Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Far Out MARCH 21, 2025 - by Matthew Ingate

THE ALBUM JOHNNY MARR SAID INVENTED TALKING HEADS: "IT WAS THE BLUEPRINT"

Although Talking Heads' debut album is now regarded as a classic, the music-buying public of the time can be forgiven for not knowing what to make of it when it first came out.

On its release, despite positive reviews, their first record barely scraped into the top half of the Billboard 200. It wasn't until the only single from their second album, More Songs About Buildings And Food, came out a year later that people started making sense of the New York four-piece. When they covered Al Green's Take Me to the River, the familiar song helped people attune to the unfamiliar rhythms, style, inflexions and performances found in the repertoire of the Talking Heads songs. Though they were on the CBGBs scene with The Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, and Blondie, Talking Heads didn't really sound like any of their contemporaries.

However, even though they didn't sound like anyone else making music in their scene, there was one band, and one album specifically, that The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr claims the Talking Heads sound can be traced back to.

"With me being a teenager during the '70s meant I never stopped being affected by Brian's music," Marr said about Brian Eno when talking to The Quietus in 2015 about his favourite albums. "If you were a big Brian fan, you would get into a cast of characters - be it T Rex or Roxy Music or Bowie - and you followed the connections of those artists."

He then went on to trace those connections from Eno even further, with a particular focus on Eno's 1974 solo album. Explaining, "I had a best mate who was obsessed with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and was playing it all the time. I got to know it really well, and it has connected to a lot of records that I like. Arguably, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) was the blueprint for Wire. It was the blueprint for David Bowie's later records, and you can hear the proto-Talking Heads on that record."

He added: "It sounds like all of those bands four or five years before they made similar stuff. The True Wheel sounds like something off Scary Monsters and it is four or five years before. Third Uncle sounds like Talking Heads many years before - so make of that what you will."

While the esoteric, experimental, and expansive sounds of Eno's album might have informed the esoteric, experimental, and expansive sounds of the Talking Heads' later work, the former Roxy Music man had a much more direct impact on their second album, as he was brought in to produce their sophomore effort.

"Here the Heads become a quintet in an ideal producer-artist collaboration - Eno contributes/interferes just enough", as Robert Christagau once described. 'Just enough' turned out to be 'not very much at all', as David Byrne later concluded, "Brian saw that we were a good live band and felt like 'my main job at this point is just to capture what's already there'."