Talking Heads' first four albums

Talking Heads' early stage fave "Psycho Killer" virtually patented that twitchy New Wave feel of abruptness and agitation. 'I always liked slightly herky-jerky spastic rhythms. I gravitated towards those", says leader David Byrne.

Talking Heads - Psycho Killer 1977

Graced with a melody that shimmers like a hummingbird dipping for nectar, "Don't Worry about the Government" (from the debut Talking Heads 77) broke with rock's tired tradition of "Mr. Jones" songs and instead empathized with office drones everywhere. Inspired by Maoist ideas and management theory, Byrne was playing with the notion - sacrilegious, in the rock mindset - that 'uniformity and restriction don't have to be debilitating and degrading'.

Talking Heads - Don't Worry about the Government 1977

More Songs about Buildings and Food, the second album, was the first with producer Brian Eno. 

Both band and producer had been listening closely to the recent output of Parliament-Funkadelic, with its ultra-vivid palette of heavily treated instruments. Parliament also pioneered synth-bass on tracks like "Flashlight" (a massive US hit in 1978), with keyboardist Bernie Worrell stacking multiple Moog low-end tones to create the most gloopily lubricious bassline ever heard.

Parliament - Flashlight 1978

Eno loved creating new strange new sound-colours using effects and the studio-as-instrument. You can hear this chromatic quality at its most intense with the splashy reverbered drums at the start of "Warning Sign" and the famous 'underwater' sound of "Take Me to the River".

Talking Heads - Warning Sign 1978


Talking Heads - Take Me to the River 1978

With 1979's Fear of Music, Talking Heads plunged deeper into white funkadelia, but the feel is decidedly late seventies - psychedelia as media-overloaded disorientation, not trippy serenity. 

Germany's Red Army Faction and the Symbionese Liberation Army (Patty Hearst's kidnappers) inspired "Life During Wartime", the album's only overtly topical tune. Byrne goes beyond the obvious excitements of being an undercover terrorist (always on the move, switching identities, carrying several passports) by imagining the character's secret regrets: no time for 'fooling around', romance or nightclubbing.

Talking Heads - Life During Wartime 1979

Elsewhere, the symptoms of disquiet and malaise are more quirky. "Air" is the lament of someone so vulnerable that even contact with the atmosphere hurts ('some people don't know shit about the air', he whinges), while "Animals" features an Alf Garnett-like grouch gruffly ranting about the wildlife being irresponsible and generally 'making a fool of us'.

Talking Heads - Air 1979


Talking Heads - Animals 1979

The most advanced pieces, in terms of their structure and methodology, were the opening "I Zimbra" and the closing "Drugs". The former combined Africa-influenced percussion, propulsive disco bass, and Byrne chanting nonsense syllables originally written and performed by Hugo Ball as Dadaist sound poetry.

Talking Heads - I Zimbra 1979

"Drugs", a slow, faltering groove riddled with hallucinatory after-images and light-streaks, evoked altered states. In order to nail the panic-attack vibe he wanted, Byrne tried to make himself hyperventilate: 'I'd run around in circles until I was completely out ot breath and then gasp, "OK, I'm ready to sing the next verse!"' The most radical aspect of "Drugs" was its discombobulated gait and gap-riddled structure, full of lapses and phase shifts. 'Brian and I tore the song down to its basic elements and then built it up again with new stuff, replaying certain parts and replacing certain instruments'. The resulting mosaic of live band playing and sound collage was something almost impossible to reproduce onstage.

Talking Heads - Drugs 1979

"Drugs" was the germ of the next album, Remain in Light, on which the band would generate a mass of rhythms and riffs that were then sifted through and stitched together at the mixing desk.

The tracks were built out of layers of percussion, tics of rhythm guitar, synth daubs and multiple bass riffs (on "Born Under Punches", there were at least five basses, each doing simple one- or two-note pulses). Glyphs of keyboard coloration darted through the drum foliage like tropical birds.

Talking Heads - Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) 1980

Byrne even attempted a stiff-necked form of rapping on "Crosseyed and Painless". In "Born" and "Crosseyed" Byrne's protagonists are caged inside the clockwork grid of the industrial West, its hamster-wheel of schedules and time-is-money.

Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless 1980

In "Once in a Lifetime" a suburban man wonders how he ended up here with all his beautiful property (house, car, wife). He's 'not upset or tormented', Byrne has said, 'just bewildered. And then in contrast the chorus is meant to convey a feeling of ecstatic surrender'. This shattering epiphany punctures the ordered absurdity of workaday life and brings the possibility of rebirth and renewed wonder.

Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime 1980

Or perhaps not: "Once in a Lifetime" is immediately followed by the spooky "Houses in Motion", in which we observe a man 'digging his own grave' in daily instalments of empty industriousness.

Talking Heads - Houses in Motion 1980

"The Great Curve" was an ecofeminist rhythm hymn to Gaia, its chorus 'the world moves on a woman's hips' inspired by the Yoruba's Great Mother cosmology.

Talking Heads - The Great Curve 1980

"Listening Wind" makes us empathize with a North African man fighting Coca-Colonization by sending letter bombs and planting devices. Says Byrne, 'It's the point of view of someone being swamped by the West, their lives and culture destroyed. His retaliation is so limited compared with the might of the global powers, it's pretty easy to identify with - especially for someon who fancied himself an underdog in the music world'.

Talking Heads - Listening Wind 1980

At the end of the album, though, modernity's malaise reasserts itself with "The Overload", a droning dirge inspired by Joy Division in uniquely oblique fashion - Talking Heads had never heard Joy Division's records, but had been intrigued by the record reviews. The whitest-sounding music on the album, the song is appropriately the most angst-racked, with Byrne numbly intoning lyrics about missing centres, terrible signals, 'a gentle collapsing'. It's as if the African dream has dissolved and we're back in the psychic hollow lands of Fear of Music.

Talking Heads - The Overload 1980