This Heat

Many like to recall the antagonism between punk and progressive through the "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt sported by Johnny Rotten at a Sex Pistols gig: it became the symbol of punk's revolt against rock's "dinosaurs", the mark of incompatibility between the new generation's music and the ideas that fuelled the old one. Yet there's a secret path connecting (post-)punk and progressive, and few albums reveal it as clearly as the second record by London's This Heat.

More than any anecdote, it's their line-up that tells the story: Charles Hayward, a drummer with a formidably jazzy touch, Charles Bullen, a skilled clarinettist who reinvented himself as a guitarist, and Gareth Williams, a record-shop manager and voracious connoisseur of underground music who, at least in the band's early days, was totally unable to play anything at all. In the gap between Hayward's progressive pedigree (he drummed for Canterbury act Quiet Sun) and Williams's anarchic DIY approach lies the source of the band's uniqueness, of their intrinsically divergent character.

This Heat were absolute outsiders. They emerged in the wake of the punk revolution and shared much of its spirit: the feral sound, the hostility toward instrumental technique for its own sake, the cult of do-it-yourself, the desire to bring music back down to earth, into the cities, right into the heart of real political and social conditions. Yet with the bands of the progressive wave they had just as much in common: Hayward's instrumental prowess, a passion for unconventional rhythmic interplay and segmented compositions, a radical aversion to the blues, fiercely experimental ambition, and meticulous attention to detail. Their dual nature made them a half-hidden bridge between the most extreme fringes of the progressive galaxy - kraut-rock, the Canterbury sound, Rock In Opposition - and the most urban, intellectual strand of post-punk, tied to Marxism, feminism and post-structuralism (from Gang Of Four to the Pop Group, by way of the Raincoats and early Scritti Politti).

Planning, enactment, manipulation

"Deceit" is the product of an era of transition, and not just musically: it was released in 1981, at the dawn of the "Reagan doctrine", as the spectre of mutually assured destruction once again loomed large. It's essentially a concept album about nuclear apocalypse, steeped in the same leaden mood the band was breathing at the time ("We were convinced we'd all be dead within three years," Hayward would later explain). What made things even more frightening was the sense of torpor they perceived in society, unable to see the web of deception spun by those in power and by the mass media.

The track that opens the album is precisely an invitation to sleep, with the paradigmatic title "Sleep", suspended between idleness and disillusionment: "a life of ease / a life cocooned in a routine of food / stimulus and response". Its little over two minutes offer a "gentle" introduction to the band's sound, with a drowsy gait and a folk element brought well to the fore, both in the call-and-response vocal chant and in the timid rhythm kept by handclaps. Things change radically with "Paper Hats", crooked and unsettling right from the start: the voice is slow and mournful, then crawling and anguished; the guitar is a clattering tangle repeated without variation. At the peak of the din, we suddenly land in a swamp of Can-style rhythmic geometry — a hypnotic, elusive pattern in 11/4 that seems to stop time itself.

An unexpected commentator revealed the secret behind such abstract, calculated architectures: after attending one of the band's rehearsals, Fred Frith of Henry Cow joked that the three members of This Heat had spent the whole time arguing in the most abstruse terms about how the music should sound ("The song should go in this direction and then slowly change" / "No, it's fine as it is" / "I think it's fine too, but I understand why you say what you say" / "No, it mustn't change, because we need to keep it on a uniform plateau")... all without playing a single note! Hayward, Bullen and Williams spent three weeks discussing the pieces in these terms, only to bring them to life in a matter of days once they actually picked up their instruments. In this way, they managed to combine lucidity with improvisational instinct, creating music that wasn't truly "composed", but whose course was nonetheless planned out in detail.

Another fundamental contribution to giving "structure" to material born out of improvisation came from tape manipulation, the direct work on magnetic tape used to merge, within a single track, music recorded at different times (and sometimes on different tracks). This Heat had been tinkering with these kinds of techniques since their very earliest days, and their first album already consisted largely of various loops subjected to cutting and splicing. For live shows they employed two sound engineers, one in charge of the mix, the other of tape treatment. Those who witnessed their concerts admitted they couldn't tell the difference between music played "live" and music that was the product of tape manipulation, not least because instrumental passages were often recorded, altered and played back "on the fly". No one at the time was used to anything like it. One trick the band loved was to settle into an instrumental loop, ride it for a while to give the sound engineer time to record it, and then stop playing and walk off stage, leaving the audience stunned in front of music that kept pouring out of the amplifiers.

Three short tracks, "Shrink Wrap", "Radio Prague" and the closing "Hi Baku Shyo", are the most paradigmatic examples of the use of tape manipulation. Almost every track, however, is in some way the product of these kinds of techniques. "Sleep", for instance, contains a section of "Shrink Wrap", and the two drum parts essentially coincide; the rhythmic backbone of "Triumph" comes from material recorded much earlier; the melody of "Independence" is born from inverting that of "The Fall of Saigon", from the previous LP, and even the background sounds of "S.P.Q.R." date back to the same sessions.

At the roots of violence

It's with "S.P.Q.R." that the album arrives at the core of its central theme, the culture of permanent terror. This is traced back to the Roman Empire ("We organise via property as power / Slavehood and freedom imperial purple / Pax romana! / Suckled by a she wolf / We turn against our brother"), but the admission "We are all Romans" projects it back into the present: as "Cenotaph" puts it: "History repeats itself".

"S.P.Q.R." and "Cenotaph" are also linked on a musical level. What connects them is the highly distinctive use of vocal harmonies: whereas in the vast majority of pop music the secondary voices sit higher than the main melody, here the harmonisations instead extend downward, drawing on older, more esoteric folk-derived patterns. The sense of disorientation is heightened by the unusual chords created by the different vocal parts, often dissonant and linked in unconventional ways. The handling of the parts does indeed recall the style of the wildly progressive Henry Cow, influenced by early-20th-century classical music and European folklore; but by shifting the harmonic interplay — which in Henry Cow emerges from a wide range of instruments — onto voice alone, This Heat achieve a barer, more "hollowed-out" sound, perfectly in tune with the spirit of the album.

This Heat thus managed to ferry the ancestral soul of traditional folk and the harmonic richness of the thorniest progressive rock into the bare, anxiety-ridden territories of post-punk. Their lesson proved fundamental for a whole string of later bands, especially American ones who, starting out from indie-rock, post-hardcore and alternative metal shores, gave rise to new forms of progressive music (chief among them Thinking Plague, Cheer-Accident, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum).

"Makeshift Swahili", on the other hand, is a leap into the razor-sharp math-rock that would later belong to Slint and Gastr del Sol. Guitar and bass strike out at oblique angles, cross paths with the drums and trace the most angular interlocking patterns since the two Crimson "Lark's Tongues" pieces. Yet the This Heat track has something the King Crimson ones lack: coldness, fury and sheer nastiness, which combined with the raw, noisy sound give rise to the fiercest, most animalistic music conceived up to that point (and perhaps still today). The voice is a roar one step away from the growl that extreme metal would later adopt, and the drone held by the organ makes the atmosphere even more tense and unsettling. Accounts tell of Williams, at live shows, placing a keyboard borrowed from Dave Jarrett of Quiet Sun on the floor and pounding it savagely, at times even drawing blood, not out of punk irreverence, but because "it was the only way to get the right sound out of it".

If that's not enough to account for the reputation as "the most violent band ever heard", earned after just a handful of concerts, the closing section of "Makeshift Swahili" banishes any remaining doubt. The track on the record is a fusion of three recordings, two studio takes and one live — the latter being the final section. The moment it kicks in, the blood runs cold: the sound is crystallised chaos, the instruments indistinguishable from one another; all that emerges are the guitar's razor-sharp slashes, the crashing roar of the cymbals and Williams's feral screams. It's hell translated into music.

21st Century Schizoid Men

All the souls of "Deceit" converge in "A New Kind Of Water", which is also the most explicit realisation of the noxious mood permeating the album. The vocal starts out as a folk lament, but through a dizzying crescendo it turns into the record's most melodic episode: an epic, desperate unison choral assault, fuelled by anguished disillusionment. The lyrics coat the apocalyptic omens hanging over the whole album in the blackest sarcasm: once industrialisation and nuclear energy have made the planet uninhabitable, once the race for wealth has led to absolute poverty, all that will be needed is "a new kind of water, a new way to breathe".

This Heat saw in this illusion the condemnation of their era: a society hypnotised by deceit, unable either to see the threat or to react to it. There was much debate within the band over whether the lyrics should be written in the second or third person plural, or in the first — it was the difference between an act of accusation and a disenchanted admission of guilt. The latter view prevailed: it was no longer possible to distinguish between black and white, between individuals who were part of the problem and others who were part of the solution. The constant need for an external "monster" to blame was itself part of the problem.

The cover originally envisioned for the album was meant to depict the band playing their instruments, wired directly into a nuclear power plant: the record itself was part of the problem. Instead they opted for an expressionistic collage in which mushroom clouds, maps of nuclear arsenals, and the faces of Reagan and Brezhnev merge into a gaunt, screaming mask. It's also through the analogy between this tormented face and that of the "21st Century Schizoid Man" on "In The Court Of The Crimson King" that the secret connection between progressive rock and post-punk runs — a connection of which "Deceit" is the unrepeatable masterpiece.

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24/12/2010