Talking Heads – ‘Speaking in Tongues’
In the wake of their punk-derived debut album, Talking Heads pivotally caught the attention of Brian Eno. At the time, the former Roxy Music synth-extraordinaire had recently enjoyed success in aiding David Bowie with his seminal Berlin trilogy and sought to stretch his legs into new territory. Eno heard true potential in Talking Heads’ funky, rhythmic take on punk and soon bonded with frontman David Byrne over shared admiration for Fela Kuti.
With Eno on board as a compositional co-director and producer, Talking Heads released their three most influential albums, cutting ties with the British producer after their 1980 masterpiece Remain in Light. This liberated farewell resulted in their fifth studio album, Speaking in Tongues. The band were confident they could piece something together without Eno’s helping hand, and rightly so.
Speaking in Tongues is a resounding success. The band take the funk-rock musings of Remain in Light and Byrne and Eno’s concurrent collaborative side project, My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, transforming them into something more streamlined, radio-friendly and dancefloor appropriate.
When bands turn toward pop sensibilities, they often lose a degree of artistic flair. In this respect Speaking in Tongues is a great anomaly. Granted, it doesn’t reach the dizzying altitude of the previous two albums, but it deftly straddles the hair-width Venn overlap between accessibility and creative innovation.
The album starts on a solid note with a George Clinton-inspired funk-spangled belter, ‘Burning Down the House’. “Chris [Frantz] had just been to see Parliament-Funkadelic in its full glory at Madison Square Garden, and he was really hyped,” bassist Tina Weymouth wrote in the liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads. “During the jam, he kept yelling ‘Burn down the house!’ which was a P-Funk audience chant, and David [Byrne] dug the line, changing it to the finished version, ‘Burning down the house’.”
Contrary to the name, ‘Burning Down the House’ builds the framework for the ensuing album with an infectiously danceable groove, which burgeons towards the choppy angst of ‘Making Flippy Floppy’. This track is a real treat for the Saturday night ravers but retains Talking Heads’ characteristic air of ominous doubt in Byrne’s fragmented lyrics: “Somebody is waiting in the hallway/ Somebody is falling down the stairs/ Set someone free, break someone’s heart/ Stand up help us out”.
Speaking in Tongues is rather acute with regard to its sonic objective. As a funky, danceable record, it gives crucial energy to Talking Heads’ ouevre. However, it lacks dynamic changes in pace, with the slightly sedated ‘I Get Wild / Wild Gravity’ as its only moment of rhythmic respite. This is less of a criticism than a comparison to the wider scope of the Eno trilogy.
The album bows out on a famous high, ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’. The idiosyncratic lovesong, alongside ‘Burning Down the House’, embodies the zenith of 1980s pop music and undoubtedly helps to buoy the album with is beauteous tones and internal sense of honesty and emotion.
Rolling ever so slightly downhill, the rough edges of intrigue and character are, to an extent, rounded off on this record, leaving a glossier, albeit well-produced, finish – the magazine to Remain in Light’s novella, if you will. It is a pacey and delightful read but falls a few inches short of the predating Eno trilogy’s artistic integrity and emotional depth.
