This Heat’s “Out of Cold Storage” was my favourite box set from last year. Before its arrival it was impossible to obtain any of This Heat’s recorded output for a reasonable price. A copy of “Deceit” on cd would probably set you back almost £50, which is roughly the cost of the box set from the Recommended website! This was a feast compared to the scraps I’d got my hands on before its release.

When it arrived I was slightly confused as I had obtained a few stray mp3s of songs over the years that weren’t included on the set and I now had no idea where they were taken from. It turns out the tracks I had downloaded were incorrectly labelled as This Heat when they were in fact the work of Flaming Tunes, a collaboration between Gareth Williams (from This Heat) & Mary Currie. They released one album together on cassette which seems to be getting a reissue soon (according to the Flaming Tunes Myspace page). I really hope it does as the tracks I have heard suggest that it stands alongside anything This Heat released.

Beguiling The Hours

Beguiling the Hours is probably the highlight from what I’ve heard from the cassette. It is the sort of tune that would sit comfortably alongside something from Brian Eno’s “Another Green World” or Arthur Russell’s “Another Thought” on a mixtape.

Here is the video for another one of the standouts, “Breast Stroke.”

This is incredible work that appears to have been overlooked over the years, possibly because of the format it was released on.

RIP Gareth.