Forty Five Minutes Of Talking Heads And Friends

Update Sunday 10.00 am. The original version of this post received a sensitive content warning and was put behind a warning message. I think this is because in my description of Azealia Banks' 212, the final track in the mix, I used a word that starts with the letter C and then sounds like honey lingers. I'm reposting the post here with the offending word removed- partly just to see if it now gets through Google's censors. 

I started a Talking Heads Sunday mix a year ago and couldn't get it to work. The early stuff, New York art- rock didn't seem to sit well with some of the later stuff or the remixes/ edits etc I was trying to fit in. Many of the songs I was attempting to segue started and ended very suddenly which was tricky and the whole thing made me quite frustrated so I shelved it. Seeing Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew play Remain In Light at The Ritz recently and the Leo Zero edit of Azealia Banks' 212 which splices Azealia's blinding debut single with Once In A Lifetime got me thinking I should try again. I've left out anything from their first three albums, much as I love all of them, and gone for a Talking Heads mix that is unashamedly dance music with some remixes, edits, side projects and solo works and covers- more an Inspired By Talking Heads mix than a strictly Talking Heads mix. I think it works now.

Forty Five Minutes Of Talking Heads And Friends Mix

• Jezebell: Swamp Shuffle
• David Byrne: My Big Hands (Fall Through The Cracks)
• Talking Heads: Burning Down The House (Pete Bones Remix)
• X- Press 2 and David Byrne: Lazy
• Rheinzand: Slippery People
• Tom Tom Club: Wordy Rappinghood
• Brian Eno and David Byrne: America Is Waiting
• Azealia Banks: 212 (Leo Zero Edit)

In August 2023 Jezebell released Jezebellearic Beats Vol. 1, the first full length album from Darren and Jesse, twenty tracks of 21st century pick and mix/ club culture dance music. It closed with Swamp Shuffle where David Byrne's 'high high high high high' chant (borrowed from Talking Heads song Swamp, off 1983 album Speaking In Tongues) surfaces and resurfaces. Speaking In Tongues doesn't get the respect it deserves I sometimes think- it's the last of the classic run of Talking Heads albums and has a very glossy commercial production, recorded (without Brian Eno unlike the previous three albums, a decision the rhythm section demanded) at Compass Point in the Bahamas, taking aim at the big charts with thumpers like Burning Down The House. It also has the sleeper song, the one that has over the decades seeped into wider popular culture, the wonderful This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) which should be on this mix but isn't.

In 1981 David Byrne released an album, The Catherine Wheel, a score for a Twyla Tharp dance project of the same name. My Big Hands is a sign of where Byrne might go under his own steam, shimmering, juddering art- funk. He'd go there with the other three Heads too but already in 81 he was exploring outside the band. 

Burning Down The House was their breakthrough chart hit (as mentioned above), a song inspired by Chris Frantz shouting the title phrase over a riff the group were playing, himself inspired by Funkadelic and Parliament. This Pete Bones remix, pretty unofficial I think, streamlines it for modern dancefloors. Could be wrong but it isn't, it turns out right. 

Lazy is from 2002- I can't believe this track is already that old, an X- Press 2 single which Byrne sang on after he approached the duo to be his backing band. They turned him down, feeling they were unable to provide him with what he wanted but they got this song out of it, a gloriously catchy housed up 21st century Byrne. David has since then recored a version with an orchestra and played it live- he did it in his American Utopia tour in 2018, a tour I was lucky to see at a very memorable night at the Apollo.

Rheinzand are a Balearic dance act from Belgium who I love. Their debut album came out in 2020, an album released just as the world went into lockdown and with this cover of Slippery People on it, Ghent's finest rejigging Talking Heads into super sleek modern Balearic house/ disco. 

Tom Tom Club were Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz's side project, formed in 1981 because they were pissed off Byrne had gone off to do other things. They recruited a load of players including Adrian Belew, Steve Scales and Wally Badarou and made an album that chimed perfectly with 1981 New York's collision of rap, art, dance, graffiti, and fashion- Genius Of Love and Wordy Rappinghood were both hits which irked Byrne- proving Weymouth and Frantz's point that he should be sticking with them. Wordy Rappinghood was their debut single, a joyous thing with Tina's sisters Lani and Laura on backing vocals and utilising a typewriter, a Moroccan children's song and some French language lyrics about words. 

Also released in 1981 was David Byrne and Brian Eno's truly groundbreaking, visionary sampledelic, worldbeat, Afro Beat, found sound opus. Eno described the album as a 'vision of a psychedelic Africa', something that Adrian Sherwood and African Head Charge were taking note of in the UK. The album opens with America Is Waiting, a track that still sounds like it comes from the future while also rooted in turn of the 80s Cold War, moral majority, advent of Reagan paranoia. The voice is Ray Taliaferro, a US radio show host, taped off the radio.

Leo Zero's edit of Azealia Banks' 212 is one of the most exhilarating things I've heard recently, Azealia's celebration of youth, Harlem, sexuality, and her own prowess riding on top of Once In A Lifetime, some sirens and a rattling drum machine. As the kids say, it slaps. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Talking Heads And Friends

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This Ain't No Fooling Around

Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew have been touring Remain In Light in Europe- they played Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Cologne, three dates in the Netherlands and then Brussels, Warsaw and Luxembourg and last week arrived in the UK with gigs in Manchester and Wolverhampton and then London. Harrison was a Talking Head, guitar and keys/ synths, and Belew played guitar on Remain In Light in 1980 and then as part of the touring band (documented on the second disc of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads and an incredible film of the band playing live in Rome in 1980).

The band that took to the stage at The Ritz last Thursday night is a dozen people strong, Harrison and Belew centre stage accompanied by two female singers, a man right in front of us who sings a lot of the David Byrne parts (and not afraid to bring his own take to some very well known songs) and plays a huge saxophone, several keys/ synth players, another guitarist, a drummer, a percussionist and a bassist. Most of them are also the support band, Cool Cool Cool, and they do a superb job of re- animating those Talking Heads songs. They have the necessary funkiness and can do the New York edge too. I've seen David Byrne perform many of these songs before- Harrison and Belew do them just as well but without the performance art that Byrne always brings to his shows (and I loved his American Utopia tour).  

The set isn't just Remain In Light. They dip into other parts of the Talking Heads back catalogue and beyond, kicking off with Psycho Killer (a crowd pleasing place to start) and hit us with four Remain In Light highpoints- the jerky, uptight but loose art- funk of Crosseyed And Painless, Harrison and Belew trading guitar licks, followed by House In Motion and a brilliantly slightly manic but very much on the button I Zimbra. From this they roll into Born Under Punches, the sax/ singer in front of us screaming the vocal lines, 'Take a look at these hands/ The hand speaks/ The hand of a government man'. The band are dancing around, the 76 year old Jerry Harrison is doing that thing where he closes his eyes and rocks back on his heals, his long curly locks framing a very contended smile. 

Cities from Fear Of Music follows and then Harrison plays Rev It Up from his 1987 solo album Casual Gods (I have Rev It Up on 12" and I'd be surprised if its been out of the sleeve since 1988). Slippery People sounds huge, Jerry's synth and keys solo a particular joy. Adrian Belew takes the spotlight for a King Crimson cover (Thela Hun Ginjeet according to SetlistFM- I'll have to take their word for it, a man's got to got o the toilet and the bar at some point) and then they launch into Once In A Lifetime, a refreshingly off kilter take on the song- the part three quarters of the way through where Harrison hits some huge synth chords is grin inducing. By this point we're right at the front. Everyone's dancing. There are a lot of younger people in the crowd as well as the usual middle aged audience and the feeling (I hesitate to use the word vibe but probably should) in The Ritz is amazing, evryone really enjoying hearing these songs so close up played by people having the time of their lies. A one point the two singers, the keys players and the sax/ singing man do a choreographed turning on the spot dance, a nod maybe to Stop Making Sense- it's a wonderful moment. 

More? They play Life During Wartime, easily one of Talking Heads' best songs, Byrne's endlessly quoteable lyrics reeling by as the band cook up a storm- 'We dress like students/ We dress like housewives/ Or in a suit and a tie/ I changed my hairstyle so many times now/ I don't know what I look like....'- and then they close with Take Me To The River. 

Life During Wartime

The encore is just two songs, the first Drugs (from Fear Of Music), a woozy, fractured, distorted song, and then they dive into The Great Curve, maybe the most dancey, most poly- rythmic, most Remain In Light of the Remain In Light songs, Belew providing the squeals of guitar and bursts of electricity, as the band bring the futuristic sound of 1980 into now. When it ends the players line up across the front of the stage for the ovation and it's clear that Jerry Harrison (plus Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz) as well as additional players like Belew, brought a huge amount to these songs, both in the studio and live- Jerry Harrison is unflashy and un- rock starry, New York cool and an innovative guitar and keys player- and as the house lights come on its all smiles on the floor of The Ritz. 

The Great Curve