Deceit (album)

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For the concept of deceit, see deception.
Deceit
Deceit cover
Front cover of the 2006 remastered version.
Studio album by This Heat
Released 1981
Recorded 1981
Genre Post-punk
Length 40:45
Label Rough Trade
Producer This Heat
Professional reviews
This Heat chronology
This Heat
(1978)		 Deceit
(1981)		 This Heat with Mario Boyer Diekuuroh
(1982)
Additional cover art
The cover art (as shown in the 1991 CD booklet) reflected This Heat's anxiety about nuclear war.
The cover art (as shown in the 1991 CD booklet) reflected This Heat's anxiety about nuclear war.

Deceit is the second album by This Heat. Deceit is considered by many as a classic of the post-punk era and was ranked by Pitchfork Media as the 20th greatest album of the 1980s. The Trouser Press Record Guide called the album "austere, brilliant and indescribable."[1]

In a 1991 interview, Charles Hayward explained that the threat of nuclear warfare motivated the band and provided the album with an underlying theme: "The whole speak, 'Little Boy', 'Big Boy' [sic], calling missiles cute little names. The whole period was mad! We had a firm belief that we were going to die and the record was made on those terms.… The whole thing was designed to express this sort of fear, angst, which the group was all about really."[2] The cover art reflects these concerns and includes a photomontage of images such as mushroom clouds, thematic maps depicting nuclear arsenals, and photographs of Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev, and Nikita Khrushchev.

As with other This Heat recordings, much of the album was recorded at Cold Storage, a disused refrigerated storeroom at a former meat pie factory in Acre Lane, Brixton, England.[3] The music included new improvisations, along with songs the band had been playing during live performances (portions of these songs were culled from actual concert recordings).[2][3] As Hayward describes, "some of the album was really plush sounding, some dim and pokey. Sometimes it would sound like the machinery was breaking up. We deliberately would make it sound as though the record player was exploding."[4][2]

During the 1990s, intermittent availability made Deceit a rarity and a collector's item among fans. In 2006, This is (a Recommended Records imprint) released a remastered version of Deceit as part of the 6-CD Out of Cold Storage box set. This is also released the album as a separately available CD.

[edit] Personnel

  • Charles Bullen: voice, guitar, clarinet, drums, tapes
  • Charles Hayward: voice, drums, keyboards, guitar, bass, tapes
  • Gareth Williams: voice, bass, keyboards, tapes, mask
  • Martin Frederick: studio and live mix
  • Peter Bullen: live mix, tape operation, projection
  • Phil Clarke: organisation

[edit] Track listing

  1. "Sleep" – 2:13
  2. "Paper Hats" – 5:57
  3. "Triumph" – 2:55
  4. "S.P.Q.R." – 3:26
  5. "Cenotaph" – 4:35
  6. "Shrink Wrap" – 1:40
  7. "Radio Prague" – 2:21
  8. "Makeshift Swahili" – 4:04
  9. "Independence" – 3:39
  10. "A New Kind of Water" – 4:57
  11. "Hi Baku Sho" (Suffer Bomb Disease) – 0:55

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ Grant, Steven (1991). in Ira Robbins: The Trouser Press Record Guide, Fourth Edition, New York: Collier Books, 673. ISBN 0-02-036361-3. Retrieved on 2006-12-13. 
  2. ^ a b c Plunkett, Daniel (June 1992), "Charles Hayward" (November 1991 interview), N D, no. 16, pp. 7-14.
  3. ^ a b Cutler, Chris (2006), box set booklet, Out of Cold Storage by This Heat. Thornton Heath:Recommended Records LC-02677
  4. ^ The source text actually reads "record played", but this is assumed to be a typographical error.