The band who transformed Talking Heads: “Kind of spectacles”
Talking Heads have always been a tough act to pin down. Even context doesn’t help, as it rattles my brain every time I consider the fact that they were in New York playing the same venues at the same time as the likes of the Ramones, Blondie, or Patti Smith. They were in the same scene, but there’s something about David Byrne’s bunch that has always felt more futuristic somehow, untethered to any moment in the past.
It’s probably because the band were looking off in a completely opposite direction. Although they’re always thrown in amongst the early punk scene simply because it’s the most defining and easiest label to slap on the city at the time, especially during the CBGBs moment, it wasn’t something they were all that interested in. In his book, How Music Works, Byrne laid out the rules the group had at first: “No rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock hair, no rock lights, no rehearsed stage patter.” For the rest of their career as a band, they were interested in questioning the very idea of what a band should be and do at every turn.
Let’s take Stop Making Sense as an example. Sure, that was a major tour and the band put on a major show, but it never once feels like a classic rock show. Byrne steps onto the stage alone, decides to play one of their rockiest songs, ‘Psycho Killer’, as a solo acoustic number. There are dance moves, but no one is ever calling the singer’s signature flailing “rock moves or poses”. Even the infamous big suit feels like a play on the idea of the big man rockstar, but with Byrne always as the tiny anxious head trying to fill the big role.
It’s not a rock show, but it is a spectacle, as Byrne was always interested in. This is what set them apart. While their peers looked back at the rock and roll legends that came before them for their rockstar presence on stage, Byrne was always looking far and wide to different styles and genres, always more interested in things like funk than punk.
“In Talking Heads, the record collection was filled with Hamilton Bohannon, James Brown, Roxy Music, Funkadelic, and P-Funk, that whole world,” he told Pitchfork. That obviously comes through on the recordings, especially in the band’s basslines and percussion, but it also touched on their performance and the whole package of the band as he added, “George Clinton and his whole crazy P-Funk philosophy was great; they were doing these kind of spectacles,” crediting the whole Parliament-Funkadelic collective for changing everything for him.
The idea of ‘spectacle’ in the world of Talking Heads is interesting and essential. Byrne is well known for being a deeply anxious man and not one who was ever super comfortable fitting in as a frontman. But perhaps witnessing these funk acts and seeing how they functioned, more so as a band filling a room with energy and letting that be the show, gave him the courage to do the same.
It’s exactly what inspired him to call in more people for moments like Stop Making Sense, as he said, “We decided that in order to represent this music live onstage, we needed to recruit some real funkers into the band. The size of the band pretty much doubled.” He admitted, “It was a big, nervy thing to do, and it was a mess at first. But man, was it fun.”
During the whole of the concert film, Byrne interacts with his audience almost not at all. But what he does provide is a true spectacle of a show, undeniably inspired by his interest in these other genres over of the trappings of rock.
