The Sounds of Explosions: This Heat’s “Deceit” at 40
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This month, Deceit by This Heat turns 40 years old.
It’s not a particularly well-known album, even among avid musicheads, but it’s still considered one of the greatest albums of the year of its release, if not the decade of its release. The user-curated music-review aggregator Rate Your Music lists it as the 28th best album of the 1980s, and the 2nd best album of 1981, behind Discipline by King Crimson.
In 2018, I wrote of how I was first introduced to This Heat by chance at my secondary school leavers’ prom, where one of my teachers, a thin man with a love of Radiohead and a weariness that hung over him like a pall, admitted to me that he was surprised I was familiar with the music of the electronic band Lemon Jelly. He proceeded to instruct me to listen to a host of bands I’d never heard of – Soft Machine, Matching Mole, Robert Wyatt, Captain Beefheart, Stereolab, Radiohead, and a band called This Heat.
I went home after the dance, getting back to my bedroom at around 3 a.m., and hurriedly jotted down the band names I could remember in a notebook. In the six weeks’ holiday that followed, I went searching around the Web for the sounds my teacher had mentioned. Some of the things I found I immediately loved. Others I bounced right off. And some grew on me.
Deceit was one of the ones that took its time to “click” for me. I first listened to a couple of tracks from the album in 2012, but I didn’t really “get it” until about 2018, and wasn’t able to listen to the album all the way through until 2020.
This essay is an exploration of Deceit after 40 years, how it remains relevant to the modern day, and what it says about the times we are living through.
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This Heat consisted of three members: Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth Williams. They were active from 1976 to 1982. Williams died of cancer in 2001. Bullen and Hayward reformed the band temporarily between 2016 and 2019 as This Is Not This Heat, but produced no new compositions.
The band were popularised in large part by the BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, and played for him in a set of sessions in 1977, which were later released on an LP simply titled The Peel Sessions in 1988, and then again on an LP titled Made Available: John Peel Sessions.
Deceit was recorded between 1977 and 1981, largely at a studio called Cold Storage, quite literally the cold storage area of a former meat packing plant, converted into a recording studio. Much of the band’s studio work was recorded here – their first album, simply titled This Heat, was also recorded there.
This Heat is a very different animal to Deceit. It’s far more abstract and loose, with less focus on any one idea. It’s more of a series of sound-paintings, atmospheres that find their ground in evocation rather than outright statement.
The most political track on that album, “The Fall of Saigon”, is a darkly-humorous story about a group of beatnik consuls barricaded inside the American embassy in Saigon as the Vietcong militia close in – to avoid starvation, they are forced to cook and eat the embassy’s pet cat, Soda, saving “the janitor” for last. (Online lyrics sheets disagree with me on that last point, believing the lyric “The last thing, save the janitor” to be “The Russians saved the janitor”. I think that interpretation is wrong, and in the absence of anything substantive that says otherwise, I reject it.)
Between This Heat and Deceit, This Heat performed live shows, before releasing the Health and Efficiency EP in 1980.
The title track of Health and Efficiency is closer to the sound of Deceit, and deceptively upbeat and positive: its opening lines proclaim it to be “a song about the sunshine, dedicated to the sunshine”, followed by a wall of cacophonous rhythms, over which are chanted a series of cynically optimistic slogans: “Enthusiasm will energise!”, “Mind over matter – love over gold – momentum over stasis!”
This beautiful chaos then collapses into a rigid, mechanised motif that lasts six minutes, backdropped by the sounds of clanging machinery and children playing in a school playground, all individuality suddenly lost in the awesome underbelly of some great, all-consuming clockwork that renders all life into oil for its gears.
I interpret the song as a satirical observation on the illusion of opportunity and freedom in capitalism (“Health”) contrasted with the day-to-day drudgery of trying to survive within the limits that it must, by its very nature, impose (“Efficiency”).
This sense of humour all but disappears on Deceit. The playful abstraction of its predecessors is superseded by a more concrete and structured form – the songs begin to resemble hummable tunes, but lose none of their abrasion and experimentalism.
What follows from this new approach is a harrowing listen, a desperate howl of apocalyptic anxiety that delves into some bleak truths about the modern human condition that still resonate to this day, even if the Cold War anxieties on which the album was based have since been replaced by a new array of nightmares.
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The first thing you notice about Deceit is the cover. A black background and a human face: contorted, its mouth open wide as if screaming, yet grimacing and grinning unsettlingly, madly, as if experiencing some unknowable, savage joy.
Projected on the blank mask of its skin, an anxious phantasmagoria: a mushroom cloud, a young couple smiling, politicians, the mouth stuffed to satiety with the red-and-white stripes of the United States flag.
Here is a system of semiotics designed to imbue madness with meaning, death with purpose, war with political significance.
And here is what lies beneath: Here is chaos, destruction, Hell, the death of hope.
Here is Deceit.
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The album opens with the sound of soft twanging, before we hear a gentle, half-whispered vocal singing a lullaby: “Sleep, sleep, sleep, go to sleep…”
“Sleep,” the opening track of Deceit, rips its lyrics from advertising slogans. It’s a deceptively peaceful song, similar to “Health and Efficiency” before it, but closer study betrays the sarcasm behind them lyrics: The singer speaks as a representative of official culture, inducing the listener into a suggestible hypnotic state (“You are now in a deep sleep…”)
The singer then proceeds to assure the listener of the opportunities and experiences laid out for them – “Endless possibilities / A life coccooned in a routine of food.”
“Sleep” establishes what will be a continuing theme of Deceit – a profoundly pessimistic attitude to civilisation, to the ways base animal needs have informed human culture. After all, civilisation was founded on the development of agriculture. Once you can grow food, you can trade food with other people.
More importantly – and here is what is deliberately not being said – once you can produce enough food that nobody in your society goes hungry, what happens when the people across the river from you have a bad season? You’ve only enough to feed your own. But them across the river, they need to eat. And they happen to have a lot of pointy sticks. When push comes to shove, what are you willing to do to stop them across the river from taking what is yours?
Thus, here is the introduction of the album’s overarching theme: The history of war and conquest, driven by the very same base human physiological and psychological needs that drove the rise of civilisation.
“Sleep”, however, isn’t simply pontificating about how humans are all bastards. That’s a lousy approach. Instead, it points out how this hierarchy of needs is deliberately obfuscated by the advanced culture in which we live; adverts promise us delicious Bird’s Eye beefburgers, chicken McNuggets dipped in barbecue sauce, the refreshing taste of Coca-Cola on a hot day, the pleasant sweetness of a Dairy Milk chocolate bar – things we convince ourselves we “need”, but are false needs, not nourishment but sheer hedonism.
Modern human beings have long surpassed fulfilling their basic needs for clean water and food, and yet warfare, which has existed for almost as long as civilisation, continues unabated. Why is this? That, indeed, is the question that the album sets out to answer.
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“Sleep” is followed by two of the more oblique tracks on the album: “Paper Hats” and “Triumph”.
“Paper Hats” was originally a composition called “Rimp Romp Ramp”, one of the tracks This Heat recorded at Maida Vale for a Peel session. “Rimp Romp Ramp” is a very different track to “Paper Hats”, but they share an atmospheric attitude to the composition. “Paper Hats” features a lyrical first section followed by a lengthy instrumental section filled with experimentation.
The lyrical section features the use of Charles Hayward’s screamed vocals, something that will become more intense and disturbing on the album’s second half. Here, there is a repeated use of the phrase “the sounds of explosions”.
The lyrics here can be compared to the lyrics to “Sky Saw” by Eno, where the singer admits that the lyrics are deliberately obscure (cf. “All the words float in sequence, no one knows what they mean / Everyone just ignores them” and “What does this tune signify? / What is its meaning? / Is it really that straightforward? / Or are our ears just beyond words?”)
However, what meaning that is there again seems to be built around the nihilism of modern warfare, which no longer serves any concrete or discernible goal, juxtaposing the absurdity of that with more trivial worries about interior decoration and “comfort” (another recurring theme on the album).
“Triumph” is deliberately discordant, opening with almost childlike banging on the keys of an electronic organ that dissolves into a lopsided melody backed by percussion that sounds something like a Jacob’s Ladder toy. This is followed by a tune being hummed on kazoo. There is a deliberate amateurishness and primitivism to this composition.
The lyrics are concerned with what Charles Hayward terms a “basic power structure” – a person looking at another person through net curtains for an instant, invisible to the person outside the curtains. A thin veneer of sheer translucent fabric is all that is sufficient to make one person superior to another – able to observe that person’s every move while never themself being noticed by the observed.
Power is frequently examined in the album’s lyrics, particularly its origins and abuses. Previously, I have referred to This Heat as “very much anarchist-leaning”. While I cannot verify what political persuasions the band members had or have, nor would I want to ask them such a dull question, it is safe to assume that the songs on Deceit are concerned with the power structures that made modern society, and the ethos behind them.
“Triumph” ends with a deflating utterance of the phrase “Triumph of the will” – the English name of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph das Willens – as though utterly bored by the mundanity of the situation, while drawing a comparison between the simple construction of a “basic power structure” and the more complex power structures that allowed the totalitarian state of Nazi Germany to come into being, suggesting perhaps that small agglomerations of these power structures can accumulate into something much larger and more horrifying.
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Deceit is often characterised as a “post-punk” album, though musically it defies classification, often leaning more into progressive rock, even resembling the post-rock that would become more familiar a decade after its release.
“S.P.Q.R.”, however, is undeniably post-punk, featuring a raucous and jangly guitar line and an uptempo beat that evokes African polyrhythms (also employed on Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, which came out the previous year).
Named for the Roman motto “Senatus Populusque Romanus”, or “The Roman Senate and People”, “S.P.Q.R.” draws a comparison behind the Roman Empire, the earliest example of modern imperialism and structures of power, and the empires that have come after it.
This also includes the former British Empire, which at its height controlled one-quarter of the world, and the more recent rise of the United States of America as an imperial hegemon.
The frantic vocal adopts the use of the first-person plural, signifying that it is the voice of SPQR rather than the voice of any individual: “We are all Romans, unconscious collective / We are all Romans, we live to regret it.”
Yet, this collective narrator is far from a simple history tutor. The lyric presents the listener with observations about the similarity between civilisations past and civilisation present: “We organise via property-as-power / Slavehood and freedom, imperial purple.”
Hayward wrote in 2016 that the song presents “a cultural view of history and logic and expedience and how we are inside that, too”. This is demonstrated in the line “We know all about straight roads / Every straight road leads home, home to Rome”, as well as the repeated refrain “Two plus two equals four / Four plus four equals eight.” For the imperial subject, the logic of empire is as real and immutable as the fact that two and two will always equal four – it is an absolute, mathematical truth.
And yet, we, living after the fall of the Roman Empire and the British Empire know that this logic is false; empires and emperors eventually, inevitably collapse and die. Yet, we assume that the world we live in today will never change radically. We somehow divorce our understanding of the present from our understanding of history. A common and very basic cognitive bias in human beings is the assumption that from the present we can extrapolate what the future will be like, when in fact the future is determined by chaotic forces we cannot understand.
Just as the Romans could not foresee the fall of their Empire, neither can we see the fall of civilisation as we know it – the civilisation that promises to fulfill our needs and provide us comforts (if we choose to participate in it, of course) is made of connections, threaded together by economic and political relationships, agreements both implicit and explicit.
If anything were to severely damage those connections, such as war, economic or environmental collapse, or, indeed, plague, that civilisation will disintegrate, casting the individuals who live within it into the abyss. An analogy might be that a string of spider silk has the tensile strength of steel, but a cobweb will disintegrate if you put your hand through it, because it is the system of connections themselves that are fragile, not the relationships that take place along those connections.
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“S.P.Q.R.” is followed by a slower-paced track called “Cenotaph”, which also uses polyrhythms, but resembles a Black Sabbath song in its use of doomy, dreary riffs.
A sardonic and bitter critique of the Remembrance Sunday observations that take place in Commonwealth countries in November, the song satirises the superficiality of buying and wearing poppies while around the world, pointless and endless wars continue to take place. (“History, history repeats itself, history repeats itself.”)
The singer observes that the apparent mournful observance that takes place on Remembrance Sunday doesn’t actually do anything substantive to prevent war (which was, to be sure, the original intention of Remembrance Sunday) – serving instead to glorify war as “keep[ing] freedom’s flag flying”, despite the fact that the First World War is well-known as having had no real point other than moving lines about on a map, and the Second World War, while today characterised as an antifascist war, was almost entirely provoked by Hitler reneging on treaty obligations as opposed to any substantive ideological disagreement with his politics.
The lyrics sarcastically imply that the only “remembrance” that takes place on Remembrance Sunday is the remembrance that “poppies are red, and the fields are full of poppies” – the political and ethical ramifications of both world wars and every war thereafter, reduced to little more than performative symbolism that deflects from the troubling idea that millions of people died pointlessly for nation-states that callously paid them no regard – the same people now commemorated as “The Glorious Dead”, inscribed on the titular Cenotaph situated on London’s Whitehall.
Even more bleakly, the song goes on to predict the Third World War, a war expected to be far more violent and deadly than any other conflict in human history. The First World War was wrongly assumed to be the “war to end all wars”, but the Third World War has the potential to end all life on Earth due to the use of nuclear weapons: “Rain and snow will be all that fall from out of the sky” could be read as a line about nuclear winter, albeit the theory of nuclear winter was not popularised until a few years after the album’s release.
It is here that the album introduces the theme of nuclear anxiety. Released at the height of the Cold War, the album’s lyrics begin to take a sharper and darker turn here, expressing the songwriters’ genuine terror at the possibility of Armageddon any day. And this terror was justified: In 1983, just two years after the album’s release, the world came terrifyingly close to nuclear war due to Soviet misinterpretation of Western military exercises.
The question posed by “Cenotaph” is thus: “What is the point in remembering past wars if the next war will be a thousand times as deadly?”
The repeated refrain, “History repeats itself” is of course a paraphrasing of George Santayana’s 1905 observation: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” However, it provides a corollary to that observation: “Those who think to remember the past, but do not learn from it, are condemned to repeat it.”
It also follows on from the previous song’s expression that in the grand scope, very little has really changed since the dawn of civilisation – the superficial aspects have shifted, but the fundamental structures remain the same: power motivated by the basic desire for security and comfort.
This dark turn, aptly, closes the album’s first side on the vinyl release. From here on out, the album becomes starker and more cynical in its lyricism and subject matter.
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The album’s second side opens with the same twanging sound that began “Sleep”, but far from a lullaby, the listener is instead assaulted by the ritualistic pounding of drums and a chant: “Shrink wrap, you lie, you lie, you lie…”
“Shrink Wrap” feels almost like a deliberate inversion of “Sleep”: While “Sleep” is about the hypnotic power of official culture in making modern civilisation legitimate, “Shrink Wrap” is about the artifice of consumer society – namely what Karl Marx and his followers term “commodity fetichism”, the perception of commodities as having inherent value that resides within the object itself rather than arising out of the complex relationships that produce the object.
The “shrink wrap” of the title refers to the cellophane we often find food wrapped in at the shops. We may know, rationally, that this food comes from a factory where workers bake it or mix ingredients, and those ingredients themselves come from farms and other production facilities, but everything about the way we relate to shrink wrapped food is based on the collective fiction that the food simply arrives on the shelf already tagged with a price, and that the item possesses an inherent value untethered to labour, thus alienating the consumer from the labourers that work to produce their food. This can also be applied to their homes, their clothes, their televisions, and so on.
Hence, the items are described by the chorus of chanting voices as “untouched by human hands”, before the listener is angrily ordered not to question this lie: “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth! / Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!” This is then compounded by another lie: “You can have your cake and eat it!”
Both “Sleep” and “Shrink Wrap” can be considered two sides of the same coin. Both songs feature the line “Stimulus and response”, but presented in different contexts.
“Sleep” presents “stimulus and response” as the motivator behind civilisation – the desire for an escape from suffering and a basic need for food, shelter and water.
“Shrink Wrap”, on the other hand, features “stimulus and response” after the line “Define the hollow spaces”. The lyric is here referring to supply and demand, and the ways in which the economy can behave like an organism, up to and including periods of ill health.
It is drawing a comparison between the motivation behind the development of civilisation – animal need – and the ways in which the economy that keeps that civilisation alive behaves in its own way like an animal with needs.
The song ends on a voice quietly murmuring “It’s an expanding universe”, referring to the perpetual growth needed for modern capitalism to function. While capitalism is only a recent invention and civilisation existed long before it, “S.P.Q.R.” has already made the point that capitalism is just a new configuration of the power structures that predate it by some thousands of years.
Thus, the problems with the modern economy are just a new expression of an ancient problem – how to satisfy need, and the seemingly inevitable conflicts of power and class that arise from unsatisfactory solutions to that problem.
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“Shrink Wrap” ends abruptly, interrupted by a rapid thudding sound like a tachycardic heartbeat, and an electronic humming. Emerging from this anxious pulse come bursts of sound – random snippets of voices, jingles, and then the loud groaning of whirring motors.
This is “Radio Prague”, an improvised sound collage that evokes the rapid pace of modern communications systems, and the anxiety they engender. It forms the first half of a mini-suite that deals with language. In this instance, a Czech flood warning pops in and out of the drone, generating a sense of confusion, the speech passing too quickly to be comprehensible but recognisably human.
Information flurries and flies around so quickly as to become phantasmagorical, sliding in and out of view but never quite involving the viewer, sliding over them and failing to penetrate. There is a breakdown in communication, eliciting confusion and fear.
The drone of motors soon gives way to what is perhaps the album’s best song, and the first song from Deceit that I ever heard: “Makeshift Swahili”.
“Makeshift Swahili” was originally intended for This Heat, and was one of the songs recorded in 1977 for the Peel sessions, under the title “Makeshift”. It’s a profoundly challenging and disturbing piece, characterised chiefly by a violence and anger in its composition and vocals that many artists would struggle to match.
The screamed vocals that define the song, performed by Charles Hayward, sound agonised beyond sanity, their emotional origin an almost primeval rage – it is not so much singing as barking.
The confusion and anxiety of informational overload characterised by “Radio Prague” is now replaced by a new horror – the collapse of communication; the time, inevitably, when all humanity will be left mute as a result of some catastrophe.
The opening verse describes the listener as someone who cannot understand a woman singing “Makeshift […] in her native German.” The woman tells the listener that “You’re only as good as the words you understand / And you, you don’t understand a word.”
We return to themes of imperialism and civilisation here. Spoken language, and later written language, provided the bedrock for civilisation to develop – to be able to express abstract ideas and speak to others is to be able to describe, and therefore shape, the world around you.
The chorus consists of Hayward screaming various idioms tied to language and comprehension: “Tower of Babel, Swahili / It’s all Greek to me. Bilingual, Double Dutch / Gift of the gab, gift of the gab…”
The very same language that created civilisation can be unmade by the very same civilisation that created it.
The following verse develops this statement on the power of language into a statement on how language can be weaponised. It describes the indigenous peoples of the continent now known as North America, who were condescended and lied to by European colonists in exchange for land, referencing the phrase, attested to have originated with the Iroquois people in the 1690s, that the “white man speaks with a forked tongue”.
By the time the indigenous peoples had realised the trick, the Europeans had enough military strength to crush any resistance. Thus, “It’s too late now to start complaining / Too late.”
The song then collapses into a fuzzy, distorted tape recording, as the screamed vocal returns, howling nonsense phrases – “New lamps for old” and “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb”. Language itself shakes itself to pieces in the face of civilisational collapse, reduced to mere inscrutable noise.
The point “Makeshift Swahili” is trying to make seems to be that language is a tool – a tool of creation and of forming connections, as previously discussed, but also a tool that can be weaponised. A kitchen knife can cut up a carrot, but it can also be used to inflict serious harm on another person. It is a fragile, useful, yet dangerous and sometimes harmful thing. It has created the world we live in, and if the world we live in is destroyed, it shall take language with it.
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Three years ago I wrote a short blog post about “Independence”. In truth, that piece is what inspired me to write this piece – I felt I really hadn’t said all I needed to say about this album in a piece that is, in retrospect, much too short to really encompass the full analytical depth I had been aiming for. While my observations in that post were accurate to what I think now, I’d like to plumb my analysis of the song a bit further.
“Independence” is a fascinating track. Built around a composition style that resembles the music of South Asia (indeed, Gareth Williams left the band in 1981 to learn kathakali in India), it paraphrases the opening lines of the United States Declaration of Independence, recontextualising them into an angry critique of American exceptionalism and its status as a hegemon.
The liberal call to action enshrined in the Declaration by the Founding Fathers of the United States is recontextualised as an embittered cry for the end of the American empire:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness […] That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”
Yet, there is a piece of detail I missed in 2018. Throughout the album, we have returned to the ideals of “comfort”, “opportunity” and “freedom”, the very same ideals on which the United States was supposedly founded. Yet, the United States, now a nuclear superpower, seems to exist in direct opposition to those values (and, it is implied, never had those values in the first place).
It should be noted that the United States is but one in a long line of idealistic republics that has since collapsed back into the very tyrannical rule it was formed to abolish. At the time the album was released, Ronald Reagan had just recently been elected President, and begun putting into place Reaganomics, which allowed large corporations to seize control of the economy in ways that had previously been unthinkable. He would soon begin escalating nuclear tensions in response to the Afghan crisis which is still ongoing to this day.
“Independence” was composed by playing the tune of “The Fall of Saigon” backwards (that song also, of course, being a more humorous critique of American exceptionalism).
The real-world “Fall of Saigon” was a major embarrassment for the United States political establishment, but indeed, the United States was not simply bested in spirited combat by a small and effective force of guerilla fighters. The United States military proved deeply unpopular in Vietnam, committing atrocities so regularly that they more or less produced propaganda for the Vietcong without their even really having to try.
The failure to defeat communism in a land war would lead to the decision to defeat communism through sheer firepower – amassing a huge nuclear arsenal, enough to destroy the world a thousand times over, simply to deter the Soviet Union from meddling in the affairs of the Third World.
“Independence” stands as a mournful cry of despair over this situation, a desperate and yet hopeless plea to be spared the inevitable collapse of not only all human civilisation, but mass extinction. The song ends without resolution, as though in the knowledge that its petition will go unheard, unanswered.
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The final two tracks on Deceit are both the most poignant and the bleakest.
“A New Kind of Water” begins as a funereal dirge, opening with a steady kick-drum beat. A small chorus of voices describes a polluted world on the verge of nuclear apocalypse: “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die […] Here is paralysed sleet / Here is bubble-bath rain / Acrid stench and festering tongue / New York to Moscow, Nairobi in flames…”
We then hear a voice keening, recalling the “expanding universe” lines from earlier: “I don’t know either / What is the answer? / We were told to expect more / And now that we’ve got more / We want more!”
It is in “A New Kind of Water” that the album comes full circle. Throughout the album we have been given peeks at themes – themes of war, imperialism, capitalism, apocalypse, nuclear anxiety, civilisation and its origins – but it is here that these themes come together, consolidated into one, final, devastating thesis.
The stage is set by these first two sections – the world on the verge of war, and humanity, having served its animal needs, now turning its attention to loftier ambitions.
The tempo picks up, and we are thrust into a vision of the present and near future: “We have moved from A to X / This welfare state is our progress…”
Human civilisation, now at its most advanced, develops systems to support the vulnerable and needy, consuming more and more resources. (“More equals better, it’s what we want.”) Armies of workers are drafted to keep the world running as it should, the fragile connections of human society sustained by the efforts of a few.
Conquering the need for food, shelter, and treatment of disease – seeking “a cure for cancer, our least vague fear”. The song’s title derives from the line “A new kind of water, a new way of breathing” – indicating the desire of the human race to transcend what is possible, seeking the perfect “wonder cure-all” to take away all suffering and satisfy all desires.
It is in the fourth verse that the question first posed by “Sleep” now begins to be answered. We return to the theme of “creature comforts, a house that’s warm”. The lyrics point out that which we have known all along – that civilisation is founded on the need to serve biological drives (“Your body would choose all this / Of course! It’s innate, we’re selfish!”) Yet, it is precisely because civilisation is founded on scarcity (“What if there’s not enough to go around?”) that “defence is needed”.
And it is here that our question is answered: Why does war seem to continue endlessly, even though the world has the resources to fulfill everyone’s needs? Because it seems that civilisation and war must by their very nature coexist. More than that, it seems that one cannot exist without the other.
Just as the bee and flower cannot exist without each other, civilisation and war exist in a mutualistic relationship. And the destruction of both is mutually assured; one cannot have the end of war without the end of civilisation, and vice versa.
The devastating penultimate verse asks, “Who can watch as the Earth burns, shatters and dies?” before cynically rejecting the idea that a nuclear war is “impossible” due to the use of nuclear weapons as “fail-safe, foolproof” deterrents rather than first-option weapons: “We’ve heard that before / Good sense is needed, let’s hope we’ve got men on the job.”
The final verse ends on a final, desperate cry: “You know from experience / Your body would choose all this…”
Throughout the album we have returned to the theme of civilisation, its various manifestations, its problems and deficits, and its apparent self-destructive tendencies, the necessity of scarcity for power to exist, and the wars that exist as a direct result of civilisation. Yet, even now, the music provides a kind of comfort, an alienation from the grim subject matter, like the net curtain in “Triumph” – a way to divorce ourselves from confronting the truth in what is being said.
As a final statement, This Heat elect in the album’s final minutes to remove even the music, leaving us only with the true horror of the end of life as we know it.
The final track on the album is titled “Hi Baku Shyo”, which is translated as “Suffer Bomb Disease”. It may be a corruption of the Japanese word “被爆者” (hibakusha), meaning “bomb-affected person”, which refers to the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Hi Baku Shyo” is a sound-painting of the sort found on This Heat, but serves as a sort of coda for the entire album.
We enter a bleak and desolate soundscape. A discordant melodica plays a few notes. We hear guitar strings twanging at random. We hear the sound of a fly buzzing. There is something wailing in pain, sounding at times animal and at other times human. A church bell tolls in the distance. A man’s voice babbles incessantly.
We are confronted with the collapse of civilisation. The death of culture, art and music. The stink of unburied and rotting corpses. Burned survivors crouched amid the rubble, blind and deaf, screaming and ignored, mere furniture in the smashed landscape. God has seemingly abandoned this place. The very same language that brought modern civilisation into being is now meaningless noise that will, in a generation, be forgotten.
And just as abruptly as this horrific vision is presented to us, it vanishes, leaving us with cold silence, and the horrible feeling that this is a vision of days yet to come, and that there is little we can do to stop it – all decisions that affect us personally are made in government buildings. As the penultimate track states, the best we can do is “hope we’ve got men on the job”.
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The production style on Deceit is extremely stripped-back, often feeling somewhat cobbled-together in a way that makes the music work extremely well. “Makeshift Swahili” alone is made up of several different taped performances of the song cobbled together, ending with a fuzzy, low-fidelity tape recording of a live performance.
At times the album feels like it’s in danger of falling apart, as though reflecting the attitude of the producers – the band themselves – to the global situation in 1981.
Deceit came out about three years before Threads, a similarly harrowing docudrama presenting what would happen if a Soviet nuclear strike were to hit Sheffield. Threads is infamous for presenting a best-case scenario: that the attacks do not totally obliterate Britain but “merely” send its people back to medieval levels of technology.
Nevertheless, millions die in less than an hour, and the latter half of the film follows the subsequent breakdown of society: the summary execution of looters, food riots, traffic wardens employed as armed police. It is sobering and sickening viewing. Notoriously, the film ends with silence over the closing credits.
Deceit can in many ways be considered a musical analogue to Threads: Both are concerned with themes of the fragility of civilisation, the horror that can be wrought by nuclear weapons, and the callous disregard paid by governments the world over to their people.
Yet, unlike Threads, Deceit also has a timeless quality that makes it more than simply an early-80s work of nuclear paranoia. Songs about nuclear war were sixpence a dozen in the 80s – cf. “99 Red Balloons” by Nena and “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood – but Deceit also hits at something deeper, a broader anxiety than simply the possibility of nuclear armageddon.
We’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which themselves took place around 20 years after the release of Deceit. In 2018, I wrote of September 11th, 2001 as “the day the world stopped making sense”, a day where unimaginable violence was visited on almost three-thousand people.
Osama bin Laden, founder and ringleader of the terrorist group who committed the atrocity, was a former member of the Mujahideen fighters who opposed the Soviet Union during the 1979-1989 Afghan conflict. He was trained by a US Special Forces commando and, along with the rest of the mujahideen, granted a share of billions of dollars by the United States government to support the fight against the Soviet Union.
A decade later, bin Laden would go on to form al-Qaeda, turning on the United States during the Gulf War. In response to United States aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia, bin Laden was motivated to order an attack against American civilians in 2001. This attack would then go on to be the moment that defined the political culture of the 21st century, an act of violence so profoundly scarring that it is now indelibly etched into history.
The Afghan conflict that precipitated this attack began in 1978. It can be argued that the conflict is still ongoing to this day, over forty years later. Not long before this writing, the United States began to pull out of Afghanistan, twenty years after invading in 2001. Almost immediately, the Taliban were able to re-take much of the territory they had lost over those twenty years, thus rendering the twenty-year-long war completely pointless.
Deceit is not just an album about nuclear war, not just an album about war. It is an album about how the world is now an irresolvable mess, shaped by market forces and ideology far beyond the understanding of any one person, choked by the sluggishness of democracy. This is not to say that its songwriting was not motivated by nuclear anxiety, but rather that that anxiety is a smaller part of the greater awareness that nobody, not even our political leaders, has any idea what is going on. To live in the modern world is to be simultaneously bewildered, bored, and terrified that at any moment some horrible death will fall upon you without warning.
The album’s title, far from just being a play-on-words, also speaks to the lies that must exist to maintain civilisation – the lie that there are “men on the job”, that there is someone in control, that the world is not random chaos punctuated by death and murder, and retaliation for that death and murder, and retaliation for that retaliation.
In 1981, This Heat were convinced that nuclear war was inevitable. Today, the Soviet Union is thirty years long gone, but the United States and Russia still possess ninety per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons, all of them put together more than enough to cause mass extinctions and set human culture back several thousand years.
In 2017, the year Donald Trump was sworn into office, I can recall having nightmares of a nuclear attack falling on London, where my family were living, while I was living in Essex for university. This anxiety has not gone away since the end of the Cold War, only diminished somewhat. Even in the post-Trump era, there is a sense that a Pandora’s box has been opened and cannot be closed – it is as though the world has entered freefall.
The anxieties expressed in Deceit apply just as well to the anxieties we have now, forty years on, if not more so. In the forty years since its release, we have seen decades of forever-war, unconscionable terrorist violence, one of the worst market crashes in history, a deadly plague that has at the time of this writing killed almost four-and-a-half million people, and the growing threat of climate change that we have known about for decades and is now getting impossible to ignore.
We live in an age of anxiety, with a sense that the wall is coming up fast and we can do little as individuals to avert our path. Our dependence on the collective hallucination we call “society” to fulfill our basic needs also seems to be the making of our destruction – the same connections that allow us to survive are also the connections that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to rip through the world, the connections that allowed fossil fuel companies to lie about the impact their operations were having on the environment, the same connections, one notes, that handed the likes of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson the reins to some of the most influential countries in the world.
Right now it feels like humanity might not even survive another forty years.
This is why Deceit is such an important work. It took me a long time to understand it, and I’ve spent many years listening to it and trying to comprehend it. I now feel it is the perfect album for encapsulating the mood of our time, as we think about what will come next, what our legacy will be.
Antonio Gramsci once wrote that “[T]he old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This is sometimes translated loosely as “Now is the time of monsters.”
I think again of that album artwork – the face screaming in terror and ecstasy. If there is a lesson to be learned from Deceit, it is that the only certainty in this world is that there is no certainty. We live in a world that is beyond all control.
Now is the time of deceivers.
Deceit is available in digital format from Bandcamp. It can also be found streaming on Spotify.
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