‘Stop Making Sense’: how one moment came to define Talking Heads
“Hi. I’ve got a tape I want to play,” David Byrne begins, and in 2023, almost 40 years after Stop Making Sense’s initial release, the audience in the cinema cheered. That was encouraged. To celebrate the Talking Heads concert film’s anniversary, Jonathan Demme’s movie was rereleased into theatres, and crowds were encouraged to shake off cinema etiquette and get up to dance. As videos of silhouetted crowds doing their best Byrne moves against the big screen went viral online, the band’s finest moment in the 1980s proved to still be their finest moment today.
Concert films are hard because there’s a limited market of interest. No one other than an artist’s already dedicated fans will likely go, and often it feels like the acts themselves don’t really care, as if the cameras are merely just there one night, and then later down the line, they might have to go to some premiere. Either that or the film becomes this swollen, glorifying thing, cut with documentary clips that fail to capture the energy of the actual show in favour of crafting a kind of self-congratulating atmosphere around the artist.
But Stop Making Sense doesn’t feel like any of that. Filmed across four nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre while the band were on their 1983 tour, it’s clear that every effort went into the movie from both Demme and the band while still maintaining a kind of rough, imperfect edge. Flowing through the concert uninterrupted with no added behind-the-scenes clips or anything other than a close-up view of the band playing and Byrne’s dances that he’d pre-rehearsed to look suitable odd, it toes the line between polished artistry and raw musical energy – a balance that also perfectly describes the band at this point in their career, and a balance that allows the film to feel just as exciting as actually going to a gig.
You get swept up in it, just like you do at a good show and just like a good concert film should be trying to achieve. But so much of that has to come down to the simple fact that Stop Making Sense captures the band at their absolute best.
Across the tracklist, they play all their best songs and they play them incredibly well, with the help of their tight backing band and a clear focus on putting on a musically amazing show. Despite spanning different albums and years, from their breakout single ‘Psycho Killer’ through to ‘Burning Down The House’, which had only just come out at the time of the shows, the songs flow together as a cohesive mass of their talent.
While the band would release a few more albums before their eventual split in 1991, this moment in 1983 was when all the best of it was out. Sure, there are songs to defend on their final three records, but none of it can hold a candle to their first four and on the setlist for the tour captured on film, the band proved that they knew exactly how to pick the best songs to build and break the tension, making sure no song feels like a skip or a waste of time, but that there’s still dynamics and mood changes. The moving, slower moment of ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’ is immediately kicked into high gear again when it is followed by ‘Once in a Lifetime’.
The opening acoustic version of ‘Psycho Killer’ seems to get grounding and context by ‘Heaven’, which begins acoustically, too, before the band members come out on stage and join in, slowly building up to be ready for ‘Thank You for Sending Me an Angel’. With a spanning band of nine people on stage to play these songs, the group are also primed here to translate tracks into their best possible live form, capturing a time when all of them were at their skilled best, their most energetic and their most passionate before tensions truly began to boil over towards the split.
It could be argued that some of these individual songs could be picked out as the band’s most defining moment, that the mere release of ‘Psycho Killer’ launched them into the world, or that tracks like ‘Once In A Lifetime’ positioned the band as a genre-blurring force. All of that would be true, but on Stop Making Sense, all those points are made within a one-hour-28-minute bundle of joy. It works as a film to sit down and watch and as an album to hit play on and let the tracklist ride through what has to be the best gig in their career.
The simple fact that today, over 40 years on from the concert, people are still paying to go to the cinema and see this on the big screen, with new and younger fans even discovering the group through this movie or being encouraged to dive deeper beyond the few hits they may now – it not only proves the worth of Stop Making Sense as a project that defines the group, but it proves the potential a good concert film can have if it’s done right and knows it’s purpose which is to capture the energy of the band and somehow translate it to viewers as if they’re also wrapped up in the energy of a gig.
