When I VERY drunkenly stumbled up to Heck’s lead guitarist Jonny Hall at ArcTanGent and asked for a quote, he surmised Heck’s 8 year run as “a load of bollocks, really”. While… yeah, it’s kind of true, Heck turned the sound of 4 blokes making as much noise as possible into one of the most exhilarating live acts of the 21st Century.
Forgive me if I come across as self-indulgent, but I need to tell you a personal story to contextualise how important this band were to The UK’s underground music scene.
In 2013, Heck, then going by the name Baby Godzilla, toured with the heavily classic rock influenced Black Spiders (who were another great band whose presence is sorely missed from the music scene, it must be noted). To say that that the two bands were mismatched was an understatement. One band was a purveyor of beer soaked hooks and headbanging, while the other was a cataclysmic explosion of noise and breaking things.
This collision of styles made Baby Godzilla’s support slot one of the most memorable gigs I’ve ever seen. Black Spider’s audience, a ragtag bunch of denim-and-leather bound beardy blokes, made it very clear that they were not interested in Baby Godzilla whatsoever. Instead of cracking a couple of self-deprecating jokes about how well the sets going, putting their head down and politely finishing the gig, Baby Godzilla proceeded to get up in everyone’s shit.
They walked into the horseshoe of disinterest that had formed in front of the stage, and absolutely dominated it. If you were going to stand at the front looking bored, vocalist and guitarist Matt Reynolds saw it fit to use you as a human mic-stand. As a finale, drummer Tom Marsh dragged his entire kit into the crowd and played from the floor. This would have been an impressive way to end the set, except Matt announced they had one more song. Tom struggled to get his kit back on the stage, and ended up gifting a Tom-tom a lucky(?) member of the crowd. “You’ve got a drum. Drum!”, he ordered.
I walked out of Southampton’s Soul Cellar perplexed, amused, and exhilarated by what we had just seen. Sure, Black Spiders had a raucously fun headline set, but it was hard to top the barely controlled insanity Baby Godzilla brought to their support slot. Their set was a wakeup call: a realisation that there were no limits to what a band could and couldn’t do on stage, and that audience indifference can be overcome with brute force. To see a band so committed to what they did was inspiring.
Heck’s rise to infamy was about as natural as any bands of the modern era. Forming in Nottingham in 2009, the band’s infamy grew through word-of-mouth. However, the band began to really turn heads with the release of ‘Powerboat Disaster’, and its accompanying video.
It displays the band playing in what looks like a non-descript council estate, and it lets the song speak for itself. ‘Powerboat Disaster’ is easily a summation of what made Heck great. Built on a riff that sounds like a thrash band falling down an elevator shaft, it includes a shout-a-long chorus, and an exceptionally silly banjo break. It is Baby Godzilla distilled to its essence: fun, thrashy, and fucking mental. This video, coupled with the gross out DZ Deathrays parody ‘Trogloraptor’, helped the band permeate people’s consciousness. However, the biggest factor in their cult-like status was their relentless touring. If nothing else, Baby Godzilla were a memorable spectacle, and even if most of an audience didn’t quite get it, they would always find a few new fans who couldn’t look away from the car crash.
In 2014, the band came as close as they would to flirting with mainstream success. They were booked to play the Kerrang! Tour, which was headlined by Limp Bizkit, across numerous large venues across The UK. 2014 was a pivotal year in cementing their legend. Sets at Download and Reading brought their music to a wider audience still.
However, 2015 proved to be a difficult year for the strangest of reasons. It turned out that Toho, the Japanese cinema giant that owns the Godzilla name, was not best pleased about a Nottingham band using their intellectual property. Consequently, the band was forced to change the name that they had been building solidly for years. For a band so reliant on word-of-mouth accounts of their insane live performances, this was problematic, leading to the first run of dates under the name Heck being “not greatly attended”.
Despite the blow to their momentum, Heck pushed forward. In the March of 2016, they released their debut album, Instructions. Miraculously, they managed to prove that they had decent tunes, and captured the intensity of their live performances. This was largely to do with the brilliant work of producer Matt Peel, who managed to retain the band’s raw energy, while managing to reign it in just enough to make the record listenable. Matt Reynolds describes the recording process as “Matt [Peel] holding onto the reigns for dear life, and trying to get it all to fit into one record”.
Heck’s last show, fittingly, was announced suddenly for ArcTanGent 2017. The show was typically chaotic, with Matt trying to crowd surf on a bit of carpet as the finale. It was a perfect end for a band that had played every show like it was there last, regardless of whether it actually was. 
While Heck’s legacy will always be one of smashed guitars and wrecked venues, there was more to the band than just wanton chaos. A Heck show was an inclusive experience: microphones, drums and guitars were often left lying around for any willing audience member to pick up, and briefly become part of the band. There was truly a sense that you could do whatever you pleased. Jonny summed it up best: “It’s DIY, you go out, you do it and no-one’s going to fucking stop you because no-one can. If you have the right attitude, no-one can stop you doing anything”.
At the end of the day, above all the theatrics, it was passion and drive that defined Heck. But fuck, are we going to miss the theatrics.
