We’d spent our formative drunken teenage years falling out of lofts, falling through hedges and falling out and in with each other through a holy triumvate of sounds; New Order’s Blue Monday, Simple Minds’ I Travel and the entirety of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense album, so when Alex Aitken one day thrust a copy of Talking Heads‘ Speaking In Tongues into my hands and said, ‘Remember when you said if I ever saw this record, I was to buy it for you? Well, here it is. That’s £3.99 you owe me,’ I was a wee bit perplexed. He might also have said, ‘Make it a fiver to account for the petrol money,’ but to be honest, I can’t be sure I’m not making that part up. Either way, I fell into ownership of Speaking In Tongues only because Alex shook me down for the money.
His story had more holes in it than his Ford Capri. I’d never asked him to buy it for me. I love record shopping; I could easily have bought it myself if I wasn’t chasing other essential records, like It’s Alive and The Head On The Door. He hadn’t gone to Ayr and thought, ‘Oh, Craig would like that…must get him it…‘. He’d bought it fairly and squarely for himself and clearly hadn’t taken to the record’s rather sterile sound, so the sneaky bazza thought he’d offload it to me instead. And it worked.
Me? Despite feeling mugged, used even, I’ve loved it from first listen to last (yesterday morning, if yr curious). True, Speaking In Tongues is clinical and awkward where the same songs on Stop Making Sense are organic and flowing and groovier, but I fell for it all the same. It struck me yesterday that, after Remain In Light, it might’ve crept into the second-top slot of my internal Talking Heads Top 5 albums.
It’s that heady combination of sunshine and rhythm that does it – the chattering and day-glo synth lines, the bubbling bass, the rinky dink guitars and lightness of percussive touch that also gave birth to the Tom Tom Club record.
It’s that inescapable notion that here is a band totally in simpatico with one another. Bass lines suggest guitar lines, synth lines ape the bass lines, percussive tumbles punctuate the gaps between David Byrne’s idiosyncratic vocal lines; the group is one living and breathing funky organism.
It’s the realisation that those stoopid Talking Heads failed to put This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) on the original record. It’s there now, of course, reissue programmes being a by-word for fan-fleecing, but back in the day – until I’d seen the Stop Making Sense concert film at least – I only knew This Must Be The Place from the Speaking In Tongues album. And, what with it instantly being my favourite Talking Heads song ‘n all meant that its parent album had permanent residence in the softest spot of my heart.
I’ve also got a room next door to it for Swamp.
Talking Heads – Swamp
It’s one of those tracks that is instantly familiar the moment you first hear it. It’s stompy. It’s incessant. And it features that caveman-ish, neanderthal hi-hi-hi-hi-hi chant that you – yeah, you! – have chanted at least once in your life. Once heard, instantly memorised.
A bendy keyboard motif. A four to the floor groove. A rinky dink guitar. David Byrne chatting gibberish and nonsense through the intro. Let me tell you a story, he eventually says, his voice slipping and sliding like your sleazy uncle on a boys’ night out, unfolding a lyric addressing existential dread and goodness really knows what else. Rarely has abstract art sounded so goddammed groovy.
Wha’sat? who’s drivin’…where we goin’?…who knows?…a medical chart on the wall…soft violins, hands touch your throat…how many people d’ya think I am?…we’ve come to take you home…woo-hoo!
It’s a head-noddin’, butt-shakin’ monster of a groove. Immensely fun.
Here’s the perennially fab-u-lous version from Stop Making Sense. Byrne’s twitches. Tina’s shoulder shrugs. The band, silhouetted and back-lit in orange. Era-defining stuff. I can’t imagine you’ve never seen this before, but you’re probably long-overdue another viewing,
I was chatting to Jim from the Vinyl Villain recently and we were discussing rock biographies. He was telling me that he’d gone off Talking Heads a wee bit after reading Chris Frantz’s Remain In Love autobiography and discovering that they were a fairly privileged and well-off group, with access to good universities and yachts and country clubs and a whole plethora of things that were well out of the reach of yr average Bowery punk rocker, and it got me thinking about it on the drive home.
There’s no denying that Talking Heads were from a fairly comfortable background, but I’m glad they chose to put their efforts into creating vital and essential art-rock for all, rather than choose to live it up anonymously in a world most of us know little about. Or maybe they’ve managed to straddle the two worlds, and we just don’t realise it…which is waaay more punk in any case.
Click click, see ya later.
Plain Or Pan 