two Heads

Talking Heads

TALKING HEADS

(Rhino/Warners)

Blender, 200?

Preppy foursome decide "funk art, let's dance", create four postpunk

classics in a row, mutate into intermittently inspired pop group, and now

finally get the deluxe box set career wrap-up they've long deserved.

Talking Heads were CBGB staples but they never really fit New York's punk scene. Partly it was because their cleancut image and highbrow gentility stood out amid the leather-jacket fraternity of juvenile delinquent wannabes. Mostly it was because they were making dance music at a time when punk consensus decreed that disco sucked. Crucially, though, Talking Heads didn't sound like honky musicians playing funk with studious fidelity and precision a la Average White Band, so much as they resemble what funk might have sounded like if it had actually been a WASP-y white invention in the first place. In their music, you can hear the urge to get down and get loose struggling with tight-assed neurosis.

Nervous, twitchy, seemingly alienated from his own flesh,  David Byrne physically embodied this tension onstage. Discomfort and detachment also provided the subject of many of his most provocative lyrics. In song after song, he seems squeamish about his own emotions. Like Johnny Rotten, it's almost as though he'd prefer to have "no feelings"  and instead lead a life entirely of the mind, all curiosity and fascination rather than messy passion. "I'm Not in Love," from the second album More Songs about Buildings and Food, is less 10 CC and more Gang of Four ("Love Like Anthrax," specifically). "Why would I want to fall in love?" ponders Byrne."There'll come a day when we won't need love." "No Compassion," from the debut Talking Heads: 77, considers empathy disabling and burdensome: "Other people's problems, they overwhelm my mind". Both albums contain several not-quite love songs, such as "Happy Day," whose line "feel like my heart has a will of its own" suggests a distanced attitude to one's own amorousness.  Yet the sound of 77 and More--Byrne's fluttering rhythm guitar, the crisp 'n' quivery funk of bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison's darting flickers of keyboard--actual feels like butterflies in your stomach.

The title More Songs About Buildings and Food chimed with the New Wave belief that you could and should write about other things apart from relationships or rock's standard-issue rebel scenarios. More than More, though, it's  1979's Fear of Music where Byrne widens his lyrical reach. In "Cities', he assesses the competing charms of various urban environments, while "Animals" is a paranoid curmudgeon's rant about the irresponsibility of all them wild critters. When Byrne does write about love, though, there's still that sense of alienation. In "Mind," he's desperately seeking the magic verbal formula to dissuade his partner from leaving. Mid-song, he abruptly levitates above himself with a wry, self-mocking "and it comes directly from my heart to you," as if trying to escape the fatuity of his own feelings through a sort of out-of-body irony.

Sonically, Fear is astonishingly varied, stretching from the African music/disco/Dadaist poetry fusion of "I Zimbra" to the radically modernized psychedelia of "Drugs". Starting with More Songs and blossoming on Fear, Talking Heads had struck up a fruitful relationship with producer Brian Eno, who helped them develop an ultra-vivid palette of textures and a panoramic sound. By 1980's Remain In Light, the mutually infatuated Byrne and Eno began to resemble a pair of cerebrally over-endowed Siamese twins. Obsessed with African polyrhythms, they convinced the initially compliant band to write in a new way, building layer by layer from multiple bass-pulses, percussion lines, rhythm guitar tics, and graffiti-like smears of synth. Byrne's grail was a tribal music for faithless postmoderns, a trance-dance sound to heal the soul-sick spiritual emptiness evoked in songs like "Houses in Motion". "Listening Wind" goes further, seeing the West from the outside, through the eyes of a terrorist bomber disgusted by American Coca-colonialism.

Having started the Seventies as a key component of Roxy Music, the era's greatest art rock outfit, Eno ended the decade as unofficial fifth member of a group that surpassed Roxy's achievement. But the expansion of Talking Heads sound on Remain caused intolerable strains within the group; Harrison, Weymouth and Frantz smarted from having been virtually relegated to session musicians. To save the band, Byrne agreed to part ways with Eno and revert to the taut tunefulness of  their early days. The fact that Remain was their least commercially successful record (despite spawning an early MTV favorite with the video for "Once In A Lifetime",  one in a series of artful promos) provided further impetus to scale back to versus-chorus-middle-eight strictures. The awkwardly transitional Speaking In Tongues (1983) generated their first real hit, "Burning Down The House," but its jewel was "This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)," an exquisite attempt to write a love song devoid of romantic clichés, full of witty but heartfelt lines: "I'm just an animal looking for a home," "you have a face with a view."

On subsequent albums, though, Byrne's apparent coming to terms with commonplace emotions leads him towards a sentimentalization of the common people, in the process sacrificing much of the tension that gave the group its edge. Paralleling a general mid-Eighties shift towards Americana, Little Creatures (1985) replaced funk with country influences (pedal steel, jingle-jangle finger-picking, and, on "Road To Nowhere," a Cajun march feel). The next album, 1986's True Stories, plunged wholesale into fascination with what we'd nowadays call the red-state heartland--the very place the boho Byrne once scorned in  More Songs' "The Big Country." Looking down (in both senses) on middle America from an airplane window, Byrne had declared "I wouldn't live there if you paid me to" and "it's not even worth talking about those people down there". But now with True Stories' "People Like Us", he seemingly celebrated the apolitical fatalism of ordinary folks with lines like "we don't want freedom/we don't want justice/we just want someone to love".

Naked, the group's 1988 swansong, ended this America First phase, opening the Heads sound to world music influences once again. Instead of  Fela Kuti-style polyrhythms, though, the touchstone for songs like "(Nothing But) Flowers" and "Totally Nude" was the quicksilver guitars of more recent Afropop like the Bhundu Boys. Among the most breezy, beatific songs Talking Heads ever recorded, "Nude" and "Flowers" sounded like the work of a rejuvenated band reaching an unexpected third wind. But the Heads split shortly after its release, and Byrne has vowed they'll never reform.

TALKING HEADS corrals the group's entire oeuvre, crisply remastered and garnished with out-takes (whose highlights include a wonderfully overwrought alternate version of "Mind"). Each album comes with the inevitable second disc of rare video footage plus 5.1 Surroundsound mixes of the LP in question. Rendering redundant 2003's unwieldy Once In A Lifetime box through the double-whammy of comprehensiveness and user-friendliness, TALKING HEADS' s must-own-factor is diminished slightly by having the classic first four albums sit alongside Speaking and True Stories (both unsuccessful even on their own reduced terms). Eno, arguably the crucial X-Factor catalyst for the group's golden era output,  recently claimed that he sees the influence of Talking Heads everywhere. If only it were true! The idiosyncracy and sheer adventurousness of the group's way with song and sound has proved largely inimitable. Okay, over the years, bands--Orange Juice and Meat Puppets in the Eighties, Franz Ferdinand and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah in the Noughties--have picked up on the group's early style, the irresistible jangle-funk of "Pulled Up" and "Found A Job".  But why haven't bands ransacked the Heads oeuvre for the dozens of other tangents spiraling off it? Entire careers--genres even--could have been built off single songs on Fear or Remain. In a sense, then, it could be that Talking Heads richest legacy still lies ahead.

a different earlier take of the same review (for Blender)

Talking Heads

TALKING HEADS

(Rhino/Warners)

Some reckon “art” and “heart” are incompatible in rock. Alumni of Rhode Island School of Design, Talking Heads often faced accusations of being detached and dispassionate. But the group wrote some of the postpunk period’s most emotive tunes, something abundantly shown by this box set, which holds all eight of their studio albums (remastered and garnished with out-takes) coupled with second discs containing rare video footage plus 5.1 Surroundsound mixes of each LP. It’s just that David Byrne approached lyrics in the same way the group handled the recording process, with a curiosity pitched midway play and research, and an eagerness to avoid the obvious. No wonder the Heads struck up a fruitful relationship with oblique strategist and sound-laboratory scientist Brian Eno for the classic trilogy More Songs About Buildings and Food/Fear of Music/Remain In Light. Having started the Seventies as a key component of Roxy Music, the era’s greatest art rock outfit, Eno ended the decade as unofficial fifth member of the only group to rival Roxy’s achievement. 

Talking Heads were CBGB staples but they never really fit with New York punk’s leather-jacket fraternity of juvenile delinquent wannabes. The group’s  image was cleancut and its crisp, funk-inflected sound couldn’t have been further from Ramones-style buzzsaw chord-pummel, while Byrne’s lyrics avoided rebel rock clichés, even celebrating office-drone conformism in “Don’t Worry About the Government.”  Talking Heads: 77 teems with honey-drizzling melody and tinkling textures. 1978’s More Songs  thickens the sound and hottens up the groove.  Tina Weymouth’s bass is the mad-catchy melodic voice on “Found a Job”, while Jerry Harrison’s keyboards give “Take Me To the River” its famous aquatic feel. 

Astonishingly varied, Fear of Music is pulled every-which-way at once, toward Afro-Dada disco on “I Zimbra” and a radically modernized version of psychedelia on “Drugs”. Byrne’s lyrics don’t stint on inventiveness either. In “Mind”, he’s a desperate lover seeking the magic verbal formula to dissuade his partner from leaving (“I need something to change your mind”, except “you’re not even LISTENING to me”) while on “Animals” he method-acts a paranoid curmudgeon ranting about the irresponsibility of all them wild critters.  

By Remain In Light, Byrne and Eno operated almost like a pair of cerebrally over-endowed Siamese twins. Increasingly infatuated with African music, they shepherded the initially compliant Heads towards a deconstructed band-sound, built up layer by layer from multiple bass-pulses, percussion lines, rhythm guitar micro-riffs, and graffiti-like flourishes of synth, and achieving coherence only through the process of editing and mixing. Byrne’s grail was a postmodern tribal music for faithless Westerners, a trance-dance sound to heal the neurosis and spiritual emptiness evoked elsewhere on Remain with “Once In A Lifetime,” “Houses In Motion,” and “The Overload.”  Rediscover the body, reintegrate with Nature, stop making sense. Or as Byrne would plead in a later song, “God, help us lose our minds”. 

But the expansion of the Talking Heads sound put intolerable strains on the group,  with Harrison, Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz effectively relegated to session musicians and Remain coming together at the mixing desk, helmed by guess-who. To save the band, Byrne reluctantly agreed to part ways with Eno and embrace the shapely economy of pop. Speaking In Tongues generated the group’s first real hit with "Burning Down The House" but its true jewel was "This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)," an exquisite attempt to write a love song devoid of romantic clichés, full of witty but heartfelt lines: “I’m just an animal looking for a home,” “you have a face with a view”.  Little Creatures reversed the advances of the Eno years, backtracking to the taut tunefulness of the group circa 1977. It abandoned the overcrowded dancefloor of mainstream Eighties pop and replaced da funk with country influences (pedal steel, jingle-jangle finger-picking, and, on “Road To Nowhere,” a Cajun march feel). Accompanying Byrne’s debut movie, True Stories saw the singer plunge into an ambivalent fascination with heartland America, a place he’d once scorned in More Songs’ “The Big Country” with the stinging “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me”.  "People Like Us" depicted the apolitical fatalism of ordinary folk, the lines "we don't want freedom/we don't want justice/we just want someone to love" leaving it unclear whether the song was critique or celebration. Naked completed the circle for Talking Heads, fusing their "American" and "African" sides. Instead of Fela Kuti-style polyrhythms, though, the touchstone for songs like "(Nothing But) Flowers" and "Totally Nude" was the quicksilver euphoria of guitarists like King Sunny Ade, while Byrne soared like Roy Orbison over lithe percussion. The better Naked songs sound like a rejuvenated Heads reaching their third wind, but the group split up shortly after its release. 

There’ s few trajectories more unlikely in pop history than the one taken by Talking Heads, who started out with the proposition “funk art, let’s dance,” stretched rock form to its dizzy limit on Remain In Light, and then mutated into one of the big pop groups of the early  MTV era, thanks to their always artful promos.  Of all the New York New Wave-era bands, they were just about the only one to get anywhere, both commercially and in the sense of sonic adventure. So hats off to the Heads. 

Jon Hassell RIP

 JON HASSELL

Fourth World vol. 2: Dream Theory In Malaya

Aka-Darbari-Java / Magic Realism

Melody Maker, May 11th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

typo alert -- gameplan = gamelan!

JON HASSELL

City: Works of Fiction

Melody Maker, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

JON HASSELL, interview

the Observer, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

[click to enlarge]

JON HASSELL, interview

Melody Maker, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

[click to enlarge] 

Single of the Week

Melody Maker, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

SINGLE OF THE WEEK

JON HASSELL/808 STATE

VOICEPRINT

(Land)

     Jon Hassell is an avant-garde composer who keeps an eye, or rather an ear, out for instictively/unwittingly avant-garde pop forms like rap and house. (He's described his astonishing album "City: Works Of Fiction" as "classical rap"). 808 State are a techno-dance production team who flirt with the avant-garde.Someone had the bright idea of getting them together, and the result is this radical remix of "Voiceprint" off the "City" album.

     Hassell's original method of composition reveals how much of an affinity his way of working has with the sampling aesthetic. Having got his musicians to play six wildly different mixes of the track, he chose his favourite sections, drew up a complicated map between the segments, and programmed it into a computer. The result: "a mosaic in which each of the tiles is a spontaneous event", and a brilliant balance between improvisation and composition, seduction and alienation. 808 State have taken the abstraction process one step further, by sampling from a vinyl version of "Voiceprint" rather than remixing the original tapes. It's a radical reconstruction rather than a track underwrittn by a standard-issue 1990 groove.

     The result is a richly evocative exercise in unspecific exoticism: you think of dunes, mosques, mirages, bazaars with their hubbub of foreign tongues and heady assault of pungent, unfamiliar fragrances.  Hassell's trumpet calligraphy darts in and out of 808's techno-vistas, synths shimmer like a heat-haze. "Voiceprint" presents the city of the future as a fractal labyrinth of uprooted cultures that co-exist but never mingle. Single of the week, because it's a work of imagination, and it works your imagination. 

This week, that's rare.

snippet from

Taking Manhattan (By Strategy) - Brian Eno in New York

director's cut version, The Daily Note, 2013 

by Simon Reynolds

.... Another inspirational collaborator Eno hooked up with in 1979 was Jon Hassell, whose post-Miles, raga-influenced music Eno had encountered when the trumpeter-composer performed at the Kitchen that summer.  Hassell’s knowledge of many forms of exotic ethnic sounds and his concept of “Fourth World Music” (hi-tech modernity meets pre-industrial tribalism) would be massively influential on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Indeed, at its inception that album was conceived as a three-way collaboration.  Byrne recalls “all hanging out together, talking and exchanging records”.  At his Tribeca loft, Hassell played Eno and Byrne field recordings on ethnomusicological labels like Ocora.  The idea emerged that “we would hole up and make a fake ethnographic records, with the sleeve notes and everything,” says Byrne. “We’d invent a whole culture to go with it.”

Both Hassell and Laraaji were present at the first sessions, in August 1979, for the album that  became My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Also contributing to the dense mix of sound was David Van Tieghem, whom Eno had seen doing a gizmo-based piece called A Man and His Toys at New Music New York, and two bassists: Tim Wright from DNA and Bill Laswell, then playing in a band called Zu (later to mutate into Material).  Of these early sessions, Eno would later wryly comment that “what was so weird was that at first I thought I'd wasted my money. I just couldn't understand it at all.” But gradually, sculpting down “ this barrage of instruments playing all the time”, an audio-concept emerged:  a “jungle music” sound, embedded in a spacious widescreen production he’d never achieved before. Profiling Eno for Musician towards the end of 1979, Lester Bangs got advance glimpses of the work-in-progress: “It sounds like nothing we've ever heard from Brian Eno before; like nothing ever heard before, period. The influence of the move to New York is unmistakable: a polyglot freneticism, a sense of real itching rage and desperation... It gives intimations of a new kind of international multi-idiomatic music that would cross all commercial lines, uniting different cultures, the past and the future, European experimentalism and gutbucket funk.”

Work on Bush-to-be was sporadic and at a certain point Hassell dropped out of the equation – a turnabout that enraged him to the point of making public accusations of being ripped off. He and Eno would reconcile fairly swiftly, however, resulting in the collaboration Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics and the appearance, or rather apparition, of Hassell’s ghostly gaseous trumpet on the Remain In Light track “Houses In Motion”....

bonus reading:

Marcus Boon interview with Jon Hassell 

Bits on Bass for The Wire's Low End Theories issue (July 2012)

by Simon Reynolds

John Entwistle / The Who, “My Generation” (Brunswick single, 1965)

Rock ‘n’ roll had triggered violence before, but up until The Who it had never really represented violence musically or enacted it onstage.  Think of words like “mayhem” and “destruction” in connection with that band and the first things that spring to mind are Keith Moon’s free-flailing drums and Pete Townshend’s scything powerchords.  (Not forgetting those climactic orgies of instrument-smashing).  But on “My Generation” John Entwistle supplies more than his fair share of the savagery. Often described as lead bassist to Townshend’s  rhythm guitarist, on this late 1965 single, his is the loudest instrument (with the possible exception of Moon’s cymbals). 

For the first minute “Thunderfingers”, as his bandmates nicknamed him,  churns and grinds as relentlessly and remorselessly as a gigantic tunnel-boring drill. Then, outrageously, he takes the solo and slashes a rent in the song’s fabric with a down-diving flurry of notes at once fluidly elegant and brutishly in-your-face.  This is generally regarded as the first bass solo in recorded rock, and as such, it’s a mixed portent.  Entwistle would immediately attempt to reprise the shock effect on the Who’s debut album with the bass-dominated instrumental “The Ox” and over the years he became an increasingly ostentatious player, peaking with the verging-on-Pastorius floridity of Quadrophenia’s “The Real Me” (much admired in the technical guitar magazines). 

But in the immediate aftermath of “My Generation”, young bands like The Eyes, The Creation and John’s Children picked up not on the sophistication (beyond their capabilities, anyway) but the loudness, distortion, and menace.  Amping up the jagged, edge-of-chaos frenzy, they recorded a series of 1966-67 singles that fans and collectors today know as “freakbeat”.  Mod, as a musical form as opposed to a subcultural style, represented a uniquely English contribution to rock: the sound of frustration and neurosis, tension and explosive release.  In their own way, for a moment there in the mid-Sixties the Who were as radical as the Velvet Underground. Certainly, as far as Britain is concerned, punk starts here. Entwistle can even be seen as a forefather of postpunk’s  “lead bassists”, or at least the  aggressive hard-rocking sort, such as Jean-Jacques Burnel and Peter Hook. Indeed Hooky actually bought some of the Ox’s bass guitars in the estate sale after his 2002 death.

Tina Weymouth / Talking Heads’s “Found a Job” (from More Songs About Buildings and Food, 1978)

So dominant was David Byrne as the front-and-center figure in Talking Heads – voice, wordsmith,  mesmerizingly awkward physical presence—that it’s  always been too easy to underplay the vital contributions of the instrumentalists. (Including Byrne’s own instrumental role as marvelously inventive guitarist).  Props due to drummer Chris Frantz and to Jerry Harrison for his keyboard colorations, but DB’s only serious rival as charismatic focus was always Tina Weymouth.  Her bass is often the primary melodic voice in the songs, while the unfettered joy of her playing provides a vital counter to the singer’s neurotic unease. 

Talking Heads’s classic first four albums hold an embarrassment of four-string riches.  The nimble pretzel-funk of “Cities”. The rubbery ache of “Heaven”.  The languid lope of “Warning Sign”. The lurching anti-groove “Drugs”. The virtually iconic unchanging bassline of “Once In A Lifetime” (whose composition Weymouth generously credits to her husband Frantz but which has her fingerprints all over it in terms of the use of space and silence). The quirky quiver of “Mind”. The uncharacteristic hypno-drone of “The Overload.”

In sheer desperation, I plump here for the first B-line of Weymouth’s, and possibly of anybody’s, that caught my young (16 years old) ear: the corkscrewing earworm that is “Found A Job,” a bass-riff that sings in your head like pure pop and pummels you in the gut like the toughest funk or hardest rock.   During postpunk, I never played air guitar (too phallic, too masculinist and metal). But I did play air bass.  And Tina Weymouth got as much mime time out of me as that other great bass hero of the era, Jah Wobble.   

Unique 3, "Weight For the Bass (Original Soundyard Dubplate Mix)" (Ten Records, 1990)

In the beginning, U.K. rave was fueled by imports from Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Homegrown efforts paled next to the real thing. But towards the end of 1989, a distinctively British sound  emerged.  Associated with artists like LFO, Rhythmatic, Nightmares on Wax, and Original Clique, and with fledgling labels like Chill, Network, and Warp, this phase has gone down to history as bleep. But at the time synonyms like bleep-and-bass or Northern bass got bandied around too. And that’s because the tracks mostly came out of Yorkshire and the West Midlands and what they brought to the house template was something that hadn’t been particularly prominent before: low end. Most of the bleep-makers were former B-boys who’d come up through the UK’s mid-Eighties “street beats” culture—breakdancing to Man Parrish and Mantronix, daubing graffiti on railway bridges and after-dark shopping center walls. Then their heads got flipped out by acid house in 1988. But instead of mimicking Chicago’s Roland 303 acid-bass, they stuck with electro’s 808-bassed boom. They were also influenced heavily by the imported-from-Jamaica sound system culture that was thoroughly established in mixed-race Northern cities like Leeds by the late Eighties. 

That three-way collision of hip hop, reggae, and house is all across the bleep sound of 1989-1991, but nowhere more thrillingly than in the output of Bradford’s Unique 3.  “The Theme” b/w “7-AM’, their debut, is officially regarded as the Birth of Bleep. But “Weight for the Bass”, their third single, packs more sub-lo heft.  The tectonic-plate-shaking  bass and eerily cavernous space are offset and lightened by  skippy electro-descended beats and an Italo-house piano vamp that chatters with the bright-eyed inanity of an E’d up raver. Spelling out the Jamaican connection, the “Original Soundyard Dubplate Mix” also nods to the Soundyard, the Bradford club founded by  Unique 3's Edzy. The group’s L Double would go on to be a valuable player in jungle, a scene organized around dubplates and bass-drops. And the title “Weight for the Bass” pre-echoes the dubstep fetish-term  “bass weight”. Indeed the way that the track stretches out a tremor into a trauma-scape of ecstatic dread anticipates such classics of the last decade as Pinch’s “Qawwali” and Loefah’s “Bombay Squad.”

                                                       [NB below is not the right mix but gives you a flavour at least]