INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

New Musical Express JUNE 25, 1977 - by Nick Kent

TALKING HEADS: ARE THESE GUYS TRYING TO GIVE ROCK A BAD NAME?

Talking Heads: it's a term they use up in the high-rise skyscrapers that house all the cogs in the corporate machinery cranking out network television for the American people.

The big-wigs in the boardroom - the William Holdens and Robert Duvalls of Network land - have a name for the lowest common-denominator programme non-personalities - the newscaster, weather-reporters, and other old warhorses who sit head and shoulders directly on camera mouthing out their obligatory tasks. These are the "talking heads" of American TV land; utterly boring, but necessary.

Talking heads with greying hair, dabs of make-up and dandruff removed from the shoulders of their suit-jackets, they sit austerely informing the public of the nation's daily occurrences - the rapes and murders, the military campaigns abroad, the latest government manouevres. No opinions, no subjective slant to their reports - they simply precis it down, feed it out to those millions of tubes and when it's over they go away, back to the bar or to the suburban home, wife and kids.

David Byrne, guitarist and singer for the Talking Heads, an American rock group, has a song that he wrote and performs entitled Don't Worry About The Government. It usually gets played early on in the set, with no prefacing explanation - just Byrne's reedy high-pitched voice almost stammering "This next song is called..."

And every time he introduced it to an audience in England, certain factions would snigger or boo or howl derisively because Talking Heads after all are a NEW WAVE group and if you are a New Wave group you must write direct anti-status quo, sloganeering songs of dissent. Just like The Clash or Chelsea or...

But Byrne's song isn't like that at all.

It's about an ordinary man who owns an apartment in some American suburb and who lives a quiet, fairly inconsequential existence, going to work in the morning and returning in the evening, who gains pleasure from life simply through drinking wine with friends or reading a book. There is no hint of moral castigation, no hint of cynicism, Byrne just places himself in his character's psyche and explains himself through his song.

It's a rare talent this, something much closer to the art of the very best short-story writers, a talent that only Ray Davies and Randy Newman before him, out of all the thousands of post-war song-writers, have bothered to identify with and explore perceptively.

"I just thought," said Byrne, "that lyrics could be used to strip down conversations, just normal day-to-day conversations and dialogues, and strip away all the phony embellishments and posturing right down to essentials so that they would actually say something directly, without having to throw in all the 'Oh yeah, baby' or 'Hey, bitch I'm coming to get ya right now' or...

"Pa-a-arty," chips in Jerry Harrison, the Talking Heads' keyboard player.

Everybody laughs.

• • •

Not an easy band to write about, these Talking Heads. They mystify and confuse simply because they so patently lack any dint of the arch brand of mystique that forms a patented cloak for the rock star enigma. Four intelligent, straightforward individuals, the very straightforward nature of their music and their image is somehow unique to the genre they have chosen to work within.

Not that the press haven't attempted time and time again to write about them, almost always in flattering terms.

They emerged as a live attraction in the hot summer of 1975 when Manhattan's CBGBs had suddenly been designated the centre-point of all new-wave rock activity; and were immediately slotted in with the likes of Television, Patti Smith, The Ramones, and Heartbreakers as the pace-setters right there at the . vanguard of this brave new scene. Convenient tags like 'punk' and 'art-rock' found themselves strange bed-fellows in numerous articles consummated by the inevitable bandying of the term 'minimalism'.

New York rock critics, having witnessed the ugly death of the New York Dolls brand of gashed-up rock, latched on fast to this new austerely dressed-down form of the music, and the Talking Heads, suddenly caught in the swell, found themselves holding down the cover of the prestigious Village Voice with a photograph taken at only their third gig. Inside was a rave-review of said show with an extensive article.

Since then, coverage has been as extensive as it has been perplexingly unforthcoming in regard to mere bottom line info on what the band were actually all about.

What was disclosed was that the band was a trio then, led by the angular, neurotic-looking Byrne who carried all guitar, vocal and composing chores, while the bass-player was a slight blonde-haired girl called Tina Weymouth whose basic feminist features were undermined by a slightly asexual manner. Drummer Chris Frantz was baby-faced and pleasantly effeminate.

Their music, though, seemed incapable of being pigeon-holed and continually presented reviewers with a daunting problem.

Having witnessed the band on four separate occasions over this last highly successful European tour, it became at once apparent that the care of Talking Heads' repertoire - principally Byrne's songs - is not something that casual acquaintance can unveil. At first, they intrigue as much as they bemuse, but the deeper you dig the more you uncover. Like Television, Talking Heads must be divorced from pigeon-holed surroundings because there-is nothing currently existing in the rock context that they can be favourably compared to.

Byrne's melodies are so insidious that they often totally by-pass the conventional quarters that rock music usually attempts to stimulate, instead going deeper, often lodging themselves in your subconscious. One song, after I'd witnessed the band only once at the Rock Garden, somehow kept manifesting itself in my dreams - this strange, utterly disarming descending chord motif would haunt me until I'd wake up desperately trying to recall it. It was only later that I even got to learn the song's title, The Book I Read.

• • •

This is how the band's music works - in away that transcends conventional avenues of 'rock criticism' where parallels to established musical forms become redundant and trite. When one has finally achieved some intimacy and contact with the repertoire, the music alone is overwhelming at times. One song - Byrne's I'm Not In Love - twists and turns, its twined guitar rhythms chattering and spitting like snap-dragons with sudden unsettling changes, its chorus brash and pointedly announced - before it charges off, climaxing in a devastating one chord ricochet of sound. Each song takes on a personality of its own as one becomes more and more acquainted - the jagged paranoid thrashings of What Is It? full of technical malevolence, the richly textured abrasive changes of No Compassion, that utterly disarming motif to The Book I Read.

Similarly the lyrics make themselves apparent in this same insidious fashion, via sudden dazzling couplets or single lines that grab you as Byrne's introvert-gone-psychotic delivery tortuously builds up and up, eyes reeling like wild horses in a flood, his pitching often totally awry but his sheer intensity galvanising because this man is truly grabbing hold of his songs, each and every utterance, like a drowning man grabbing straws.

Byrne's performance is, in fact, full of the tortured passion and gut-commitment that many of us were hoping for and found so disappointingly lacking in Tom Verlaine's recent shows in Britain. Like Verlaine, Byrne is totally the master of his chosen medium, yet there is an edge to Byrne that is so much more human.

Where Verlaine is oh-so calculatingly distant, Byrne's thrashing desperate need to communicate his songs grants his music a whole other dimension of sheer humanity and warmth a million light years removed from the cold arch-romanticism of Television's guiding light.

• • •

Off-stage, sitting with his cohorts in Talking Heads, Byrne exudes ail the cooped-up mannerisms of a caged bird. He seems to be suffering from some arch nervous defect that would need a constant ingestion of valium to assuage. Twitching almost, he sits hunched up in a chair, ungainly like a parody of look-alike Tony Perkins. When he talks, his voice is weak and reedy and often his attempts to explain certain facets of his songs - particularly his lyrics - lead him into weird tangential awkward ramblings that cause other members of the band, Tina Weymouth in particular, to open displays of ridicule which make him even more edgy. He looks embarrassed and bows his head slightly.

Observing him, I can't help feeling concerned for his obvious discomfort, as if any form of socializing causes the man to undergo real psychic pain. He later admits to the gross discomfort of what is really just a fairly casual conversation, and claims that performing affords him infinitely more relaxation.

"I can express parts of my personality on stage that I would never dare do in any other context."

Byrne's past remains obscured by the haziness of his own recollections. He talks about working in art galleries in the past, though he didn't in fact paint, while he claims his previous vocation while in college was to write up detailed questionnaires, until song-writing became an infinitely more agreeable pastime.

In contrast, the other three members of Talking Heads carry themselves in this social set-up with an ease and general openness.

Tina Weymouth appears fairly disinterested at first, more concerned with scanning the pages of the latest Oui, but is suddenly forthcoming when a question is either directed her way or else grabs her attention. Chris Frantz seems perfectly in sync with the whole interview routine, lavishing over most of his answers with great and entertainingly 'camp' detail.

And then there is Jerry Harrison, the newest member in the group, a veteran of only six months or less, but who has already obviously orientated himself into the consortium with great alacrity. Harrison is the most loquacious of the band and, with Frantz, the most forthcoming. His history as a musician is already full of worthy fodder for discourse, since he started his career as an integral founding force with Jonathon Richman in The Modern Lovers, about whom his reminiscences are nothing if not extremely witty.

"Well, you probably know that we started The Modern Lovers as a real cause - y'know, we were anti-drugs for a start, due to the fact that at that time in the States all the kids were just oohing themselves on quaaludes. So we'd go onstage and start our sets with this number called I'm Straight which would immediately cause all the audience to start throwing things - oh, rotten fruit, bottles, cans, anything - at us."

The Lovers' history was short due firstly to their corporate snooty attitude to playing clubs of the ilk of Max's Kansas City - "We didn't want to be associated with the New York Dolls or this or that... so we never played anywhere" - plus the traumas that followed the band being signed by John Cale to Warner Bros, who after financing an album (produced by Cale - it was finally released last year by Beserkley) decided to drop the band, leaving them penniless in Los Angeles.

Even when the album was being made, Harrison claims there were problems.

"Well, this was around the time when Jonathan was starting to want to write and sing only happy songs (laughs). So there'd be continual arguments between Cale and him over how we should sing certain numbers. Cale would be saying 'Now, Jonathon, I want you to sing this in a mean way.' And Jonathon would just look at him, y'know - 'Mean? I won't sing mean! I don't feel mean!'

"And he (Richman) kept going through changes of direction. Like one time he'd be totally into The Velvet Underground and early Stooges, and then he was suddenly enamoured with Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and he'd want to alter his whole style. Also he's a total astrology freak. You know that song, Astral Plane? Well he was always having these visions - or so he said - and writing songs about them. Things like... oh God (he starts laughing again) 'I saw you by, the waterway, the waterway, the waterway' - just on and on. We'd have to tell him to forget it."

After the Modern Lovers broke up, Richman briefly went onstage backed only by a bunch of kids beating rolled-up newspapers in time to his songs, before disappearing altogether for a long spell to (according to John Cale) lock himself in his bedroom.

When Harrison is asked whether he feels more comfortable being in Talking Heads than Richman's motley crew he simply sighs, "Infinitely."

• • •

Much of the conversation is taken up with the subject of the British New Wave and how the remarkably civilised T. Heads have found themselves having to cope with the more agressive elements at their concerts, particularly as they've been supporting the head-banger's friend, The Ramones.

Seems the atmosphere has never actually soured and that circumstances have been pretty agreeable all the way along.

From the other new wave bands of this country, T. Heads claim not to have incurred any particular animosity.

"Only Rat Scabies has caused a scene," claims Weymouth. "He appeared backstage at the Greyhound in Croydon and tried to get one of us to fight him. When we showed ourselves to be totally disinterested in that course of action, he contented himself with spitting on the floor and walking out. I felt rather sorry for him."

Meanwhile back in New York, the band have yet to break out of the New York club circuit set-up they've been working in for at least the last two years.

A record deal with Sire (whose head, Seymour Stein, is the only executive to have fully committed himself to the New Wave, having also inked The Ramones, Richard Hell, and now, apparently, The Dead Boys (a Cleveland pastiche of England's punk excesses), has produced the single Love→Building On Fire, an addictive though comparatively slight song from the band's repertoire.

A Talking Heads album, however, is scheduled for September release produced by Tony Bongiori and with five backing tracks already in the can. Ten tracks are scheduled - all Byrne originals including Pyschokiller, The Book I Read, No Compassion, Happy Day, and I'm Not In Love, the only unfortunate matter being the probable exclusion of the band's brilliantly terse rendering of Al Green's Take Me To The River.

The band are still a guaranteed sell-out at CBGBs on any given night, a not inconsiderable feat as many other similarly prestigious local bands are unable apparently to do the same - and on their own minor league waterfront they've gauged a strong cult audience.

But then there is something - extremely addictive about this band's music - potent enough to make Byrne an object of paranoid fear in the eyes of Tom Verlaine (who, according to Weymouth, is very, nervous of Byrne's status on the New York scene - as perverted a compliment as anything that can be divined from Verlaine's psyche one supposes). Meanwhile Byrne ts also considered the most singularly brilliant new songwriter currently in the States by John Cale, and even Lou Reed has lent a sizeable quota of suspiciously paternal advice.

Weymouth: "Yeah, I'd say he was actually genuinely trying to help us. I wouldn't say he was trying to rip us off, for example."

Byrne: "That's not true."

Weymouth: "How can you say that, David? I mean..."

Byrne: "Because he told me he ripped some of my ideas off. Not that I'm angry or anything."

How did the... uh gentleman go about this paternal business then?

"God... he'd invite us round to his apartment and insult us for a solid hour, particularly me. He'd always insult the clothes I was wearing, or my shoes. Then after that, he'd start to be more reasonable and actually have an agreeable conversation with us."

Byrne goes silent for a minute and then, for the first time, he seems calm and relaxed.

"Do you want to know... I'll tell you how much we've come on in the last two years, the real symbol of progress in Talking Heads. Now I can go round to Lou Reed's apartment and I can be rude to him!"

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