Song of the Week #3 – “Independence” by This Heat
I can recall the moment I was introduced to This Heat. It was, strangely enough, at my secondary school prom on (appropriately enough) the 4th of July 2012, where my old IT teacher, a fairly quiet man who kept himself to himself, chatted to me about some of his favourite music. Earlier that day I had played a personally curated mix of music out of my laptop, hooked up to a sound-system and using a DJ controller, at our school leavers’ assembly and he found, to his surprise, that I was a fan of Lemon Jelly, a mildly-obscure electronic band, to whom I had been introduced by a school friend (Hi, Alex).
My teacher was first and foremost a fan of Radiohead, but he also told me to listen to Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica (1969) as well as a band that I had never heard of, called This Heat. While Trout Mask Replica remains an occasional listen, I find myself returning to This Heat’s discography over and over again. This Heat are, perhaps, one of the strangest bands ever to come out of this green and pleasant isle, though the majority of This Heat’s music is anything but green and pleasant.
Formed in 1976 by multi-instrumentalists Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth Williams, This Heat’s music could be described as “proto-industrial”, experimental rock, and art rock. Some of their music even anticipates post-rock, though this is a far cry from the beautifully intricate soundscapes of Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden (1988) or the devastating beauty of Sigur Rós’s “Hoppípolla”. This is bleak, dirty, homebrewed music. Often when listening to their music you get the sense it’s being recorded in someone’s woodshed and that the instruments consist of old jars, bits of aluminium and wood interspersed with more conventional instrumentation like guitars. This isn’t too far from the truth: the band’s “studio”, named Cold Storage, was literally the cold storage room of an abandoned meat pie factory located in Brixton.
This Heat seemed to thrive on breaking convention: Rather than gain exposure through more official channels, This Heat sent their tapes to John Peel, who played their music on his radio show, which landed them a record contract with the independent record label Piano, which of course meant that This Heat would remain a fairly obscure outfit.
This Heat’s first album is titled, aptly enough, This Heat (1979), often referred to as Blue and Yellow to distinguish it from its namesake, and because the cover consists of the words “This Heat” written in yellow on navy blue (funny that). It is a heavily experimental album, opening with the track “Testcard”, which consists of electronic bleeping, which soon transitions into “Horizontal Hold”, a growling, often atonal wall of sound that changes timbre, time signature and even musical structure seemingly at complete random. Particularly notable on this album is the darkly humorous track “The Fall of Saigon” which depicts the denizens of the American embassy in Saigon during the final days of the Vietnam War, blockaded and without food, forced to resort to eating the furniture and even “Soda, the embassy cat”, with the aside “For last we saved the janitor…” It transpires that the people stranded in the embassy consider eating a cat to be more dehumanising and cursèd than literal cannibalism.
The follow-up to This Heat, titled Deceit (1981) – it’s a pun, geddit? – is a significantly more structured and focused album. Released on Rough Trade, it followed an EP titled Health and Efficiency (1980), the title track of which sounds almost like an outtake from Stereolab’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996).
Deceit is an angry, paranoid album, hitting out against the notion of patriotism and unquestioning support for one’s country. The album’s cover depicts an image of a human face in an open-mouthed grimace, on to which has been projected a collage of Cold War-related imagery, most prominently the Stars and Stripes and a nuclear mushroom cloud.
The theme of the album is nuclear paranoia and the seeming inevitability of annihilation, as well as the futility of nationalism and of expansionist conflict: “SPQR” and “Cenotaph” respectively deal with nationalism in the face of civilisational collapse using the analogy and imagery of the fall of the Roman Empire, and the useless pageantry of Remembrance Day.
The song on the album that most struck me when I first listened to it at sixteen years old fresh out of secondary school was “Makeshift Swahili”, which features screamed vocals, which is unusual for the early 80s. While it is fairly common to hear screamed vocals in music now, “Makeshift Swahili” features a disturbing, nasally snarl of a vocal that sounds genuinely unhinged, and in 1981 would have been fairly shocking to the ears of many listeners, especially when it sounds like the singer is actually in pain. The vocalist, Charles Hayward, barks and shrieks about the breakdown of language at the top of his lungs.
The album’s crown jewel, however, in my opinion, is “Independence”, probably the most melodic and consistent track on the album. It makes use of a haunting, reverberant woodwind, sparse percussion, and spidery guitar and bass over which there are the wailed vocals of the entirety of the band, who sing the opening two paragraphs of the United States Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be / Self-evident, that all men are created equal / That they are endowed by their creator / With certain rights”.
The lyrics are almost unchanged from the words of the original Declaration, but what is striking to me is that the musical context into which the words are placed entirely changes their meaning. First and foremost, the tune of “Independence” is actually the tune of “The Fall of Saigon” backwards, and second of all the words change from being the intended triumphant declaration of the inevitable victory of secular liberal democracy over theocratic absolute monarchy to being a mournful, almost resigned plea to destroy America before it destroys the world. The closing lines: “That whenever any form of government / Becomes destructive of these ends / It is the right of the people to alter or abolish it” seems to be a call to action – by the late 1970s America had indeed become destructive of the right to “Life, liberty / And the pursuit of happiness”. This Heat, very much anarchist-leaning, recontextualise arguably the most famous piece of liberal writing ever put to paper as an impassioned argument for the abolishment of government, especially the United States’ federal government.
Remember, the wording has not changed at all – it is entirely the artistic context that alters the meaning and intent behind the text, which is a fascinating demonstration of the mutability of texts. “Independence” is one of the most cleverly-written pieces of music ever, and the lyrics are almost entirely unchanged from a text from which they have been lifted, wholesale. The piece takes my breath away every time I hear it, especially in combination with its immediate successor, “A New Kind of Water”, which sarcastically offers its hope that people won’t be so stupid as to destroy the Earth, and the instrumental “Hi Baku Shyo” (which in Japanese means “Suffer Bomb Disease”), which features a quiet electronic drone, an atonal melodica, the buzzing of an insect, the clanging of a church bell, a chirping bird or squeaking mouse, a babbling male voice, and, distantly, something moaning, before an abrupt silence – clearly meant to represent the universal devastation after a nuclear war – the total end of language, the breakdown of culture, the end of meaning, purpose and reason and, above all, a sense of hopeless, terrifying inevitability.
This Heat are not for everyone. They are, indeed, the musical equivalent of Samuel Beckett or James Joyce – densely layered, often difficult to understand and sometimes deeply disturbing, but I believe they are worthy of relistening, and Deceit is an absolute essential for anyone that likes political rock music, post-punk, industrial or screamed vocals. It is definitely not for the faint of heart, but for me it warrants listening to again and again.