The Camberwell trio who applied musique-concrète tape method to a rock band and charged it with Cold War dread · a band that began before punk and stood against it, and a foundational influence on the industrial and post-punk traditions.
This Heat are a foundational influence, and the Bureau files them at Tier I as one of the bridges between the avant-garde tape tradition and the industrial form. Three multi-instrumentalists, Charles Hayward, Charles Bullen and Gareth Williams, formed the band in Camberwell in early 1976, as punk was breaking, and defined themselves against it: their roots lay in progressive rock, fusion and free improvisation, and they regarded punk, when it came, as a disappointment that "just sounded like rock and roll".
Their working space was their instrument. They rehearsed and recorded in a disused cold-storage meat locker in Brixton, which they named Cold Storage, and the room's dead acoustic and their reel-to-reel tape machines were as central to the music as the guitar and drums. The method was concrète technique applied to a rock trio: tape loops, phasing, overdubs and splices folded into live performance, patterns broken into faintly connected fragments with artificial skips and looped end-grooves.
The result is a small, dense catalogue. The debut This Heat (1979), recorded across 1976–78, is the tape-heavy statement; the Health and Efficiency EP followed in 1980; and Deceit (1981), released on Rough Trade, is the song-based set built on Cold War dread, confronting governmental deceit, media manipulation and nuclear annihilation through dissonance, sampled broadcasts and field recordings. The political dread of Deceit is exactly the register the industrial tradition worked in.
Their influence runs directly into this archive. The tape method, the weight, the dread and the refusal of ordinary song-form reached 23 Skidoo and the British post-industrial scene, and they are routinely named alongside the foundational influences on industrial and post-rock. They were a band of the same moment as Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, working the same polluted ether from a different starting point.
The Bureau files This Heat at Artists · Tier I as a foundational influence: the trio who took concrète tape method into a rock band, built it in a cold-storage locker, and charged it with the Cold War dread the industrial form would make its own. Gareth Williams died in 2001; Hayward and Bullen have since revisited the work as This Is Not This Heat, but the two albums and the EP remain the high-water marks.