They rehearsed in a former meat pie factory, drawing on claustrophobic 80s London to make violently anxious music – but This Heat, finally available to stream, talk about how they wanted to appeal to everyone
Over lockdown, says Charles Hayward, he found his thoughts turning to This Heat, the wildly influential band he played in 40 years ago. It wasn’t the Covid-fuelled atmosphere of dread and paranoia that did it, although plenty of people heard dread and paranoia in the music This Heat made between 1977 – when the wider world first became aware of the extraordinary sound made by Hayward and fellow members Charles Bullen and the late Gareth Williams thanks to a John Peel session – and 1982, when they split after their second album, Deceit. It was what he calls “the grain of sound” on TV at the moment.
“Because everyone’s doing everything from home, production values have become very interchangeable – sometimes a show can go from one sort of technological texture to another, and people aren’t batting an eyelid. You’re listening to the news, or a comedy programme and it’s jumping from one sort of grain to the other, one acoustic to another and you’re making your own connections. That is what This Heat records are.”
