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New Musical Express DECEMBER 22, 1979 - by Nick Kent

TALKING HEAD FIRST

Nick Kent interviews David Byrne - the man behind NME's Album Of The Year.

"Think of London, a small city..."

A hire car draws up at an A address in Soho, and three members of Talking Heads troop into the Cine-Lingual building, Berwick Street.

Tina Weymouth enters at a smart, no-nonsense pace, her diminutive figure swathed in army fatigues, a khaki GI Joe cap holding up her shoulder length blonde tresses. Husband Chris Frantz follows a couple of yards behind, a good-natured grin creasing his 'pleasant' features for the benefit of the custodians at the door. Finally comes Jerry Harrison, and the consensus of opinion down in Studio Two is that the projectionist should get down to business 'toot sweet', the fourth T.Head, David Byrne, having been present and correct well prior to his comrades' entrance.

What follows is a thirty-five-minute documentary on Talking Heads filmed in and around their New York headquarters by a British crew, which will be screened by ITV on the December 23 edition of The South Bank Show. By TV rock documentary standards it's an exceptionally well thought-out study of a band who both transcend and confuse the orthodox media overview of rock. Instead of some hideous macho talk-over voice providing a cliché-ridden narrative, the group members are allowed to speak for themselves, whilst the programme also affords the viewer some intriguing glimpses into the band's rehearsal procedure and composer David Byrne's mode of song construction.

To define it as compulsory viewing for T.Heads fans would be an understatement. The camera flashes through myriad ephemera: scrapbook snaps of the pre-Heads congregate, Byrne and Frantz's Artistics/Autistics; grainy photos of Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth in their Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) days; the Village Voice over of Talking Heads at their third ever gig that set things in motion, with the headline "Tired Of Glitter? The Conservative impulse of the New Rock underground"; plus everything that came after, whilst one of the four members provides a sharply-paced commentary for these formative years.

Moving on up, next it's the band getting down to business in their rehearsal loft, building on a song, shaping, defining, relentlessly scything down the arrangement to an angular dagger-like sharpness. Another section has Byrne seated in his apartment with a pocket-sized cassette recorder, humming stray melody lines and explaining how the songs for the Fear Of Music album came about mostly from rehearsal sessions such as the one filmed; ideas would develop or appear from out of the air, forcing Byrne to relay his melody ideas onto cassette in this primitive fashion as quickly as - possible and later work up chord sequences to complement the tune.

This, above all, is the documentary's real ace up the sleeve. The film crew caught the band just at that vital period when the songs and music for Fear were being conceived. Thus one gets a sharp focus profile of Byrne, globules of sweat running down his taut, glazed-eyed face to his chin, where they drip one after the other almost in time to a formative version of Life During Wartime as he sings lyrics which, although three quarters complete, have yet to hit on the classic "This ain't no Mudd Club / Or CBGB" couplet - amongst other less glaring omissions - utilising strictly throw-away fodder as temporary filler.

Also, the director's choice of interviewing the four members separate from one another - using the same environment every time - makes for a fine study in contrasts. While Tina Weymouth is terse, close to abrasive, with the vaguest hint of cynicism, husband Frantz slices his views on the band with a healthy sense of humour. Both of them address the subject of the band image - or lack of same - with playful snipes at cliched rock'n'roll uniform stance; Weymouth wittily mocks the Robert Plant bare chest brigade whilst Frantz declares that Talking Heads' visual anonymity is a boon compared to everyone from Kiss to "The Clash who, I guess, reckon they have to dress up as urban guerillas every time they walk out the door."

Jerry Harrison is his usual level-headed self, best able to provide an overview of the band because he was the last to join.

And David Byrne? Well, David Byrne is, as usual, the oddball: self-conscious and clumsy one moment, erudite the next but inevitably making some ridiculous observation one can't help guffawing out loud at.

Whilst the other three seem oblivious to the camera's intrusion, Byrne is obviously nervous, uncomfortable at having to define himself and his work. The classic moment of Byrne's verbal awkwardness comes when, presumably having been asked some question about his current environment, New York - the city he moved to six years ago - he states, the tone of his voice sounding more than ever marooned irreconcilably between naive bemusement and half-hearted self-assertion: "I really like New York. It's the kind of place where you see anything happen, y'know. Just looking out the window, you see people, uh, falling over! Yeah, people fall over all the time in New York. No one gives a damn. It's great."

Few people present can suppress a chuckle at the ridiculousness of Byrne's half-baked observation when it occurs midway through the film. Some twenty minutes later the lights go on and: Jerry Harrison, seated beside Byrne, chides him affectionately about the remark whilst over in another corner one of the band members scowls at having such a 'dumb' quote appear in a film concerning the group they are a party to. Byrne, mildly bemused by it all or maybe slightly embarrassed, just grins sheepishly for a second and then forgets all about it.

• • •

Ok, so the album Fear Of Music didn't go mega platinum the first month of its release. OK, so the brilliant single Life During Wartime failed to secure a prestigious chart placing in either the British or U.S. Top 20s. But make no mistake, 1979 has been Talking Heads' most lucrative year to date.

The album's disquieting tonal quality, bizarre conceits and uneasy listening somehow still managed to grant it a cosy location in the lower reaches of the American Top 30 whilst affording it across-the-board rave reviews. Indeed, when we here at the NME sweatshop were called upon to scribble down our favourite albums of the year, Fear shut down its nearest rival by almost two votes to one.

Fear Of Music is in fact a grand departure from the previous two Talking Heads albums, 77 and More Songs About Buildings And Food. The latter pair, although different in a number of key respects that arguably have most to do with a change of producer - Tony Bongiovi handled 77 whilst Buildings saw the commencement of a most fruitful alliance with Brian Eno - are tied together by one key factor in that, as Byrne himself only too readily admits, "The first two albums featured and consequently used up all the songs I'd written within a certain space of time. I had absolutely nothing left in reserve for Fear Of Music and therefore had to get to grips with composing a whole new set of songs."

Listening to the three records certainly bears this point out. On 77 Byrne's melodies are more expansive, with songs like The Book I Read, Pulled Up and Happy Day bristling with strong hook-lines, whilst the Frantz-Weymouth rhythm section, having not yet fully developed into the earth-shudderingly functional power they now are, were still getting over the restriction of having once been two-thirds of a three-piece band and were content to work on their personalised retreading of the bass-and-drums interplay notable on the Al Green records they used to practice from ceaselessly. These factors, along with producer Bongiovi's inability to capture the band as a fully interlocking four-piece (although Jerry Harrison's extra textures on keyboards and second guitar had already been tightly meshed into the band's live sound, his contributions were virtually ignored on the first album), provided the inquisitive listener with a debut album spotlighting Byrne's quirky song structures and lyrics. Mated to a pleasantly buoyant rhythm section, it made for a marketable coalition of left-field disco and agreeable new wave: an utterly superficial conclusion, of course, but in an industry where labels seem all-important, an equation needed to be formulated.

The stand-out track on 77 was Psychokiller which, although Byrne shrugs off the contention that the song has since become a proverbial albatross around the group's neck, has certainly granted many reviewers the perfect vehicle for nailing Talking Heads to the psycho-rock mast-head.

"Psychokiller is the first song I ever wrote," remarks Byrne, when the subject is broached. "It was sometime in 1973, I guess, because Chris (Frantz) and I had got this band called The Artistics together. Later we changed to The Autistics... uh, because somebody, I think, misunderstood one of us when we told them our name." He gives a typical self-effacing chuckle. "Oh yeah, and the other guitarist... there were two guitars, bass and drums and the guitarists were me and this other guy who was autistic, so that sort of struck. Unfortunately.

"No, we didn't look that much different than we do now. Maybe a little more concerned with a, uh, visual thing but nothing really striking. We didn't wear platform boots or make-up, which I seem to recall being kind of popular at the time. Songs? Oh, we did... umm let's see, there were some Smokey Robinson songs we did. Things like Tears Of A Clown and My Baby Must Be A Magician. I think we did The Love I Saw In You Was Just A Mirage as well, now I recall. Then there were 1-2-3 Red Light, and this old 1910 Fruitgum Company song which we carried through to playing at early Talking Heads' dates. 96 Tears? Yeah, we played that too, I think. Psychotic Reaction we definitely played.

"But Psychokiller was the first song I actually ever wrote. What inspired it was... well, Alice Cooper was really big then and I just thought it'd be interesting to do a song in something approaching that mock-ghoulish vein he was pumping but give certain twists. Like, Alice Cooper had all these safety gauges worked out so that it wouldn't connect with anything remotely dangerous. It was all 'It's OK folks, it's only a show'. I just liked the idea of writing a song that was more... real."

• • •

On the last count, Byrne's attempt at trumping the wretched Cooper's puerile theatrics worked only too successfully. Psychokiller quickly became Talking Heads' most requested item even in their earliest days.

This was in the late summer of 1975, approximately two years since Byrne's odd-ball behaviour got him expelled from the RISD in Providence. (He was studying a function design programme known as Bauhaus Theory plus a conceptual arts course, but "felt only a frustrated disdain for the elitist streak predominant in the whole art scene"; a disdain which manifested itself in Byrne, the rebellious campus eccentric, on one occasion, shaving his hair and beard off onstage accompanied by a accordionist and a showgirl displaying Russian cue cards. (That showed 'em! - Ed.) His ultimate recourse to break away from the elitist stance was to compile questionnaires as a way of gaining direct feedback. One particular questionnaire he instigated as a way to try and compose the perfect pop/rock song had caused him to be viewed as a worthless eccentric who had to be expelled.)

The realities of expulsion either meant returning to Baltimore, his birth-place and the city he was brought up in, or venturing on to pastures new. As the former was a dreary, spineless burg - when I ask whether Randy Newman's song about the place being desolation personified was fact or fiction, Byrne mutters, "Well he's never been there. How does he know it's not even worse?" - a journey to Manhattan's Village area seemed preferable. Fellow one-time RISD students Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth arrived some short while later and, Frantz having drummed for The Artistics, he, Byrne and Weymouth - still a complete novice in playing bass guitar - banded together under the moniker Byrne had latched onto during his stint at video studies, Talking Heads.

All too aware that the 'satin and tat' look personified by the N.Y. Dolls was over, but similarly unwilling to rip their clothing like Messrs Hell and Verlaine, Talking Heads' image was bizarre simply because they possessed no image whatsoever beyond their wholesome collegiate casual wear.

With such a disarmingly clean-cut visual, Talking Heads immediately stood out.Tina Weymouth initially possessed a look of total vulnerability centering around a pair of incredibly frightened-looking eyes, while Byrne was the victim of an overbearing stage-fright which forced his already somewhat manic temperament to go sky-diving way over the top into a demented exhibition of vocalising on the verge of hysteria, either cracking up altogether or else straining like a drowning man to hit the right pitch, inevitably doing about as well as a blind man on a rifle range.

His songs however were undeniably strong, with Psychokiller gaining an added drama from the traumatised vocals. Indeed, barring maybe two or three numbers all the songs gracing 77 and More Songs About Buildings And Food were written over a period of time that could well be no longer than two years, all told. Certainly items from Buildings like The Girls Want To Be With The Girls, I'm Not In Love, Found A Job and Thank You For Sending Me An Angel were being performed before Jerry Harrison, former Modern Lover and keyboard player for everything from Boston bar bands to 1974's new Bob Dylan, one Elliot Murphy, arrived to finally "make it possible" according to Byrne, "to fill in the missing colours to what had previously only really been sketches. With Jerry, we became a real band."

Talking about that first cargo of songs, Byrne claims that there was no set pattern to the way they were conceived.

"It's not a case where the title always comes first or the idea comes first or..." he ponders the question for a moment. "My sole consideration overall - the main thing which I could look back and say yes, this is true about these numbers, is the fact that in terms of the lyrics, I wanted to strip everything down to the level of... of it being nothing more than what one hears in a conversation. I felt lyrics were becoming long-winded and pointless, that they needed to be far more to the point. It wasn't so much a case of what was being said, so much as the way it was being put across. I couldn't stand all the unnecessary embellishments, the idea of lyrics as poetry that demanded reams and reams of verses, most of them superfluous or just pointless."

On the subject of potentially autobiographical aspects in his lyrics, Byrne, as usual when talking about his work, is vague - not in a manner that gives you the feeling he's holding anything in particular back or attempting to be somewhat 'enigmatic' in that hideously self-conscious manner that certain self-appointed 'composers' try for. Instead he just shrugs almost apologetically.

"No, I can't say... well perhaps certain songs have been triggered by me experiencing something and thinking about what might occur if it were more traumatic and I had a particular neurosis or... It's just hard to pinpoint anything, though. Most of the time I see them more as exercises."

Exercises in what? Gradually Byrne becomes more expansive.

"In... in relating differing points of view, I guess, more than anything else. Like you can take virtually any one of those songs in which I'm playing a character who's narrating a certain view-point and you can be sure to find another song of mine which has someone taking exactly the opposite stand. There's the guy in 'Don't Worry About The Government' who's a real satisfied suburban homebody type and then there's the guy on the plane in The Big Country who has nothing but disgust for that life-style. Or the guys singing about how great love is and then the singer of I'm Not In Love who's... yeah, he's a strange one, but whether you want to think he's duped himself into feeling like that or not, that's his statement. Y'know - 'There'll come a time when we won't need love'.

"Even Psychokiller kind of has an opposite in Life During Wartime. In Psychokiller the guy singing it is flipping out from an internal crack-up. He's hysterical, but his hysteria is all to do with this fuse that's blown in his brain. The guy I depict in Life After Wartime is a very rational type. When I wrote that, I was thinking not.so much of a World War Three thing so much as a terrorist attack - a Baadar-Meinhof situation, that would have escalated into pretty much civil war. And the narrator is just very logically running down a list of things - materialistic stuff that suddenly means nothing when a real state of emergency is declared.

"It's like... I'm not taking a stance, saying y'know, 'war is bad'. Who needs to be told that again? It'd be a joke to write some cheap moralistic crap about how war is bad."

That's a good example of why you rarely - if ever - take a direct moral stance in your songs. Have you never felt the urge to do that?

"Hmmmm... not really. I don't really see how what I feel is right and wrong is of any great use to anyone. I'm more interested in expressing a point of view. Different points of view."

So surely by now you must be really fed up of people who keep harping back to Psychokiller. There was a review of Fear Of Music in Creem magazine, for example, where the critic spent over half the piece trying to persuade the reader that Byrne "has gradually assumed the role of Psychokillers' narrator - quietly berserk, just on the edge of cracking and... ready to squeeze a pup into a bloody pulp in an instant".

"Yeah, I read that review," Byrne remarks, fairly unmoved. "It's unfortunate that certain people need to pinpoint me in this one-dimensional way. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not at fault somewhere, but then again I don't... There's humour in some of those songs. Animals is kind of funny, I'd like to think."

I concur, remarking on how Byrne sounds like a General Patton type gone completely off the rails doing the song. He smiles at the remark before turning pensive. When Byrne is silent, it seems like he's miles away somewhere, lost in some semi-conscious hinterland where such tasks as defining his lyrics and his music are as absurd as he probably in fact thinks they are. I recall the only previous time I'd encountered him in an interview situation, when the three other members of the band were present and Byrne was painfully uncomfortable - a state of affairs made all the more excruciating at times when he'd attempt an explanation of sorts regarding some detail in one of his songs, only to be greeted by somewhat derisive chuckles from other members. Tina Weymouth would virtually scold him like a mentally defective son for his inability to articulate logically for the band. Group interviews are now virtually a thing of the past, I was told by one who should know.

A similar source had also hinted that Talking Heads were due to take a lengthy sabbatical, commencing very, very soon. No permanent break-up, mark you. Just an extended holiday for a band who've been relentlessly working ever since the deal with Sire was signed.

• • •

To resume communication, I half-jokingly ask Byrne what happened to the vocal coaching lessons he'd been intent on taking up when we last spoke.

"Oh yes!" His memory is jogged. "They weren't really very successful. The coach kept wanting me to sing Send In The Clowns and somehow I didn't see how..." tapering off, he chuckles at the absurdity of the predicament.

Departure time hastens. A sound-check needs to be dealt with. Wandering off toward the tube station, I ask Byrne if he ever considers seriously working at some other vocation. Perhaps writing fiction or painting? Design after all was his previous topic for study...

"No, I never think about that." His reply is probably resigned but undeniably firm.

We say our goodbyes and he disappears quickly, quietly, leaving me to mull over various couplets of Byrne's. "Say something once / Why say it again" relates perfectly, for example, although in an infinitely more passive fashion than the Psychokiller narrator would have us believe. I keep recalling this gangly figure as the hyper-misogynist of I'm Not In Love, declaring in a bout of hysterical self-assertion: "Respect my opinions / They will be respected someday". Just recalling Byrne's physical form, watching his self-conscious, finger-nail biting edginess and low-profile gait, usually scuppered by some ridiculous act of clumsiness, it simply doesn't fit. Where does this alternative David Byrne come from?

A glimpse at that answer explodes when David Byrne takes the stage with Talking Heads and his performer's persona takes over.

• • •

There are no less than three performances scheduled for Talking Heads in London the week I interview Byrne, and even though I get to see only one - the first, held at Hammersmith Palais where the acoustics tend all too often to muffle the rhythmic stab of the band in full kinetic flight - the gig is still extraordinary.

The sound juddering out of the PA, even in its muffled form, possesses a dagger-like precision, Frantz holds down a perfect spartan pulsebeat whilst Byrne's guitar slices out relentless stabbing rhythms connecting perfectly with Weymouth to his left, an absolutely immaculate bass-player who has fully developed a style of her own that can serve to provide melody or underplay the rhythm maelstrom at any given moment. Meanwhile Jerry Harrison, directly to Byrne's right, adds just the right brush strokes and aural splashes on electric organ, or fires off a perfect guitar-run counterpoint to Byrne's rhythm. Everything is locked in tight yet never feels constrictive, always allowing for tempo deviations, be it the numbing poignancy of Heaven or the sudden reappearance of the vintage Love→Building On Fire.

And it's here, amidst the taut, machete-like slashes and automaton rhythms, where the perfect new music rock band plays, utilising the perfect ratio of tension and balance for maximum impact - it's here that David Byrne is set free from the ridiculous business of attempting to articulate all the whys and wherefores of something he really doesn't need to explain, where his clumsiness is transformed into an immaculate state of total abandon, where the characters even he probably wonders about sometimes, come to life and declare their intentions, neuroses, secret passions, hopes and fears through his haunted, edgy croon.

After hours spent attempting to gauge the man via the simple but ultimately fairly pointless mode of probing questions, stilted dialogues, etc., the most salient feeling I'd experienced throughout our two lengthy encounters had been one of distance. Now my subject is on stage - on that precious turf where he somehow feels invulnerable, carefree, able to pour it all out - and I've gained a hard-focus proximity, a grandstand view of the proverbial 'big picture'.

When the last note is struck, Byrne's body suddenly stiffens, his mouth uttering a curt, almost falsetto-ish "Goodnight", and the transformation back to awkwardness has occurred once more. Me, I'm left wondering where all those characters he summoned forth go to. After the dance.