I have been listening to, and enjoying, the Talking Heads since the mid-80s - but it never occurred to me until very recently...... they were actually one of the funkiest, grooviest bands out there!
It was while watching a David Byrne live BBC performance from about 20 years ago (available here for a while if you are in the UK) that it really struck me. There is such great rhythm and movement in their classic songs. Byrne was playing with a really tight band in this gig, but they were just replicating what that ultimate husband and wife rhythm section of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz had been doing twenty-plus years before.
Please note - if you come across any of those lists out there of 'the greatest bass players of all time' and Weymouth is not on it - the list was quite probably compiled by a moron.
And it's not just me - I have found plenty of people out there who agree, and who have put things much more eloquently than me. But it is from the music itself that you will really see what I mean, so check out the videos dotted throughout the article. If you listen to any of these songs and aren't at least tapping a foot by the end.......
We set the scene with a description, from of all places, Encyclopaedia Britannica:
"Talking Heads’ blend of workable rhythms for dance clubs and brain fodder for hipsters provided an intellectually challenging and creatively adult musical alternative to arena rock, disco, and the commercial impossibility of punk. As the group’s music developed, it became a great white answer for an audience whose curiosity about world music and funk was most easily sated under the guidance of white urban intellectuals."
The Guardian, in an article from September 2016, look back to second album, More Songs About Buildings And Food (1978), where producer Brian Eno starts to get them to draw out their groovy side.
"Found a Job captures a band on the brink of multifaceted greatness. Under Eno’s tutelage, punk upstarts became funky sophisticates capable of flavouring meta-aware lyrical narratives with danceable beats and esoteric influences. Taking its cues from minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Terry Riley, then hip touchstones on the New York art scene, the instrumental outro of Found a Job is ingenious in its esoteric simplicity: a skipping cyclical pizzicato melody repeated for two full minutes without variation, to hypnotic effect, over scratchy chords and an awkward chord progression, eventually fading out as if it would continue ad infinitum even after the needle has left the groove."
Found A Job (Live in 1978)
When they move on to fourth album, Remain In Light, we can not only see how this danceability has developed, but how it will influence future generations of bands.
"Crosseyed and Painless might be Talking Heads’ most deliriously danceable song, not to mention the blueprint for a clutch of future New York bands from the Rapture to LCD Soundsystem. Weymouth’s popping bassline, Byrne’s stuttering, disjointed riffs, added “stunt guitar” solos from Adrian Belew and assorted staccato guitar rhythms and keyboard chirps all circle one another over a congas-and-cowbells beat. Like Once in a Lifetime, the song features not a single chord change in all of its four and a bit minutes, but instead simply shifts vocal melody to denote a chorus.
Crosseyed And Painless (Live in Hollywood, 1983 - from Stop Making Sense)
Legendary live album Stop Making Sense has versions of classic Talking Heads songs in what, the Guardian says, "are arguably their definitive versions, a practically aerobic performance of apocalyptic dance band jam Life During Wartime for one. Originally featured on the 1979 album Fear of Music in more sterile form, its driving disco beat, chewy keyboard riff and sharp angles were perfect fodder for the expanded live Heads line-up, which added a crack squad of American funk musicians in Parliament-Funkadelic founding member and synthesiser guru Bernie Worrell, percussionist Steve Scales, guitarist Alex Weir and backing vocalists Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt."
Life During Wartime (Live in Hollywood, 1983 - from Stop Making Sense)
John McFerrin Music Reviews talks of Talking Heads as "one of the first and best purveyors of 'dance music you can't dance to,' churning out songs that had (on paper) many of the same raw materials as 'regular' pop music, but that put these elements together in such a wholly bizarre way as to distinguish themselves from everybody else."
McFerrin also focuses particularly on Remain In Light, again noting the layers that guest multi-instrumentalist Adrian Belew adds: "I'm also extremely fond of The Great Curve, not in the least because of Belew's aforementioned solos. However, this is only the final great part of an otherwise brilliant groove, one that can't help but get your foot tapping like mad for six+ minutes while backing vocals interact incredibly with the lead vocals with the guitars with the bass with the drums with the whatever. Oh man, this is beyond brilliant as far as 'dance pop' goes - if your whole body isn't trying to move from the "World moves on a woman's hips" part onward, you're even more hopelessly honkified than I am."
The Great Curve (Audio only)
To sum it up a bit, we turn to Ben Cardew, writing in DJ Mag last November. "Whatever Talking Heads did, the dancefloor was never far from their thoughts. Weymouth, the band’s bass player, once explained that when they started, “we called ourselves Thinking Man’s Dance Music” and — perhaps more than any other rock band of their generation — they understood the power of a groove, even as their music mutated and evolved."
He picks out another album to demonstrate the dance band narrative. ‘Speaking In Tongues’, the band’s fifth studio album, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, was key to their dancefloor success: a stone-cold new wave disco classic that was all over New York’s clubs in 1983, from the Paradise Garage to the no-wave venue, The Mudd Club. “I mean, you could just put on the album and go home,” says Justin Strauss, a New York DJ, remixer and producer since the early 1980s, who was resident at the latter. “You have ‘Burning Down The House’, ‘Slippery People’, ‘Girlfriend Is Better’, ‘This Must Be The Place’ — it's just crazy. All the songs now are so iconic.”
Girlfriend Is Better (From Stop Making Sense - includes that famous suit!)
Referring to legendary New York City DJ Larry Levan who loved to spin tunes from it, and a cast of top notch musicians who guested on the record, Cardew goes on. "Thanks to these dance music historians, we also know that Levan spun no fewer than four ‘Speaking In Tongues’ tracks at the Paradise Garage: ‘Burning Down The House’, ‘Slippery People’, ‘Swamp’ and ‘This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)’. “Larry was regarded as the major DJ of New York,” says Strauss. “When he started playing it [‘Speaking In Tongues’], other DJs followed, who might not have played it before. ‘Speaking In Tongues' is almost certainly their most club-friendly — full of Frantz’s propulsive disco drum grooves, Harrison’s itchy guitar funk, Weymouth’s tightrope-tight bass lines and Byrne’s dance-chant vocals. Notably, the album also features French musician Wally Badarou and Parliament-Funkadelic founder Bernie Worrell on keyboards, as well as Labelle’s Nona Hendryx on backing vocals.
Wild Wild Life (Official music video)