STILL Making Sense!

Monday is movies. And sometimes TV. This week a plea: Go see the Talking Heads Concert Film in the cinema as soon as you can!

Hi, from America still - my final day on holiday here. Back to New Zealand soon - but with a few more days of vacation still. I’m doing my best to keep regular with the newsletters, and to deliver them at or around the usual times. I’ve also been adding a few reviews and new columns to the Off The Tracks side of things - which of course you find here at Substack now, all under the same banner. I don’t email out about everything I write, because I don’t want to spam you - but have a look around the site from time to time if you are interested in more writing.

Anyway, Monday is about movies.

And I like to go to the movies when I’m on holiday. Some people think this is crazy - you should be out and about exploring, you can go to the movies any old time. But hey, why not both? Why not out and about exploring and going to the movies any time (including while on holiday). I love checking out cinemas in other cities, and other countries.

While, I’ve been away, it was announced that the Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense would be screening in New Zealand in November. So that’s something to look forward to very much.

But I had secretly hoped my trip over here would line up with the concert film being released again in America. And guest what? It did!

So, last Friday, I went to a small cinema in a small town and watched the lunchtime session of Stop Making Sense on its opening day.

It filled me with joy to see this film on the big screen. I’ve been a Talking Heads fan my entire life. I think my older brother assisted me somewhat there, I really had no choice. But also, because of my age, I grew up with the second half of the band’s career. Snobs will want to tell you to only listen to the first four or even the second two albums of their catalogue - 1977-1980 only. But I love the material from 1983 and even from 1986. In fact, the final Talking Heads album, Naked, is utterly brilliant as far as I’m concerned. It just pays to think of it more as the first David Byrne solo album - it aligns more with his solo work than the band’s catalogue. So, yeah, of course I love Remain in Light and Fear of Music, and maybe I even love them the most - but I also really dig that album, Speaking in Tongues. And the soundtrack/live album Stop Making Sense. For it was Speaking and Sense (and Little Creatures - released the year after the film) that I heard first. And I ain’t mad about that.

Anyway, earlier this year I wrote about my top 10 all-timers when it comes to concert films.

And right there, at number two was Stop Making Sense. Actually it’s pretty much a tie between this film and The Band’s The Last Waltz. In fact, I remember, vividly, going into Fisheye Discs back in the day, hungry for knowledge and filled up already on some of it, trying to tell Seamus (the guru) that the best concert film of all time was easily Stop Making Sense. He politely countered (as he did - from behind his counter) that The Last Waltz was really the one. And I took him on his word and investigated - and immediately had a new favourite. But they’ve been locked at first and second and alternating positions ever since.

Stop Making Sense is just so wonderful to sit with - to watch and listen and love. It’s a band at the peak of their powers, with a setlist to die for - many of the songs are brand new at the time (Burning Down The House, Girlfriend Is Better, Slippery People, Swamp, This Must Be The Place) and they are among the concert’s highlights.

But if you are from that old school that values Fear of Music and Remain in Light the most, you are going to get to hear Once In A Lifetime and Life During Wartime and so on…

I have easily lost count of the number of times I’ve watched Stop Making Sense but it’s well beyond double-figures. I first saw it when I was about 9 or 10, and I would regularly rent it from the local video store. I’d watch, and watch - always getting in two screenings before returning it; even trying to hook up two VCRs to make my own copy, only to mix up the leads and get a version with no sound.

I eventually bought my own VHS copy, and then later had it on DVD for a while. These days I revisit it on YouTube, I still go through the whole Talking Heads catalogue from time to time - such a lovely, finite close-to-perfect catalogue from a band that’s been with me my entire life. I’ve seen David Byrne twice, read books by him and Chris Frantz, and a couple of outside-author biographies. I’ve been listening to a Talking Heads podcast the last few years, it obsessively traces the band’s catalogue album-by-album. So, yeah, I’m all in - always.

But Stop Making Sense is the perfect mid-career snapshot. Still working with the extended band (Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steve Scales etc), the wee cameo interlude from Chris and Tina’s Tom Tom Club (Genius of Love) and of course this immaculate setlist of songs from across five albums at that point. So that great cover of Al Green’s Take Me To The River is in there, those early Brian Eno collaborations are there, and even a rare early David Byrne solo track recast for the band (What a Day That Was - from his score for The Catherine Wheel).

It’s a celebration - constantly - of everything that makes this band great. And every player is hypnotic to watch.

Jonathan Demme’s direction is exquisite - putting the music front and centre. Knowing that each player is key to this, so including them all in as many sweeping shots as possible, plenty of individual close-ups - and not worrying too much about the audience. We don’t need to, we feel them all the way. But I was noticing for the first time this time - seeing it up close on a big screen and elated as if it was a concert - that it’s really a master stroke to not focus in on the audience so much. Recent concert films do that way too much. But here it was about a staged version of a stage performance - and though it’s ‘real’, and actually happening, it’s a film too. Damme walks this line so beautifully. And it’s only near the end that we really get to see the audience, by then they’re close to fever-pitch.

But the star of it all is David Byrne. They’re (largely) his songs. And it’s largely his concept. And he isn’t ever still for the 80 minutes of concert-film. He runs around the stage, he dances with a lampshade, he boogies in a big suit, he flaps his arms as his knees wave back and forth like a car yard inflatable. He is also able to create a different persona for each song by just the slightest adjustment. A set of glasses for Once In A Lifetime, slicked back hair for Swamp, the big suit of course - but also the big suit minus the jacket, the big suit plus a hat, it’s all so wonderfully simple. But it’s a bit like saying My kid could do that when you visit the gallery - they didn’t, did they? Byrne thought of this first, these simple movements, the backlighting, the building the stage up bit by bit and adding the band, member by member as the concert grows, song by song.

There I was on Friday, in a theatre by myself. I was taking pictures and video clips as if I was at a real concert. As if I was seeing this for the first time. Because it was the first time in this way.

There’s been speculation the band will reform - with their many public appearances in support of this concert film’s re-release. They hadn’t been seen together since a Hall of Fame appearance in the 90s. They broke up at the end of the 80s and it was messy. The acrimony has continued. It’s there splashed all through the pages of Frantz’s book. But money talks, and there they all are.

I hope it’s for the right reasons. And I don’t need a new Talking Heads record or performances of the band all together - though I’d probably welcome both of course. I’ve loved the integrity of this band. A nearly perfect, finite catalogue and then walking away to various projects themselves. I’ve kept an eye and an ear on most of those as well. (I’m returning to New Zealand with a copy of Byrne’s Catherine Wheel OST to replace the one I foolishly gave away a few years back).

But, wow, I wasn’t prepared for quite how cool it was to see the new print of the film in a theatre.

I’ll be going again in New Zealand next month. And you should too.

Why make it only once in this lifetime…