INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

New Musical Express JULY 22, 1978 - by Tony Parsons

MORE WORDS ABOUT AMERICA AND PRODUCERS

Tony Parsons sits on Talking Heads Beds and other items of household furniture. Pennie Smith designs the interiors.

"Your wife didn't like our album," smarts a Talking Head before I'm even sitting comfortably.

Damn that television! What a bad picture! Don't get upset! It's not a major disaster!

The phrase Talking Head was originally coined in Stateside video terminology. It's American media jargonese for a static head 'n' shoulders camera shot of the twice-nightly, coast-to-coast, impassive harbingers of the Planet Earth's interminable horror-show.

Conservatively attired, conscientiously poker-faced, the scrupulously objective anti-personalities parrot another man's lifeless litany of the day-to-day confluence of kidnappings, mass-murders, race-riots, bombings, hijackings, strikes, assassinations, Washington's political science, Russia's dissident-disposal industry...

Kid, these Talking Heads have seen it ALL: nothing touches them they're numb inside, they got no heart.

Decay! Doom! Death! Destruction! Armageddon! And now for the weather!

So watching the Talking Heads evokes no more passion in the viewer than gawping at the Test Card. Anybody can shock a baby or a television audience, but it's too easy and the effect is disproportionate to the effort. Look out, honey, they're using technology to arrange the world so that we don't have to experience it.

"I just read the review your wife didn't like our album? What did you think?"

Save for the very same enigmatic handle, the T. V. Eye's desensitized pawn-cocktails bear no similarity whatsoever to the quartet of young Americans remaining perfectly civilised if somewhat, ah, distant as they size me up with polite suspicion in this darkened hotel room located in one of the more sedate residential areas of Kensington, S.W.7.

As the others watch my hands for any sudden movements and stonily stare me out without breaching the fundamental rules of social etiquette, mild-mannered Chris Frantz (doe-faced drummer) plays Henry Kissinger, perching on an arm-rest at the other end of the sofa where I recline, and asks me for my thoughts on the recently released second Talking Heads album, More Songs About Buildings And Food, produced by Brian Eno.

As I conjecture that the hot-off-the-presses vinylised evidence seems to suggest that Eno needs Talking Heads whereas Talking Heads really don't need Brian Eno, the rest of the band are less loquacious than Chris and not so willing to place their person within gobbing distance of me.

Chris's wife, blonde bassist (Mar)tina Weymouth, sprawls across a big brass bed sucking on a Camel and resembling a younger, prettier, more wholesome edition of Marianne Faithful.

Over by the window is inscrutable ex-Modern Lover Jerry Harrison (keyboards and guitar), and between him and Chris there sits David (Byrne - guitar, vocals and he writes the songs) looking just like Tony Perkins in a permanent state of shock.

If the others are mildly hostile, my presence appears to cause David - a pathologically shy man at the best of times - chronic discomfort. Tense and nervous and unable to relax. Byrne exudes the mannerisms of a petrified rabbit transfixed in the beam of a car's headlights and waiting for the crunch.

After numerous false-starts to the interview, the band eventually realise that I come in peace, my aim is true and that I hold Talking Heads in high-esteem. It subsequently transpires that the reason for their initial animosity was not J.B.'s 'scathing review of their latest platter but the hysterical assurance given to them by a wizened NME stringer who shall remain nameless that my sole intention for doing the interview was to shred the Heads into news-sheet mince-meat.

"We very nearly called the whole thing off," smiles Tina. "We thought we were going to hate you!"

Impossible, Tina. But while Chris, Jerry and Tina all open up and gladly become their warm, intelligent, trenchant natural selves, David Byrne's nerve-ends are stretched taut throughout the interview's duration and Talking Heads principal architect remains silently ill-at-ease.

"Nobody can think their shit don't stink," muses Tina philosophically.

• • •

Eighteen hours earlier Talking Heads are on stage in front of a sardined-to-the-rafters packed-house at the Strand's Lyceum Ballroom and performing live is refreshing the parts of David Byrne's tortured psyche that normal conversation just can't reach.

Q'est-ce que c'est, psycho-triller? Fronting Talking Heads low-key, austere, in puris naturalibus visual, Byrne begins as jittery as he is in, well, real life; steadily gaining confidence as the show progresses and gradually building up to a peak of mesmerising intensity.

Eyes-roll, tongue-lolls in the sweat-soaked, screwed-up visage of a staid introvert who's mutated into a jabbering mentally unbalanced wreck, bobbing his head like a sulky Stan Bowles juggling a football in training after a particularly bad night at the dogs, his voice a whooooshing haywire Hoover. Beautiful.

The irony of it all is that Byrne's song's share none of the slobbering rhetoric of all those rock bands bleating on and on and on about non-existent sub-stratas of society. More than any other musician, Byrne needs the cathartic therapy of performing live, but the bottom line is that he doesn't require it to promote the same old flabby flaccid fantasies as everybody else, but to put across songs about the major concerns of the average human being; loved-ones, work, home, civil servants, buildings and food. Lyrics pruned of any false embellishments, the bare essentials of everyday thoughts, dialogue and conversation that David Byrne himself finds so unbearably painful when he's not on a "Rock 'n' roll" stage...

The multi-textured, full-bodied sounds of Talking Heads live is totally unlike the Jack Nitzsche-esque cold-eyed clarity of the Tony Bongiovi production on their first album, Talking Heads: 77.

Tina: "Bongiovi was working on Disco Star Wars at the same time he was working on our record. There was a lot of record company pressure on him to make us sound 'good'."

Jerry: "But the sound was too weak, it sounded really thin on the radio."

David (in a rare moment of garrulousness): "At the time we thought we'd like to work with someone who was commercially orientated. We thought that if we were going in one direction and he was going in another it'd be some kind of weird amalgamation of the two... I think Tony Bongiovi is one of the biggest assholes I've ever met. He was horrible to work with."

Chris: "You got it worse, David!"

The songs performed from the second album are more similar to their recorded countez-parts though they gain a stark, satisfying, abrasive quality on stage without the disc's. mundane miasma of Eno with his putrid plethora of studio echo-chambers, tape-loops and a veritable battery of synthesisers and sound filters.

Songs on the new album like Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, Stay Hungry, Found A Job, The Girls Want To Be With The Girls and especially The Big Country are the equal of the infectious gems on Talking Heads: 77, though exchanging Bongiovi for Brian has merely exchanged the fire for the frying pan and for full appreciation of the band's modus operandi it's still necessary to catch them live.

In this environment they go from strength to strength, the joy-bringing power of their Lyceum date transcending even their classic, quasi-mythical U.K. debut over a year ago at Covent Garden's Rock Garden.

Under Byrne's high-pitched nasal vocal, the insistent pace of his twelve-string splices with the distinct adornments of Harrison's keyboards and Telecaster, carving out the insidious jagged melodies that twist and turn, cut and thrust, and are nailed down by the taut syncopation of the husband and wife rhythm section who put the FUNK into Talking Heads.

At home Chris and Tina spend many happy hours listening to the strident drive of the bass and drums deployed on the work of Munich Machine producer, Giorgio Moroder.

The overall effect owes much to Yellow Label Stax in general and an updated-for-the-'80s version of the nirvana experienced listening to Veda Brown's Short Stopping in particular.

And, apart from David Byrne's inevitable transition to theatrical epilepsy, they ail look so... normal!

• • •

"The way we present our music was a reaction away from the distractions," remembers Tina Weymouth. "The high-posing macho, the costumes, the lights... the lights changing in time to the music! She laughs. "I consider that to be an insult to peoples' intelligence. So when it was time for us to go on stage we didn't know what to do except just present our music."

Talking Heads are the only band I've ever talked to who explicitly state that they're not out to make their audience feel inadequate, and who actually carry this through to their performance. Despite all the punk-posturing hyperbole, the majority of bands who have appeared over the last couple of years have been at least as willing to perpetuate and profit from the Star/Fan barriers as any Rolling Stones.

Mass-adoration, that's the name of the game, and each generation plays the game the same. And if you think that one of those pitiful pogoing stage invasions equals rock egalitarianism then you are a sucker, sucker.

But, of course, as Talking Heads grow in stature (their first album was on the American charts for forty-nine weeks and they're easily Sire's biggest selling artists), their natural austerity is in danger of becoming the trade name they consider to be a must to avoid.

"I think we run the risk of our natural image becoming a cliche," mutters David darkly.

"You do wanna change, but how can you avoid that trap?" asks Jerry. "Damned if you do -"

"- and damned if you don't!" intercepts Tina.

Everybody laughs.

Aesthetically, I love Talking Heads. On a personal level I like them all enormously and would be proud to number them amongst my friends. On a professional basis, however, I like the songs on their new album but can't stomach Eno's production. Ol' Brian seems to have used the band as the raw material for his own production ideas. The Heads disagree...

"We got to the point where we'd done the basic tracks in just five" days," says Jerry. "We'd rehearsed solid for two weeks before we flew down there to the Compass Point Studio in Nassau down in the Bahamas."

Why did you record there?

"Because the studio had the same MCI mixing desk that Eno had used for the latest Bowie and Devo albums, it was the only other one in the world that Eno knew of..."

Another reason for the choice of location, apart from the weather, was that it was a new studio which still had a few bugs in the system so that it was possible to rent the studio by the week instead of the hour, fly all their equipment there and back and live down there for a month and the overheads of the album were still much less than it would have been if More Songs About Buildings And Food had been cut in New York or Los Angeles.

On the album sleeve Eno is practically listed as a fifth member of the band. He's certainly come on since the first time he met the band backstage at their Rock Garden gig and told them they were the most exciting thing he'd seen in two years (this is long before he was swapping fraternity pins with Devo, of course).

Jerry: "So after the basic tracks were down we had over three weeks to re-work all the songs and try out any ideas any of us had to make the songs sound different."

Tina: "Plus he had a real artist's attitude to technology."

Jerry: "With some of the people Eno had worked with I think they felt afraid to experiment beyond a certain point for being Eno-ised."

Tina: "Great!"

"No, I don't think that is great," retorts Jerry. I think that we felt our music was strong enough and that we shared enough views that it would be a great combination and I think that it does come through, it's definitely our music whereas maybe other bands Eno has worked with have been an extension of Eno."

"I think Eno's contribution was just like any one of us writing parts of the songs," opines Tina. "We all make the decision, and we ran into very few quandaries or conflicts when it came to decisions what to do..."

Oh, well. Talking Heads obviously have a deep empathy with you, Brian, so I don't mind you producing their next album or the one after that. In fact, you can keep doing it till you get it right.

• • •

David Byrne's practice of adopting persona to put across a particular viewpoint inevitably results in rock's answer to Roald Dahl, frequently contradicting himself in song. For instance, I'm Not In Love is the direct antithesis of Who Is It?, Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town and even Stay Hungry, where the muscle-bound jock sweats blood to remain in shape and retain the affections of his steady. And in the sublime Don't Worry About The Government the subject wallows happily in comfortable bourgeois contentment while in The Big Country David's mouthpiece mordantly puts down the very same cocooned-but-cosy environment.

There is never the faintest hint of any bitter cynicism or moral castigation directed at the views expressed. Moral judgement is a luxury handed to the listener.

"People feel different things at different times," Jerry justifies. "We just do songs that express a viewpoint at a particular moment in time. We don't try to put out a manifesto or to have just one standing point..."

But whereas Don't Worry About The Government rings true, The Big Country just doesn't convince that you mean it, man.

The first time I heard the song I was at home in our tiny North London garret and the rain was pouring through the crevices in the ceiling and summer's here and the time is right for fumigating the cats' turd-box...

"I see the shapes I remember from maps / I see the shoreline / I see the white-caps / A baseball diamond, nice weather down there / I see the school and the houses where the kids are / Places to park by the factories and buildings / Restaurants and bars for later in the evening / I guess it's healthy, I guess the air is clean / I guess those people have fun with their neighbours and friends / Look at that kitchen, and ail of that food / Look at them eating/I guess it tastes real gooood."

In a haze of euphoria I drifted away on the C&W steel-guitars, to sweet-smelling Marlboro County. Then Byrne's put-down punchline brought me back to terra firms with a jolt.

"I WOULDN'T LIVE THERE IF YOU PAID ME TO!"

I don't believe you, David. You just made it sound too damn appealing! We all hoot with raucous laughter. Even David! I seize this opportune moment to ask if there.is any truth in the rumour that he's a scatologist (a turd-fetishist to you ignoramus morons out there).

This is good-naturedly denied and David goes to the bathroom.

"David's not a scatologist," explains Tina with a grin. "It's just that when you're on the road your humour tends to be a little, uh, FAECAL!"

A short while later I get a practical demonstration of this coprolite whackiness when I go to the can to empty me bowels. One inch under the pan's water Elvis Costello peers myopically up at me from behind a camera on a tripod. I breath a sigh of relief when I suss it's only a eight-by-twelve photograph and not the real thing.

When I come out and ask Tina if she knows what she's got floating in her carsey she says she doesn't and goes to take a look see. She returns with her ribs well-tickled.

"Did you piss on Elvis?" she asks me.

It was either that or let him take my picture. I look around for David Byrne. Of course, he's gone by now.

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