{"id":23034,"date":"2025-07-26T07:10:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T07:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/23034\/"},"modified":"2025-07-26T07:10:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T07:10:13","slug":"when-talking-heads-found-their-groove","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/23034\/","title":{"rendered":"When Talking\u00a0Heads Found Their Groove"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAmong the brilliant first four Talking Heads<\/a> albums, More Songs About Buildings and Food has always been a dark horse candidate for the all-around greatest. Released 47 years ago this month, it sounds more electable now than ever. With its lean muscularity, panic-attack propulsion, weird ambiance, highwire anxiety, paranoid prescience and formal coherence, it comes across as the Sgt. Pepper of media-age alienation.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat alone would merit a shout-out for More Songs About Buildings and Food (Super Deluxe Edition), yet another super-sized major label classic album vault-scraping. But there\u2019s context, too. The run-up to the band\u2019s half-century birthday \u2014 they formed in 1975 \u2014 has seen the theatrical re-release of Jonathan\u2019s Demme\u2019s touchstone concert doc Stop Making Sense (spurring a Heads reunion, at least on talk-show couches). Head Head David Byrne reanimated the band\u2019s catalog on Broadway and film via the American Utopia project. Drummer Chris Frantz wrote an excellent memoir (Remain in Love). Heads vets Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew are currently touring a band (call \u2018em Heads & Company) focused on material from the band\u2019s 1980 classic Remain In Light\u2013era, while lesser-known tribute acts \u2014 see Mystic Bowie\u2019s Talking Dreads \u2014 have spiced up the cover band circuit for years.<\/p>\n

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\n\tPart of the magic of More Songs is about the addition of Harrison, fresh off his tenure with Velvet Underground acolytes The Modern Lovers, on second guitar and keyboards, bolstering the original trio of Byrne, Frantz, and bassist Tina Weymouth. More magic came from co-producer Brian Eno<\/a>, currently in the midst of his own latter-day renaissance (recently, two collaborative LPs with Beatie Wolf and a perpetually-shapeshifting career documentary, Eno). More Songs was the band\u2019s initial studio encounter with the future super-producer (Fear of Music and Remain in Light followed). Like a good first date, there\u2019s a sense of discovery and mutual admiration, everyone showing their best selves, letting each other shine \u2014 the high-strung art-schooled NYC post-punks and the low-key art-schooled post-glam English groove scientist.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\tEno\u2019s influence is subtle but key. You notice it on the rag-tag chorus of \u201cThe Good Thing,\u201d with its Before and After Science vibe. It\u2019s delivered by a choir dubbed \u201cTina and the Typing Pool\u201d in the liner notes, which included support staffers at Compass Point Studios, then a brand-new state-of-the-art facility built in the Bahamas by Chris Blackwell of Island Records. More Songs was among the first albums recorded there, helping to map the dubby club grooves of the \u201880s and make the studio a recording destination. (Tina Weymouth recalled the band got an early-bird discount; one of the two studio rooms was still under construction.)<\/p>\n

\n\tYou also feel Eno\u2019s presence in the rubbery snare hits and nagging car-alarm guitar riff of \u201cWarning Sign\u201d \u2014 a song whose foreboding vibe hits particularly hard in 2025. More Songs is, in effect, Eno\u2019s debut as a capital-P producer, notwithstanding some minor early efforts and, of course, David Bowie\u2019s landmark sessions for Low and Heroes. Eno didn\u2019t co-produce those albums per se, though he shaped them by \u201ctreating\u201d instruments via his EMS Synthi AKS portable synth. He worked in a similar way on More Songs (In the new liner notes, Byrne recalls \u201cwe asked for the Low snare effect [\u2026] so we got that on \u201cTake Me To The River,\u201d as well as some sonar sounds that Brian added.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe album\u2019s closer, \u201cBig Country,\u201d also lands hard in 2025 \u2014 a travelogue survey of a land mass, presumably North America, that zooms in on every-day life on the ground and concludes \u201cI wouldn\u2019t live there if you paid me to,\u201d followed by an outburst of gibberish and distinctly country-western guitar licks. An alternate take of the album\u2019s opening track, \u201cThank You for Sending Me an Angel (Country Angel Version),\u201d amplifies the concept, magnifying the song\u2019s trail-ride rhythm and adding caffeinated campfire acoustic guitar strums. More Songs About Buildings and Food has always been one of the great concept albums about America. As Jonathan Gould notes in his new band bio, Burning Down The House, the LP was originally titled Oh What a Big Country, before Chris and Tina (with help from XTC\u2019s\u00a0 Andy Partridge) hit on a better idea. Fittingly, the music is intense, darkly funny, frequently beautiful, absurd, sometimes frightening, belligerent, angry, crazy.<\/p>\n

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\n\tThere\u2019s nothing earthshaking among the bonus cuts (10 alternate takes plus an instrumental version of Fear of Music\u2019s \u201cElectricty\u201d). But they do shine light on process. You hear how the tempo of \u201cArtists Only\u201d got sped up, how \u201cGirls Want to Be With the Girls\u201d was slowed down. (\u201cTake Me to the River\u201d was also slowed down, radically, from the band\u2019s early live versions, though there\u2019s no studio evidence here.) The instruments are more clearly defined on the alternates, before, one assumes, Eno artfully smeared the final takes. His touches made all the difference, however, pulling the songs into a pulsing turbo-charged whole. Side two of the finished LP, in particular, was one of the great house party soundtracks of the era.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat version of Talking Heads, the house party dance band, gets showcased here in a cleaned up copy of a widely-circulated concert bootleg, recorded in the summer of 1978 in New York at the short-lived Entermedia Theater \u2014 formerly the Yiddish Art Theater, built in the gilded-age \u201820s and, like everything else in the late-\u201870s, a bit down at the heel, a very-off-Broadway Lower East Side venue that was just a short walk from the band\u2019s early home base of CBGB. On this night, they were a killer bar band with a sophomore record, grown from trio to quartet, breaking into full bloom, and already showcasing new material (\u201cDrugs\u201d) that would be on their stranger, more diffuse follow-up. Byrne camps up the vocals, hooting, hollering, snarling, yelping and whooping; Harrison thickens the guitar mix; Tina and Chris drive the rhythm; and songs tumble one into the next like a great, sweaty-ass DJ set. Quite a moment, but they were all just getting started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Among the brilliant first four Talking Heads albums, More Songs About Buildings and Food has always been a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,23208,134,136,23209],"class_list":{"0":"post-23034","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-brian-eno","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-talking-heads"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}