album

With its feverishly rolling drums, relatively conventional guitar melodies, and tormented sprechgesang, »Twilight Furniture« almost resembles the music of contemporaries like Joy Division, but already the next piece shatters any semblance to conventional music: »24 Track Loop« is a visionary experiment with sort-of-sampled, dubbed-out breakbeats that are punctuated by wailing chords—a missing link between Karlheinz Stockhausen, Muslimgauze, and jungle perhaps.

This literally unheard-of music proved that while everyone wanted to destroy rock’n’roll, This Heat were the only ones who achieved that goal. This spirit also reverberates through the drone-inspired »Diet of Worms,« the aptly titled »Music Like Escaping Gas,« the fiery free jazz of »Rainforest« and »The Fall of Saigon,« a sort of industrial/neo-folk hybrid avant la lettre. The second »Testcard« piece closes This Heat with repetitive feedback noise as an abrasive, non-musical finale to an abrasive and sometimes not-quite-musical record.

This Heat were born out of the music scene that punk rebelled against. However, before punk even started out in earnest, this band went one step further than even the groups that promised to go further than punk. This Heat can barely be called an album, but it was a mission statement: a promise to push things a lot further than anyone else. While it might not be the most famous post-punk album, this makes it the definitive one.