Sunday, April 17, 2005

Here's a song about the sunshine

THIS HEAT "Health & Efficiency" (live)
This live version of "Health & Efficiency," from Krefeld, West Germany, in 1980, originally released on cassette by the Independence label in '86, is by now fairly well-booted; there's a CD version called Cold Storage, named after the studio they recorded in. I have it on vinyl, a two color paper cover sleeve marked Live. I don't listen to it very often, but each time I try to figure out what it woulda been like to see this band live, and in Germany if the whole connection to bands such as Faust would have been that much more pronouced or what.

That also makes me recall how when I visited the Faust folks in Hamburg in 1990 and caught their first show in 15 years almost by accident, I was shocked how few people were in attendance, and oover a spaghetti dinner pre-show that the band took me out to (a total highlight of my life? yessss) how the band said in their entire career they'd only played in Germany like less than six times, how they played more often in the U.K., how the only other German band they ever listened to was Ammon Duul I, and I was just blown away at how different my idea of the scene was versus the reality of it.

Of course, this post is about This Heat and not Faust -- sorry, I get so easily carried away!!! If I were actually smart, you could call me a rambling professor. Instead I'm more akin to the stoned waiter who blathers on about something of interest to him for four minutes when really all you want to know is can you have it without the anchovies!

I played this record, well the studio version anyway, "Health & Efficency" (what a song, I love how it goes on for so long) in a sushi joint the other night and three people asked what it was -- and there were only like seven people dining at the time!

Clearly, This Heat = sushi music.

1 Comments:

Blogger JD said...

Wow. I've always thought that folded riff that cuts in during the third minute was cut together and looped in the studio. And here they are playing it live. Jesus.

9:13 PM  

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