Talking Heads were exceptional for a lot of reasons. But a bleeding obvious one was that you got a sense that all of the songs this art rock cum new wave quartet created were cohesive to an entire body of work, even if they were able to explore myriad musical areas stylistically.
Founded as a slightly awkward trio, the Heads have their roots in Rhode Island, where drummer Chris Frantz formed the band with Scottish-born singing guitarist David Byrne, Frantz soon adding his wife-to-be Tina Weymouth on bass. Upping sticks to New York, guitarist-keyboardist Jerry Harrison was added to the line up and found themselves inextricably linked to the CBGBs scene, even though like club cohorts Blondie their music was far too diverse and ambitious to be constricted by a narrow genre like punk.
Between their first album in 1977 and their last in 1988, Talking Heads became one of the most critically acclaimed bands of the era. Listening to all ten of their albums in order the one thing that stands out is the incredible stylistic shifts that occur. Of course urban alienation is a major theme running through the band’s work, yet the delivery and sonic palette was brilliantly varied. They’d gone from angsty NYC energy and subdued minimalism to an international collective that had explored everything from art-funk to polyrhythmic worldbeat and simple, melodic guitar pop, while managing to earn several memorable hits to boot.
On the 50th anniversary of their first gig at CBGB, we assess the Perfect 10 of Talking Heads albums, with extra star stylee.
Talking Heads: 77 (1977) ★ ★ ★ ★
In November 1976, the Talking Heads trio signed to Seymour Stein’s Sire, the Warners division who rejected Jimi Hendrix but signed Madonna (cough). The label issued a one-off single the following February in the shape of Love → Building On Fire, and even then the quirky horn-fuelled Stax meets Television vibes demonstrated how this weren’t no ordinary post-punk outfit.
Following in September (on the day Marc Bolan died), Talking Heads: 77 was the band’s showcase as a quartet, proudly augmenting with Jerry Harrison from the Modern Lovers. With its genre-hopping arrangements taking in punk, new wave, and calypso, the album garnered acclaim for its stripped-down jerky compositions, particularly Byrne’s geeky, erudite lyrics and bipolar vocals.
With its Caribbean meets Motown flourishes (the steel drums-assisted bouncy bass riff is very early Jackson 5), Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town was the opening track and first 45 to be extracted, setting the template for much of Byrne’s lyrical dexterity: a cynical showboating bravado riddled with his trademark anxiety-laden delivery.
According to Chris Frantz’s memoir, Lou Reed had been impressed by the band’s performance at CBGB and offered to produce their debut. He was passed over in favour of Tony Bongiovi, but one bit of advice stuck: the Velvet Underground frontman suggested they lower the tempo of Tentative Decisions, its live iteration much faster and heavier on the bass than eventually on 77. It’s one of those early tunes that’s more of art song than a groove song, while somehow still being incredibly groovy.
If there’s one song that could be described as Talking Heads’ signature song — from the 1970s at least — it’s Psycho Killer, an early ballad that was totally reworked to become the LP’s second single, months after New York was menaced by the Son Of Sam serial killer. It’s the one song Norman Bates would have hocked his last bottle of blood to record, though Byrne was quoted as saying the songwriting style harkens back to two rather more musical ’70s notables:
“I thought I’d have the kind of dramatic subject that Alice Cooper might use, but then look at kind of an interior monologue, the way Randy Newman might do it. And so I thought, let’s see if we can get inside this guy’s head. So we’re not going to talk about the violence or anything like that, but we’ll just get inside this guy’s kind of muddled up, slightly twisted thoughts.”
Beyond the alluringly disjointed dweebish lyrics and tense bassline (dating from 1974, the track’s famous rhythm part was originated by Hank Stahler, who was bassist in Byrne and Frantz’s college band The Artistics), the cartoon cacophony of its instrumental coda is a thing to behold, though perhaps the real engine of this fabulously funky song is our own curiosity about the narrator, and the contradictions of human nature.
The character-forming struggle between artistic expression and wanton acts of violence were two moral solitudes found in much of the Heads’ output. This is a prime example, and as a single it stalled at 92 in the US (five places higher than the LP) but made the top 20 in both Belgium and Holland.
More Songs About Buildings And Food (1978) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
If one were to pick an LP that best represents Talking Heads as a fully functioning unit, then More Songs About Buildings And Food (depending on who you believe, a title claimed by Tina Weymouth or XTC frontman Andy Partridge) is probably it.
For this stunning sophomore set recorded at Nassau’s famed Compass Point, production duties were supervised by ambient pioneer and former Roxy Music synthesist Brian Eno, who’d been an admirer since John Cale took him to see the Heads at London’s Rock Garden supporting the Ramones.
His lateral and abstract approach to recording helped foster what might be their most compact, consistent work bursting with carefully constructed, arty pop tunes, distinguished by extensive experimenting as well as flashes of surprisingly credible funk and electronica.
Cut free from the anxieties that coloured 77, the band are on red hot form, with a rhythmically stunning opus: from cantering opener Thank You For Sending Me An Angel through to coruscating closer The Big Country, a send-up of city slicker snobbery that predates American Psycho by a decade and a half and remains one of Byrne’s visceral, vital stories.
Competing head-on with Bryan Ferry’s contemporaneous cover (oh, the irony), the slow-burn rejig of Al Green’s Take Me To The River is arguably the best-known song – it was the Heads’ first major hit on home turf after all, making it to #26 on the Billboard Hot 100. Particular praise goes to our Tina, who completely kills it on deep cuts such as With Our Love and Warning Sign, a disoriented ditty that officially encapsulates how far Talking Heads had come.
Fear Of Music (1979) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Thematically ranking amongst the most gloomiest moments of Talking Heads’ career, by LP No. 3 something else becomes apparent: why it’s so easy to heed why the New Yorkers are highly regarded among the older muso types and contemporary post-punk “intelligentsia” who’ve bagged their places at the English speaking world’s art schools.
A busy and enigmatic offering largely inspired by the East Village and Alphabet City, Fear Of Music is characterised by dark, urban textures. reflected in the Jerry Harrison’s artwork: black corrugated iron that felt pried off Avenue A’s pavement/sidewalk/whatever. It’s strangely downbeat and upbeat: a minor key torrent of cerebral introspection juxtaposed with an Africana of rubbery quasi-funk rhythms and Ebola-infectious melodies. The second in the Eno trilogy, the basic tracks were captured in Frantz and Weymouth’s loft in Queens. And, as he would do with its follow-up, the egghead instilled confidence in their sonic ability while electronically enhancing the recordings in post-production.
Life During Wartime, its first 45, is a stone-cold classic and something of a blood brother to Debbie Harry and Chris Stein’s disco monster Heart Of Glass, to get the full perspectival picture. Byrne shrieks and frets – and cites CBGBs while doing so – but somehow finds a danceable solution.
Following his cameo on Blondie’s Parallel Lines, guest guitarist Robert Fripp turns up on a rawer alternate take that was added to the CD, and he’s also present on Dadaist show opener I Zimbra, Jerry Harrison’s favourite Heads song, and the set’s second single. Despite its tight, scratchy guitar, “nyah-nyah” keyboard refrain and tribal affectations (which Eno had brought with him from working on Bowie’s Lodger), the star is a panoply of African-derived polyrhythms and world-beat percussion which symbolised making the band’s wedded rhythm section their musical centrepiece, and which would reach its zenith on LP No. 4.
Another gorgeous gem is Heaven, a deceptively anti-Yank satire that parodies the yearning plastic soul ballads of Bowie’s Young Americans. It’s also perhaps the closest thing the Heads did to date to a ballad. Indeed, it’s so unnervingly pretty it could’ve worked as a regular ‘normal’ hit for a more conventional act.
Cities, the third single, is hyperactive and heroically funny. It flips the defiance of Bowie’s “I want to live!” declaration in Cygnet Committee on its head over a groovy tune where Byrne’s Asperger delivery is raucous and random: “Did I forget to mention Memphis? / Home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks / Do I smell? I smell home cooking / It’s only the river, it’s only the river”.
Lastly, it wasn’t for everyone but I am quite partial to Drugs, a chilling comedown with a breathless vocal, lethargic bass, and some atmospheric Ultravox-like synthesizers that whizz by once in awhile. A sinister sensation, just like its parent project.
Remain In Light (1980) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The fabulous fourth; the one with guest spots from Adrian Belew, Nona Hendryx and Robert Palmer… and inverted typography inspired by ABBA and Adam And The Ants. What’s not to like?
Not only is Remain In Light arguably the band’s zenith, but it’s one of those albums packed full of superlative songs I could gush over for entire millennia, and I might just do that one day. Perhaps for its 45th anniversary in the autumn? For now, I’ll just reiterate that LP No. 4 contains eight offerings that are some of the most brain-teasingly, densely brilliant compositions of the 20th century. What a way to kick off the ’80s.
RIT is where Talking Heads hit their idiosyncratic stride, marking a clear point of evolution and progression. In other words, going further down the path they’d stepped on, which was to refine and hybridise their new wave sensibilities with jam funk and exotic world influences, and was again helmed by the egghead Eno, with sonically spectacular results.
After getting lambasted by some critics for what we would now call I Zimbra’s “cultural appropriation”, Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade admirer David Byrne decided to be transparent about being under African influence this time. His letter with the album’s press kit even included a bibliography of suggested reading.
Arriving at the Bahamas with no prewritten material, the band taped their jams then selected their favourite sections. With Eno back for a third time — basically a fifth member of the band now — they used those moments of improv inspiration as a basis for more structured recordings. With sampling in its infancy, the Heads had to learn to play those little parts endlessly for extended sessions, combining various “loops” of takes into rhythm-heavy and dense, funky grooves.
Byrne also took a deconstructed, impressionist approach to his vocals, essentially “scatting” stream-of-consciousness gibberish over backing tracks then going back, listening, using the bits he liked, using post-rationalisation to find meaning where there had been none. The result is not only wildly artful and well-polished, but it’s also endlessly entertaining, as if dance music was being performed by Martians.
Though not much more than 16 minutes in duration, the first side features a triumvirate of tight and twisty treasures. Opening with an exclamatory yelp, Born Under Punches bubbles with menacing synthesized bongos, drum machines that make whipping sounds, and colourfully loping keyboards, while Byrne affects his speedy intonation, begging us to “take a look at these hands.”
Crosseyed And Painless is a fast and furious, funky and fizzy — a blend of Africana and paranoia, through the Mr Magoo lenses of a gangly group of college nerds. Alienation in therapy, the song cedes to an old-stool rap that distills the paranoia on its predecessor to devastating degrees. Almost as brilliant, The Great Curve is dense and hypnotic, with wayward Belew guitar parts that evokes his gonzo solo on the Thin White Dame’s Boys Keep Swinging.
As if Side 1 was merely the Hors-d’œuvres to the Entrée of Side 2, the strange, crowded textures suddenly coalesce into something that is so good it distills everything they were trying to achieve on Remain In Light into one of the greatest singles of the ’80s.
While US audiences weren’t keen, Once In A Lifetime proved to be a breakthrough in Blighty, cracking the top 20 in February 1981. Naturally, as their first UK hit it was also my introduction to Talking Heads, a memory still fondly emblazoned on my memory.
I remember hearing the song on Radio 1’s Sunday night chart countdown as an 11-year-old little creature and being completely taken by that hypnotic, trance-like rhythm, the austere yet earwormy chorus, and the high anxiety in Byrne’s voice as he wailed “well, how did I get here?” I thought it was one of the greatest songs I’d ever heard. In fact, I still do.
All these years later and the song’s lost none of that lustre, with dozens of sonic miracles darting around the stereo field. It’s a groove bustling with circling synthscapes, propulsive pum-dum-dum bass, and even a detached, buzzy axe solo at the end that’s slightly buried in the brilliantly busy mix.
As for the vocals, the existential astonishment at the heart of the lyric (albeit male-centred) is key. Byrne assumes the role of a preachy infomercial announcer who’d just woken up from a profound psychedelic experience — questioning the American dream (nice house, nice car) and banging on about water on the moon. It’s a buoyant masterpiece, and you get the feeling too, that after it fades, it’s still going on, like a river ebbing and flowing its way underground.
And from there, things get wonderfully weird as the remaining quartet of cuts are twitchy and bewitching as they descend into a haze of creeping tempos (Seen And Not Seen) and increasingly ominous vibes (the Joy Division-ish The Overload).
One of the Heads’ best deep cuts and later covered by Peter Gabriel, the lurching rhythm and mournful air of Listening Wind tells the story of an indigenous Native American fighting colonial land grabs, while Houses In Motion sports layers of guitars and keyboards working in parallel to mesmerising effect. Epochal.
The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads (1982) ★ ★ ★
Culled from nascent radio and concert recordings capturing their musical evolution over a four year period, Talking Heads released a fairly conventional double live set in the spring of 1982.
The first half includes energetic renditions of the band’s early material, including Psycho Killer with a decidedly different second verse, and rare cuts like Electricity (a drony prototype of Drugs) and Clean Break (Let’s Work), never officially released at the time.
All this provides the perfect context for a revelatory second half, with some of the headier studio creations from Fear Of Music and Remain In Light played by an expanded lineup including Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic) on keyboards and Kentucky axeman Adrian Belew.
It’s good but would be totally overshadowed by a certain second live set two years later.
Speaking In Tongues (1983) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
By the time of the fifth Talking Heads album in 1983, the band had severed ties with the egghead and opted to self-produce with occasional assistance from recording engineer Alex Sadkin (Grace Jones, Duran Duran), as Chris Franz recalls:
”We didn’t have Brian Eno. It’s not like we fired him—but I guess he felt, and probably we felt, we’d done three albums together, and it was time to do something different. I remember going to Tony Visconti, and meeting with him at the Hilton Hotel where he was packing his bags to go to London. I said, ‘Tony, how‘d you like to produce the new Talking Heads album?‘ And he said, ‘You don‘t need a producer. You just need a good engineer. Produce it yourself.‘ So that‘s what we did.”
While the band were still able to push the envelope regarding rhythmic innovations except within a more conventional and commercial structure, Speaking In Tongues sees them serve up a non-stop dance party comprising “strictly pop songs”, according to Byrne.
That led to accusations that the finished product was somewhat overblown. However, its charm is that maximalist energy, the foursome following the trend of big eighties bombast but keeping it weird at the same time, which even Bowie couldn’t manage with that year’s Let’s Dance.
Subsequently tackled by Tom Jones, the shouty monster that is Burning Down The House tries to fuse M’s Pop Musik with Eddie Cochran, and as their only US top tenner, it’s arguably their most identifiable song in the States. Yet the LP’s first 45 wasn’t a hit in Britain, so wasn’t terribly known at the time.
However, the first side’s fizzing opening run – it’s followed by Making Flippy Floppy, Girlfriend Is Better, and Slippery People – is the New Yorkers at the peak of their powers, expanding the funk leanings that was always bubbling under the surface of their music.
It’s obvious the band was building toward the kind of sound where melodies would be free to roam around a rhythm, rather than constrained to a set of chord changes. And that’s none so evident than it is on This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody), which closes the album. It’s a beautiful love song that coyly dances around the subject, like a sort of God Only Knows for the 1980s, where Byrne’s vocal wanders dreamily, yet within the bounds of the hypnotic engine chugging behind it thanks to the rest of the band.
It was the tail-end of an era that allowed artistic innovation to exist comfortably beside mainstream success, and the fact that this record makes up much of the setlist for the next cannot be overlooked.
Stop Making Sense (1984) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Its title taken from a line in Girlfriend Is Better, Stop Making Sense was different for the outset. Directed by Jonathan Demme for cinema release, it was a landmark recording of a 1983 show at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theatre but shot differently to a standard live video, attempting to more authentically capture the experience of watching a Talking Heads gig in the flesh.
Accordingly, standard establishing shots of the audience were kept to a minimum (I don’t know about you but if I’m at a show, I prefer to look at the stage, not the punters); crowd noise was also removed from the soundtrack as far as possible, to allow cinema and home audiences to react to what they saw on screen themselves, rather than being prompted by what people present on the night had responded to.
Close ups of the group members weren’t used either (again, you don’t see the group’s faces up close at a concert) and lighting effects were kept as plain as possible. And there was no attempt to conceal stage hands or the movement of instruments and equipment about the stage during the show – what the audience saw stayed in the film; typically in other ‘live’ videos, this type of thing would be edited out.
The movie captures the band during a point in their history when they’d expanded their live aesthetic from being a tightly-wound and claustrophobic quartet into something of an Africanised pop-funk collective.
Indeed, depending on your view of live albums, the contents might even beat the studio versions for pure muso-aided exuberance. Several additional funk musicians were installed to fill out the sound, and effectively reposition the material into a more dance-oriented style, while losing little of its spiky, angular origins.
Stop Making Sense was also Byrne’s idea of what it means to be a showman. In his ludicrously over-sized pastel business attire, he’s parodying both the absurdity of the nondescript and big-haired, big bucks arena rock pomp (mentioning no names Serious Moonlight Tour). His suited persona was about frenetic movement, with an exaggerated parody of traditional performance tropes to externalise what it felt like on stage. Byrne wanted to boost the dimensions of the body, and minimise the appearance of the head, the latter of which represents the mind and rational thought.
The results paid off, and Stop Making Sense represents a high artistic watermark in music on film and deserved its critical lauding. Three singles were extracted from the soundtrack, two of them originally found on Speaking In Tongues: 1984’s vaguely gospel meets Morse code workout Slippery People, and in 1985, the frenzied strangeness of Girlfriend Is Better. And if you weren’t keen on concert cuts, a brand new studio set was mere months away.
Little Creatures (1985) ★ ★ ★ ★
Now exclusive a studio based outfit, in the summer of ’85 Talking Heads jettisoned their experimentalist knotty rhythms and turned in the most straightforward and accessible record of their storied career, albeit one with diversions into country, Americana and a sure sense of pop-smart: “It’s so much fun to be able to relax and just play without feeling you have to be avant-garde all the time,” Tina told The New York Times, a month before the album’s release. “We spent so many years trying to be original that we don’t know what original is anymore.”
Little Creatures is a celebration of love, procreation, and all the normalcy Byrne used to treat with a sense of fear and alienation (after all, this is a man who once sang: “They say compassion is a virtue, but I don’t have the time”). The new direction paid off, commercially at least. Little Creatures is the band’s best-selling album worldwide (and their first top tenner in the UK), but some of their alluring spikiness had been sanded down. Frantz, Weymouth and Harrison, who’d just shown cinemagoers what shit-hot players they were in Stop Making Sense, are perhaps sold a little short.
Whereas its predecessors were often worked up from riffs and grooves, here the contents sounded like they’d been written as songs. Case in point: the LP sags in the middle but is kept afloat by its exuberant bookends, And She Was and the perennial Road To Nowhere, deserved bona fide hits that prove Talking Heads the pop group can be as engaging as their previous arty nerds incarnation.
There are hooks and teases all throughout Road To Nowhere, the Heads’ only top ten single in Britain. You could almost class it as a spectacular take on a tent-meeting gospel singalong, even though the lyrics convey a message construed as being entirely opposite. Moreover, its deceptive jauntiness hints, ironically, that no future is guaranteed but for the present times which will shape and define it.
True Stories (1986) ★ ★
The penultimate project and the basic bitch of the catalogue, True Stories is the companion piece to David Byrne’s film of the same name, a Texas-set satire he described as “like sixty minutes on acid”. Talking Heads always functioned best when David Byrne spoke in relatable abstractions, allowing his colleagues to translate them into expansive and mysterious vignettes. Where once they were trips to savour, now this sort-of soundtrack is more like 40 minutes on hold to the bank.
Without labouring the point, True Stories contains some of the most polite music the band dared to release, with songs that make sense when sung by the relevant characters in the film but fall flat as a cajun pancake as a standalone record.
Still, there is the odd magic moment like the wacky Wild Wild Life (very Cars-esque and the album’s only hit), the elegiac Orbison-esque balladry of City Of Dreams and the twangy immediacy of People Like Us. What’s more, the sunny, zydeco-tinged Radio Head gave some public schoolboys in Oxfordshire a bit of an idea.
Naked (1988) ★ ★ ★
Rounding out the decade, Talking Heads went Naked, a partly Paris-recorded swan song with producer Steve Lillywhite (U2, Peter Gabriel). A marked improvement on True Stories, the arrangements marked a return to their worldbeat explorations, incorporating some intriguing Latin and highlife influences that inject some energy back into the band, even if some long-term followers complained they didn’t want any salsa on the menu.
Despite a roll-call of musicians including Mory Kanté, Wally Badarou and the Borneo Horns, tracks like Mr. Jones and Ruby Dear, Frantz and Weymouth have space to really get into the groove again. It’s not all cricket, though – Facts Of Life is a gauche industrial plod. But at the other end of the spectrum the (Nothing But) Flowers is a marvellous advert for rewilding which imagines a planet where nature strikes back, and Ordinary Joe finds himself missing lawnmowers and fast-food restaurants (“this was a Pizza Hut/ now it’s all covered with daisies”). That it also features Brit stars Johnny Marr (on guitar) and Kirsty McColl (vocals) just adds to the blindly ambitious aesthetic.
Rather than a last gasp, the final cut from Talking Heads sounded like a way forward. Alas, like a lot of denouements by bands with a controlling leader, Naked was an impressive-sounding shrug that pointed to where David Byrne would go with his solo career. In 1991, the frontman revealed Heads had butted for the last time, interestingly around the time when New York City began to bounce back, away from the edge of the precipice. Still spiky, the singer sued his erstwhile colleagues for attempting to resurect the band name, so the trio went by the moniker The Heads for the cheekily titled 1996 album No Talking Just Head.
On a couple of occasions the quartet have put acrimony aside and got back together not to make music but to perform at their 2002 induction into the ghastly, redundant Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and, perhaps even more surprisingly, plug a Stop Making Sense audio-video redux, the most recent reunion being in 2023. Whether these unexpected rapprochements will lead them anywhere creatively remains to be seen, but if there is just one Talking Heads album you could take with you to a desert island, this must be the place you can take your pick.
Same as it ever was.
Steve Pafford
Spotify My Love: 20 Golden Greats for Valentine’s Day ft Tom Tom Club et al is here
