‘Remain in Light’: Talking Heads’ most innovative record
It’s now 45 years since Talking Heads’ defining Remain in Light, the band’s pivotal record that both served as a creative culmination and sonic blueprint, yet charted an aural realm they’d never visit again.
They were always good, but it’s unlikely that the CBGBs crowd would have anticipated just what a mainstream presence Talking Heads would have marked for themselves way back in New York’s punk burnishing. Playing alongside nascent pop sensations Blondie and the Ramones’ sped-up garage attack, frontman David Byrne cut just as distinct a mark among the lauded club’s eclectic billing, commanding a feverish energy, captaining angular hooky new wave, and ensconcing fiercely eccentric but captivating songcraft.
Debut Talking Heads: 77 would stand as one of the era’s finest albums, but still somehow orbited the same terrain as Television or The Modern Lovers a few years before them. For the following year’s sophomore More Songs About Buildings and Food, former Roxy Music synth maestro and artistic Svengali Brian Eno entered the Talking Heads fold, adding subtle electronic textures and expanding the peripheries toward a wider scope of art-pop experimentalism. Such leftfield expanse would yield Talking Heads’ first real LP gem, 1979’s wiry and nervous Fear of Music, a vibrating bite of tread-plated neurosis mining Eno’s signature atmospheres and affording Byrne an unreined thematic canvas to let loose all his lyrical eccentricities.
After touring, Talking Heads took a break to reassess their direction. Byrne and Eno scratched each other’s backs with their My Life in the Bush of Ghosts sessions, charged by a mutual fascination with African and Middle-Eastern rhythms and the latest sampling technologies, and the respective drummer and bassist couple Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth hung out with Jamaica’s Sly & Robbie during a Caribbean break, soaking up new percussion techniques as well as grumbling about Byrne’s artistic control. Byrne was happy to oblige, for the while at least, and the quartet, including guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison, fresh from producing an album for LaBelle’s Nona Hendryx, agreed to conceive their next record via extensive jams and a more equitable creative process.
Eno was full of ideas, too. Hesitant to sign up for a third session production, ears were pricked when hearing the band’s lengthy instrumental demos, chiming with his emerging interest in the polyrhythmic grooves pioneered by Fela Kuti, as well as the developing hip-hop beats closer to home. With such a heady brew of influences and far-flung styles cooking, Talking Heads would conjure a sound that no one in the broadly mainstream pop world had yet touched.
Sonic ingredients had been planted previously. Worldbeat instrumentation, engulfing effects, and bristling funk all pervaded Fear of Music, but on 1980’s Remain in Light, such qualities were pushed to looser, freeform, and infinitely alien territory. One play of its electric opener, ‘Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)’, unleashed the record’s infectiously warped fever gloriously, a dense, knotty groove of teeming slither that evokes in the mind microscopic footage of multiplying cells, each lick and slap tessellating with elastic yet interlocking synergy, and scoring Byrne’s strange incantations concerning the “government man” with stirring surrealism.
It’s the worldwide first single, France exclusively treated to ‘The Great Curve’, ’Once in a Lifetime’ that immortalised Talking Heads and served as most people’s first exposure to the band. Aided by its artfully possessed bluescreen video with co-direction from famed choreographer Toni Basil, the future MTV favourite proved to be the perfect beckoning window into Remain in Light’s hypnotic collage, Byrne playing the fired-up Pentecostal preacher and proselytising the good word on taking stock of life’s good fortune and to quit living life on cruise control. As much of the new wave was still bogged down in lyrical malaise, ’Once in a Lifetime’s erratic optimism proved to be a strangely provocative statement as punk’s embers still burned around them.
Remain in Light’s spectral Afrobeat casts a beguiling spirit, a record packed with haunted energy, be it the livewire ‘Crosseyed and Painless’ or ‘The Overload’s heady closer, yet it never lapses into mournful gloom. Throughout, Talking Heads’ fourth studio album plumbs a plane of cathartic astral projection, a shadowy, echoing pool rippling with leftfield pop and dissected grooves hinted at on early material, pointing the way toward the more vibrant and mutant funk that would await on 1983’s Speaking in Tongues, but never sculpting such exquisite slabs of piquant atmospheres with the same hypnagogic glow.
Talking Heads would scale greater commercial peaks, dropping the lauded Stop Making Sense concert film and Wrymouth and Frantz’s Tom Tom Club, dropping the summery ‘Genius of Love’. However, Remain in Light stands as the band’s most essential statement, a record that reached into the depths of musical unconvention and creative unorthodoxy and still managed to beam a light to the pop mainstream from their distant, unearthed vantage point.
