the name of this band is talking heads
the other and best talking heads live album
programming note: tiny mammal kingdom is expanding! normal newsletters like this one will now be posted alternating mondays and wednesdays starting next week, and i’m starting to do interviews with pals about the media they love, which will be posted every other friday starting either next week or the week after. if you have something you’d be interested in being interviewed about, message or email on tinymammalkingdom@gmail.com and we can work something out. i can’t promise, though, that i’ll be able to publish everyone’s contributions any time soon.
I’ve been trying to work out how exactly to talk about Talking Heads in this newsletter for a while. I’ve written about the ‘autistic erotics’ of their love songs before, so I don’t really feel like I have much more to say about those tracks or about love in their music. Trying to grapple with their entire discography head-on seems essentially impossible, both because there’s so much of it and because their music has been so important to me for so long and in so many different ways that I just don’t know how to begin to unpack it. Instead of trying to write an article which tries to communicate what this band means to me, then, or doing the obvious thing and focusing on Stop Making Sense or Remain in Light or whatever, I’m going to talk about the live album which I think gives the best window to what Talking Heads actually were: The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads.
Not necessarily the most famous Talking Heads live album, The Name of This Band was originally released in 1982 and reissued in an expanded form in 2004. Unlike Stop Making Sense, it’s not taken from an individual tour, but from thirteen different concerts across four years; instead of just offering them as they were at one point in time, therefore, it gives us direct access to multiple different forms of the band.
The album begins with David Byrne telling his audience ‘the name of this song is ‘New Feeling’, and that’s what it’s about’. There’s a brief pause, some guy in the crowd says ‘yeah’, and then it starts: the instruments kick in with a classic Chris Frantz beat which starts with just kick drum and hi-hat alongside a jutting, angular guitar. There’s bits and pieces of talking from Byrne throughout the record, but mostly it just doesn’t let up, and the music is essentially uninterrupted as we go from that 1977 performance for a radio station in Massachusetts to a 1981 version of ‘Psycho Killer’ in Tokyo to ‘The Great Curve’ played in New York in 1980. There are thirty-three individual tracks (although two appear twice), and the whole thing takes about two and a half hours to cover these four years.
All this is to say that if you’ve for some reason been challenged to listen to a single Talking Heads album with the most tracks from the widest period, then this album’s made for you. Although it doesn’t include songs from Speaking in Tongues, making Stop Making Sense technically their most widely representative live album in terms of which albums the songs originally appeared on, The Name of This Band has a genuinely remarkable depth for the years it covers.
These are important years, too. Although their pre-history starts in 1973, when Byrne and Frantz first formed the Artistics, and they played their first gig as Talking Heads in 1975, 1977 saw them gain their fourth member, Jerry Harrison (in March), and release both their first single (in February) and their first album, Talking Heads ‘77 (in September; it was recorded in April). By 1978, they were collaborating with Brian Eno — who had already, by that point, worked with David Bowie — on More Songs About Buildings and Food, and then released another two Eno-produced albums the next two years: Fear of Music (1979) and their masterpiece, Remain in Light (1980). They’d started 1977 as a pretty straightforward new wave band with three members, and by 1980-81 they’d released an era-defining album whose inspirations included funk and Afrobeat and were touring with nine members. They were, to put it lightly, pretty busy, and this is the essential stage in their development as a band — and the one in which they probably reach their musical peak. No wonder they went on a hiatus after the mammoth and legendary Remain in Light tour, and only released their next proper album in 1983.
Stop Making Sense famously traces part of the band and Byrne’s evolution over the eleven years since he’d started making music with Frantz. Byrne starts the concert playing the lonely and paranoid ‘Psycho Killer’ alone in what looks like an empty room, and ends it on a packed stage amid the cathartic release of ‘Take Me to the River’ and ‘Crosseyed and Painless’. Obviously the narrative is in a sense universal: opening up to the world, becoming part of something greater than you through this wonderful, collaborative musical joy. But it’s also a kind of creation myth for the band, the shy and withdrawn (read: autistic) Byrne, who has said he learned the guitar so he could talk to girls, opening up and transforming his music into something radically new and gorgeous, specifically through the influence of his bandmates. Insofar as this is an accurate version of the story (kinda debatable, though it does have some truth to it), it’s one we see happen before our eyes in The Name of This Band, their genuinely staggering transformation somehow even more impressive when you can actually hear it.
The two songs which appear twice on the album are a great demonstration of this: ‘Psycho Killer’ appears once as performed in 1977 and once in 1981, while ‘Stay Hungry’ appears in two versions from 1979 and 1980 or 1981. The versions which appear are just remarkably different from one another, even though there’s only two years between the performances of ‘Stay Hungry’. It’s not quite like they’re different songs, and the 1984 solo version of ‘Psycho Killer’ on Stop Making Sense is much more of a departure than the 1981 performance, but there’s a really directly visible sense that this is an evolving band taking on new shapes and forms and experimenting with past material. On the later version of ‘Stay Hungry’, the end has an Adrian Belew guitar line floating just underneath it in a way I love — it gives the lines, some of my favourite Talking Heads lyrics, this ethereal quality.
I don’t want to give you the impression, though, that The Name of This Band is just a historical curiosity or simply the most efficient vehicle available for listening to a lot of different Talking Heads songs. Its relatively unfiltered nature isn’t just a reason it’s interesting as an artifact of these performances: it also means that it makes the band feel so much more human. Although there isn’t much talking between songs, you can hear bits of guitar noise as the band gets ready to launch into the next performance, and you can occasionally hear the band counting each other in.
It feels so much more alive than listening to Stop Making Sense can. Obviously I love that album/film, but that they cut out a lot of the breaks between songs and that some of the music got corrected after the fact just loses a lot of the direct contact with the band, and it’s when they appear most vulnerable and least produced — whether when Byrne’s covered in sweat after running around the stage during ‘Life During Wartime’, when he takes off the suit for ‘Take Me to the River’, or when he looks at the lamp with an extraordinary tenderness during ‘This Must Be the Place’ — that I tend to enjoy it the most. The Name of This Band feels just like a full album of those bits.
What speech there is is just so endearing, too. The album’s title is a joke about Byrne’s stage banter in the early performances, of which his intro to ‘New Feeling’ is potentially the longest snippet featured. This isn’t that someone’s gone through and cut the speech, it’s that he never spoke, and when he did it was to say ‘the name of this song is’ and then say the name of the song they were about to play. That he added an (admittedly four word) explanation of what the song is about is actually remarkable. Elsewhere, he can be heard telling the crowd ‘once again, you can dance… if you want to’. That’s basically it. I love him. He’s just so autistic, and I love him so much for it.
The early performances featured also showcase his extraordinary ability to just yell. There’s a common assumption, I think, that early Byrne was some recluse, that it was all neat and buttoned-up and that his adoption of repressed personas meant his performances were drained of life. This just isn’t true, although you can see what people are talking about on the evidence of the early albums. But the performances on The Name of This Band of songs like ‘A Clean Break’, ‘Don’t Worry About the Government’, or even Fear of Music’s ‘Mind’ show Byrne let loose. In the album versions, these narrators were on the verge of losing it between their fear and anger and repression; in these songs, it’s already lost.
A lot of the songs, too, just sound better. For me, this is most notable in tracks from Fear of Music, an album I’ve always conceptually appreciated but found a bit empty musically — it’s all just so paranoid and repressed that it doesn’t feel alive anymore. On More Songs, the weight of how much the band could rock always propels you through the songs, particularly with Chris Frantz’s insistent drumming, and in Remain in Light the groove’s always strong enough to carry you, but Fear of Music always felt a little cerebral to me. Not here, though, most notably in ‘Animals’, whose album version is one of the band’s weakest songs but which is transformed here. Part of it is that these songs are actually really funny — the album is structured around the narrators’ fears, whether of memories (which can’t wait and make your mind an unending ‘party’ in the sense only an autistic person can use), heaven (where nothing ever changes), or life during wartime (presumably self-explanatory). But some of the fears are of things like air and paper and electric guitar; it’s just an overreaction, someone who can’t cope with life, who’s suspicious of animals because he’s worried they’re laughing at him — and ‘they say’ they don’t even need money! In the album, the joke doesn’t quite land because the music feels so self-serious; in the live performance, there’s a genuine joy and humour and fluidity to it.
This transforms even songs whose album versions are amazing, with particular standouts including the Remain in Light tracks ‘Houses in Motion’, ‘Born Under Punches’, and ‘The Great Curve’. You can almost feel the life in the music, the real joy and connection that ties the band together and makes it into a living thing. It isn’t that the album versions lack this, necessarily, it’s just that when they’re all live and unfiltered in the same room as each other, there’s a fluidity and motion which deepens this all even further. There’s something lovely in feeling them all respond to each other in the moment, building something together. Talking Heads in 1980-81 were genuinely a band at the height of their powers, possibly more in sync with each other (musically, at least) than any band I’ve come across. It’s great hearing that happen in the moment.
There are issues with the album, obviously, and that it doesn’t include material from Speaking in Tongues — particularly ‘This Must Be the Place’ — is a real shame, and although the original version was released in 1982, there would have been an opportunity when it was reissued. I understand why they didn’t, though: that version of the band has already been perfectly captured in live form on Stop Making Sense, and including them would open up difficult questions about the even later albums from Little Creatures. While there are tracks from those albums — ‘Road to Nowhere’, ‘And She Was’, the first half of Naked, presumably others — which would warrant inclusion, mostly the material just isn’t as good, and it would fuck with the progression from spartan new wave to… Talking Heads.
So it’s not a definitive introduction to their music by any means, but I think the title of The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads is weirdly appropriate. This is a band finding its voice, finding the things which made them not just another CBGB’s band but the era-defining geniuses they became, transforming before our eyes into what we know Talking Heads to be. The early tracks are also, obviously, amazing — both on their own terms and because you can start to see the bits of the band, like Byrne’s lyrics or the rhythm section, which go on to define the later periods — and the whole package is just sensational, both as a window to really getting to know this band and as just a fantastic album.
(final thing: there’s a really interesting article to be written (and let’s not kid ourselves, I’ll probably write it at some point) charting David Byrne’s live evolution, through these and other early recordings like the Rome concert, Stop Making Sense, experimenting with kilts in the late ‘90s, the ‘07 Austin live album, his performances with St Vincent, and finally American Utopia, which is somehow on Stop Making Sense’s level? Which is astonishing. Byrne’s evolution as a performer is fascinating to me, and that you find him actually talking to the audience in American Utopia is really lovely.)