Understanding The Impossibly Far-Reaching Influence Of This Heat
This Heat has always had the uncanny ability to appear — and, then, after quietly disappearing, reappear — right on time.
In 1975, as the U.S. fled Saigon and Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party began its slow ascent, two multi-instrumental veterans of the London rock underground, Charles Hayward and Charles Bullen, recruited self-proclaimed "non-musician" Gareth Williams to start a defiant rock trio. Taking the name This Heat, the three decamped, ironically, to a once-refrigerated food locker in an abandoned meat pie factory, overrun by a confederation of zealous artists. This Heat called their home Cold Storage.
The sounds and ideas coming from Cold Storage defied easy conventions of genre. On two LPs and a single, This Heat, still reeling from the aftershocks of World War II, railed against nationalist dogmas, nuclear war and any view of humanity that might limit one's self-discovery. Operating under the credo "All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four hour alert," This Heat mined dub and Dada, prog-rock and politics, tape manipulation and tempestuously heavy rock. It could be loud and mean, eerie and apocalyptic, funny and catchy.
This Heat existed for less than seven years; the trio's very distinct personalities and penchant for endless debate steadily pulled it apart. Still, the group's extreme experimental impulses and magpie-like enthusiasm for disparate influences made this tiny catalog of music one of rock and roll's most low-key-influential.
In fact, after LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy "Have you seen my records?" during his chronicle of cool, "Losing My band he namechecks, long before Scott Walker, Gil Scott-Heron, or even Lou Reed. This Heat helped facilitate the ever-widening scope of indie rock, and predicted some of the thornier paths electronic music would pursue. You can hear This Heat's tension in post-punk and art-rock, from Women to Stereolab to Deerhunter, their frisson in noise-rock, their fluidity within interconnected improvisational scenes. More than four decades later, This Heat's music still feels radically free, unlimited in the shapes it can take.
