ON September 11 last year, at the Toronto International Film Festival, all four members of Talking Heads were photographed together for the first time in more than 20 years. It was only for a Q&A session, but this seemingly routine get-together was greeted with widespread jubilation because it seemed to iron out a nagging wrinkle in the fabric of the music universe. Namely, how could a band who brought the world so much joy hold so much animosity towards each other?
“Which is why us getting together around Stop Making Sense was so great for our fans,” says Chris Frantz. “Because they can say, ‘At least these people are willing to be in the same room again.’”
“They didn’t realise that we didn’t hate each other,” adds Tina Weymouth. “We just were annoyed!”
If any project was going to bring Talking Heads back together, albeit only for a press tour, it was Stop Making Sense. The 4K restoration of Jonathan Demme’s legendary 1984 concert film of the expanded band in full flow allowed us to fall in love with Talking Heads all over again. Cinemas were full of people dancing in the aisles. “It wasn’t Talking Heads fans my age, although some of those probably went too, but it was a lot of much younger people who had heard about this,” marvels David Byrne. “Sometimes they’d come up to me on the street and say, ‘I saw the film, and we were all dancing.’ That’s really nice.”
Talking Heads are one of those rare bands who are constantly accruing new followers, more than three decades after their dissolution. They’ve never not been popular, never not been cool, never dropped off the critical radar. Jerry Harrison credits this in part to the way the band were able to evolve from album to album, avoiding becoming stuck in one sound or era, while always remaining true to themselves: “Our creed, you might say, was relentless exploration.”
“The band went through all these different phases,” continues Byrne. “There was a part where it was very yelpy and angst-ridden – not quite punky, but in that world. A lot of yelping more than singing! And then it transitioned into this amazing interracial funk outfit. There might be people who like one and don’t like the other. But they’re really different, it’s kind of like a completely different band. Maybe the very fact that we managed to evolve and change is part of what people like.”
Crucially, there were rules in place from the very beginning which meant that, when the band did regenerate, they never lost sight of their artistic goals. “We weren’t going to adopt the traditional rock’n’roll stances,” says Byrne. “We wanted our lyrics to reflect who we were and the world that we were dealing with. There was a sense that a lot of what we saw on the pop charts didn’t relate to us, it just seemed to be some big fantasy world of rock stardom and excess. So we thought, in our own modest way, ‘We’ll do something that speaks to us, and maybe some of our peers.’”
DAVID BYRNE
Talking Heads are about to return to those yelpy, angst-ridden beginnings by assembling an expanded edition of their 1977 debut – the first in a planned reissue/remaster series of all their eight studio albums. Harrison is currently going through some early live tapes to see what might be worth including. “We were recorded for Italian TV at CBGB, there was something for a radio station up in Boston. And probably the search will come up with more.”
The band have also struck a deal with Columbia University for them to host the Talking Heads archive. “Now we have to find it!” laughs Weymouth. “It’s not as complete as it ought to be. But it should be helpful to people trying to piece the puzzle together.” Adds Byrne: “The idea is that once they get everything digitised, all the ephemera, and also all the rehearsal tapes and outtakes, they make it all publicly available. I thought to myself, ‘What would I have liked when I was trying to figure out how to navigate this whole thing [of being a recording artist]?’ That could have been really handy to me. Now it’s possible.”
Underlining the band’s appeal to successive generations, A24 – the film company behind 4K – have just announced a Talking Heads tribute album, featuring the likes of Paramore covering songs from ; the Blu-ray and streaming release of the 4K remaster is also coming soon. Rewatching the film, says Frantz, “just reinforced what I already knew: that Talking Heads had a very unique, and I would say
