This Is Not This Heat at Unit, October 31st 2018
Unit, the venue for this show, is in Daikanyama, which is a neighborhood in Shibuya. In recent years Shibuya has become the Halloween capital of the world, but on this Halloween night there were no costumes in sight at Unit. Among the concertgoers it was business as usual. At the same time it wasn’t. This night was an event.
This Heat, the band that split over 25 years ago, after recording two of the most challenging and influential albums of the late seventies and early eighties, reunited in 2016 with two of its surviving founding members: Charles Hayward and Charles Bullen. This was the second of their two shows in Tokyo.
Due to the passing of third member Gareth Williams in 2001, they decided to go by a Magrittean moniker. This Is Not This Heat fits with their dadaist approach to music. An avant-garde collage of sounds way ahead of its time; one among the pioneers in the use of taped and manipulated sounds in rock music. In their lyrics they questioned conventional perception and society’s assumption of stability. They were the whole package.
Hayward and Bullen were joined on stage by a group of exceptional musicians. Daniel O’Sullivan from Ulver was on bass, keyboards and backing vocals along with clarinetist and guitar player Alex Ward, percussionist Frank Byng and James Sedwards -from the Thurston Moore Band- on lead guitar. They walked on stage after a 12 minute loop of Testcard played over the PA. Just like in the blue and yellow album they segue to a blistering rendition of Horizontal Hold that set the tone for the evening.
What followed was, as on the record, Not Waving. Its mantra “there is no tomorrow” delivered by a soulful Charles Hayward interjected with brief bursts of screaming and high pitch spasms, in accordance with This Heat’s method of contrasting serenity with chaos. I stood the whole show in front of Hayward and left in awe with his musicianship. He’s an extraordinary drummer, one of the bests I’ve ever seen. Behind his kit he conducts the rest of the musicians providing direction to the improvisation sections without missing a beat. Even sometimes pulling the beat when it becomes too motorik, in the krautrock sense, as he did in 24 Track Loop slowing it down, playing behind it. He does all that while singing in a powerful commanding way. It was quite an experience to see him in action during the course of the show.
The first part of the concert, dedicated to highlights from their first album, closed with The Fall of Saigon. As many before me have pointed out, that song anticipated the direction the band was going to take in their second album Deceit. One element in particular is the three part vocal harmony. Its foreboding tone and particular delivery, in which the end of each verse is the beginning of the following one, was delivered flawlessly from the stage, mainly by Hayward, Bullen and O’Sullivan.
The apex of this technique was SPQR. Wagner’s endless melody concept combined with a propulsive beat was the recipe for one of the most brilliant songs of its time, a song that still speaks volumes. “We organize via property as power / Slavehood and freedom, imperial purple / Pax Romana!” I guess nothing has changed in the last 35 years since they recorded it or the last 2000 years that they referred to. Seeing it performed live felt like a mystical experience.
When they reached to the song Sleep after a series of highlights from their second album, I thought that was a brilliant closer for the set. “You are now in a deep sleep. Endless possibilities”, those lyrics condemning a culture of consumption would’ve been perfect to send us back to reality, but a couple more gems were in store.
The set closer was actually a 15 minutes rendition of Health and Efficiency, a song originally only available in an eponymous EP that was released between the main two albums. Bullen took lead vocals for this one singing the opening lines “Here’s a song about the sunshine, dedicated to the sunshine” as well as the “Enthusiasm will energize” line repeated throughout most of the first part of the song. Sedwards provided the backbone with the song’s second half angular riff. There were some mic malfunctions that were promptly solved and the rest of the musicians improvised back and forth with Hayward signaling them with a drum fill pattern that will keep things steady in the pocket. I thought Sleep would’ve been a great closer, I was glad to be wrong.
Luckily for us the band returned for an encore, Hi Baku Shyo, Deceit’s last song, rounding up the concert duration in two hours. Hayward entered and left the stage playing a melodica, as a pied piper would, for what it was one of the best shows of the year.
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