Talking Heads

The 1978 Talking Heads were still the most indecipherable creature to emerge from the new wave incubator of CBGB. Metropolitan aliens with clean-cut, well-dressed faces, tremendously cerebral, with that arty approach of unrepentant nerds and that skeletal sound, woven from razor-sharp guitars and lunar basslines. So white in the vocals – high-pitched, ungainly, neurasthenic – and so black in the rhythm, openly eyeing funk, Afrobeat and – sacrilege! – disco music. Almost anti-punks in the age of punk. And yet it was precisely under that label – perhaps paired with the more reassuring suffix “art” – that their debut “Talking Heads: 77” had been filed. With that bombshell of a single called “Psycho Killer” forcefully pushing them out of the cramped enclosure of New York's musical intelligentsia.

But that destabilizing debut LP was still missing something that was nonetheless embedded in the band's genetic code: total devotion to rhythm, an even bolder fusion of African primitivism and Western futurism, an even more extreme use of the recording studio as a futuristic forge for a unique, revolutionary style. All of it filtered through a dry, synthetic language. In two words: new wave. A natural destination for the former Lower East Side loft-mates? Maybe. But history decreed that bringing it to fruition required the fifth Talking Head: Brian Eno.

The worst-matched tour in history

The meeting between the New York band and the “non-musician,” fresh out of the sessions for “Low” with David Bowie, took place in London, during what Simon Reynolds calls “the worst-matched double European tour in history”: Ramones + Talking Heads. What united the two bands was their shared birthright on the CBGB stage; everything else drove them apart: legend has it that Joey Ramone and co. couldn't stand the James Brown tapes Tina Weymouth kept playing them on the bus, and were stunned to see the Heads reading books instead of raising hell on the road. The choice of producer would drive them apart for good, too: while the Ramones dug up an old glory like Phil Spector, the Talking Heads looked to the future, embodied by the hallucinated gaze and tapering hands of mr. St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. “He reminded us of a Jesuit monk, he was very charismatic,” Weymouth would recall. “They were the four best people I could have hoped to meet,” Eno would reciprocate, seeing in the Heads – and in Byrne in particular – a younger version of himself, with that “desire to build music in a conceptual way.” The bizarre, visionary personality of the Scottish singer, in turn, found in Eno's approach – fresh off the early landmark “Before And After Science” – “a stimulating order for the free flow of influences, fascinations, metropolitan, archetypal, planetary images” (as Mimma Schirosi put it, OndaRock).

Gentlemen take Polaroids

Brian Eno's decisive insight lies precisely in his ability to compress that anarchic sonic magma, that mass of syncopated, lopsided rhythms, into a coherent musical flow – more structured and almost always danceable – emphasizing the irresistible bass-and-drums tandem of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, but also the hitherto sidelined role of keyboardist Jerry Harrison, adding new electronic polychromies to the band's sonic palette. A collage, or rather a puzzle, just like the one on the splendid cover, created by Jimmy De Sana from an idea by Byrne, depicting the band members through 529 Polaroid photographs.

“More Songs About Buildings And Food” – a title reportedly suggested by XTC frontman Andy Partridge – was released on July 14, 1978, with eleven tracks, mixing songs left off the debut (hence the “more”) with entirely new material, the fruit of the band's first recordings at the famed Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. As the sessions progressed, groove took hold of those anorexic litanies, swelling them with new pulses, with the spirit of Fela Kuti hovering over the studio (legend has it Eno put his own copy of “Afrodisiac” on the turntable at home to explain to Byrne what he had in mind). Funkedelia is the watchword: a postmodern alchemy that blends wild pan-ethnic ritual with metropolitan neurasthenia into disorienting polyrhythmic collages.

In the jungle of rhythms

Projected into this fascinating new scenario, the Talking Heads leave behind one last bridge to the past, in the form of the opening shuffle “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel,” which picks up where “Pulled Up” left off on the debut, a clattering gallop with spastic guitar breaks and keyboard chimes marking the beat of Byrne's frantic sung-spoken delivery, lost in his disoriented nonsense (“I'm walking 'round the world... But first, show me what you can do!”). Not even a second of silence, and a drum hit catapults us into the jungle of this new otherworldly funk, possessed and futurist: “With Our Love” advances menacingly like a mechanical march amid the darting bass hits of Weymouth – the band's true “second melodic voice” – and the riffs of a rhythm guitar as thin as a metal blade, while Byrne mumbles another one of his alienated mantras (“Forgot the trouble, that's the trouble”).

With her breezy look and ultra-short Jean Seberg crop, Tina takes center stage as the main counterpoint to Byrne's epileptic vocals. Starting with the intro of “Warning Sign,” where her round riffs pave the way for the neurotic dialogue between dry guitar arpeggios and the vocal melody line, with sudden tempo changes tracking Byrne's mood swings, fading into a final chant that only seems reassuring. It's Weymouth again who lays out the lunar prelude accompanying the guitar jab and Byrne's hallucinated declaiming on the bouncy “The Girls Want To Be With The Girls,” the album's pop peak, its sixties-style chorus dripping stickily over a triumph of glittering disco keyboards. And it's another bass-driven ride that propels the schizophrenic (and superb) “Artists Only,” where amid gusts of guitar, synth blasts, whirling organs and syncopated rhythms, the frontman stages one of his rambling pantomimes, played entirely on the thin line between autobiographical parody and deranged self-justification (“I'm painting, I'm painting again/... I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning my brain... I don't have to prove... that I am creative!/ All my pictures are confused/ And now I'm going to take me to you”).

Byrne runs the show with his surreal lyrics that “skipped right over the subjects that monopolized 96% of rock's attention (love, sex, various forms of rebellion and misbehavior),” as Reynolds recalls, exploring instead themes like bureaucracy, television, animals, phobias and urban alienation, through imaginary mini-films and wordplay. And he's always the star of the show, with his awkward, schizoid deliveries, played entirely on the vocal cords rather than the diaphragm (“he's literally a Talking Head,” as Rolling Stone put it).

But there's no doubt that rhythm is the absolute ruler of the album: pounding, obsessive, suffocating and often paroxysmally cadenced, yet never following a predictable trajectory, even within the same song. “I've always liked rhythms that are a bit spasmodic and jerky, that's what I gravitated toward,” Byrne would recall. From the unnatural mix of his City-clerk stiffness and this skewed funky instinct come surreal dancefloor numbers. Like “Found A Job,” which closes side one with an irresistible funky crescendo – Tina again in the spotlight, in a spectacular tussle with the rhythm guitar – and Byrne's near-rap telling the tongue-in-cheek story of a couple who end up channeling their stupid arguments into a hit TV show. Or like the frenzied (intellectual, of course) disco jam of “Stay Hungry,” with Byrne recalling the alien, dreamlike vocals of his old CBGB comrade Tom Verlaine (Television), adding his own unmistakable deranged touch, in an orgy of synthesizers ranging from soul to jazz all the way to the edges of prog.

On the verge of a nervous breakdown

There's never a moment's respite on “More Songs About Buildings And Food,” not least because tension runs beneath the surface of every track, even the seemingly sunniest ones, like “The Good Thing,” with its catchy, building chorus buoyed by carefree backing vocals, frantic jangle guitars and sinuous basslines, masking an inner conflict over the search for the best solution (“I will fight; will fight with my heart... A straight line exists between me and the good things/ I have found the line and its direction is known to me/ Absolute trust keeps me going in the right direction/ Any intrusion is met with a heart full of the good thing”). Even the abrupt stop-and-go of “I'm Not In Love” – perhaps the most rock moment of the bunch – conceals a latent anguish in Byrne's dazed vocals, which end up almost drowned out by the instrumental chaos, finding peace only in the chilling final line: “I believe that we don't need love/ There'll come a day when we won't need love.” And even where it completely blindsides the listener, transporting them into unexpected country prairies, complete with mandolin, slide guitar and martial drums (the quivering closing ballad “The Big Country,” inspired by a line from Roxy Music's “Prairie Rose”), Byrne doesn't shy away from a desolate reflection on his wandering life, tinged with weariness and regret:

I wouldn’t live there if you paid me

I couldn’t live like that, no siree!

I couldn’t do the things the way those people do

I couldn’t live there if you paid me to

I’m tired of looking out the windows of the airplane

I’m tired of travelling, I want to be somewhere.

It’s not even worth talking

About those people down there

It's almost paradoxical, given such creative wealth, that the album's hit should be a cover. Though in this case it's a genuine reinvention: Reverend Al Green's "Take Me To The River" is drained of its soul pathos and transformed into an unsettling, jagged, mechanized gospel-wave number, without giving up its winking hook, underscored by Byrne's hiccupping vocals and groovy basslines. Released as a single, it will climb to No. 26 on the US Billboard Hot 100, pulling the album into the Top 30 on both sides of the Atlantic.

The hand of the “non-musician”

So it's not all Eno's doing here, either. But the hand of the “non-musician” can be sensed in plenty of the album's nuances: in the electronic breezes and drum reverb of "Warning Sign", in the clicks and echoes of "Stay Hungry", among the psychedelic overtones of "Artists Only", in the staccato bursts and faint shimmer between the chorus lines of "Take Me To The River", and even in psyxties-style nursery rhymes like "The Girls Want To Be With The Girls".

Never too intrusive a hand, though. Eno's “discreet” sonic taste never threatens to overturn the Heads' musical balance, nor to alter their surreal, eccentric spirit. In short, this was no one-off collaboration, but a genuine artistic fusion between the English producer and the New York band, one that would continue with equally inspired results on two further Talking Heads albums (1979's "Fear Of Music" and 1980's "Remain In Light"), further refining this new concept of psychedelic funk, which would later veer into avant-garde territory with the historic Eno-Byrne duo collaboration "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" (1981).

"Songs About Buildings And Food" remains, however, the original spark of that partnership, the live-wire excitement of the rendez-vous itself, as well as the most disarming collection of songs ever written to move both booty and brain at once.

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06/09/2020