Deep Heat (compilation series)

Telstar Records' range of Deep Heat compilation albums were one of the first house music collections to be released by a specialist marketing firm in the United Kingdom.

Launching in March 1989 with the Number 1 album Deep Heat, the brand achieved a successful four-year run and set the footprint for dance music compilations for many years to come. The record company, which had formed in 1982, had achieved modest success with dance-themed multi-artist compilation albums with notable successes in the genre including the Dance Mix collections of 1987 and 1988 and The Best of House '88. What was initially unique about the Deep Heat collections was that they contained exclusive 12" remixes of recent club hits, instead of extended versions of chart hits featured on similar collections such as Now Dance 89 which was charting around the same time as the first Deep Heat albums. The success of the series was partly due to the CD boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s and it was the first time full 12" mixes could be commercially bought on Compact Disc, offering the listener at home a whole new experience of enjoying digitally enhanced dance music. Tracks on the first and longest running release kicked-off with Adeva's version of "Respect" while underground favourites such as "Break 4 Luv" by Raze and Hithouse's "Jack to the Sound of The Underground (Acid Mix)" ensured the album reached the top of the newly created Compilation Chart, the first of many.

Vinyl was still relatively popular with DJs and this format of Deep Heat sold well with each volume being released on vinyl when other companies such as Arcade (who came on board in 1991 with the Groovy Ghetto series) had largely abandoned the format, preferring to concentrate on packing as many tracks as they could onto a 74-minute single CD.

Also unique to the Deep Heat Compilations was that there would often be 'exclusive remixes' of tracks, such as the megamix of Technotronic's biggest hits. This appeared on Deep Heat 7 ~ Seventh Heaven several months before the track was commercially released, while "Exclusive Deep Heat" mixes of tracks by The KLF featured on later editions. It would be these 'exclusive tracks' that would form the focal point of Deep Heat's extensive television advertising campaigns launched by Telstar to promote each release. These would feature clips of videos of the album's biggest club hits, usually with graphics in the style of the album's theme on the sleeve.

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