Talking Heads reunited for the first time since 2002, for the restored release of the seminal film Stop Making Sense. From left: Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth, Chris Franz and David Byrne.
Together in the same room for the first time in 20 years, Talking Heads tell Tom Augustine how their last live show – “the absolute worst gig ever” – hasn’t clouded their fondness for New Zealand
There’s an interesting Kiwi footnote in the history of Talking Heads: their last live shows were played in New Zealand. The 1984 Sweetwaters Festival, and Talking Heads’ infamously tumultuous appearance there, paints a fascinating picture of the contradictory nature of the band and of our country.
Where the Heads’ music has always been successful here, the messages underlying much of their music, namely the way they drew attention to the absurdity of the structures of a corporate, whitewashed, conservative life, weren’t necessarily picked up on by the conservative element here in New Zealand. What was picked up on was the lengthy speech by two wāhine Māori, brought on stage by the band to discuss indigenous rights.
The audience, reportedly, was not pleased, throwing things at the stage and booing. This tension continued into the show itself, coming to a head when frontman David Byrne walked off stage halfway through the show, being pulled back on by drummer Chris Frantz.
Bassist Tina Weymouth said in 2011 that it was the band’s “absolute worst gig ever”. It came to symbolise where the band was at that point, before Byrne famously, unexpectedly, left the band, bringing about the end of Talking Heads. “It was just this really sad, dismal affair,” Weymouth told the Guardian. “It was awful that everything we’d been working towards ended like that.”
The most interesting contradiction, though, is the fact that the Talking Heads now remember New Zealand on only the best of terms. “I have this memory that it had been raining, and seeing these rainbows as we drove to the show that I had never seen, where you could see the rainbow hitting the ground,” says guitarist Jerry Harrison. “This idea of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, well, it was right over there. I mean, I can see it, it’s like touching right there. I had never seen that before. So to me, it was a pretty magical day.”
Perhaps reflecting the record sales that the band had always enjoyed in New Zealand, and their continued cultural influence here, Weymouth remembers another milestone. “Our promoter came to pick us up at the airport and he said, ‘You have a gold record.’ That was our first gold record ever.”
Frantz chimes in. “I remember they said, ‘Mate, you’re bigger than Rod Stewart down here.’ As for their bringing on the wāhine Māori speakers? “We thought they should be given a voice. We can give them a voice for a minute there,” says Byrne.
“It was the right thing to do,” concurs Weymouth. She adds: “I think New Zealand was very special for us. It’s just got everything, mountains, water. We felt, ‘Oh my gosh, if you want to find a place on Earth where you can live, this might be the place.’”
You may find yourself wondering, what year is this? Didn’t Talking Heads break up several decades ago? You may find yourself, as I did, staring slightly nonplussed at the band, sitting together in the same room, for the first time in two decades. It’s 4.30am, New Zealand time, and I’m a little bleary, telling them I’m not entirely sure I’m not dreaming. “You’ll wake up and go oh, that interview never happened,” laughs Byrne.
Even more remarkable: the vibe is great, with all assembled behaving with cordiality, even bonhomie, despite the many years of bad blood between Byrne and the husband-and-wife team of Frantz and Weymouth. To add to this sense of displacement, soon you’ll find the defining visual document of Talking Heads, the concert film Stop Making Sense, playing in cinemas once again, newly restored and remastered, an astonishing sensory overload in IMAX.
Directed by Jonathan Demme, it was quickly (and rightly) exalted as the greatest of all concert films, a daring, even radical document that eschews all the egotism and filler of the traditional rock-doc for an intimate and exhilarating up-close experience, a work of art unto itself.
“When it came out, we didn’t anticipate that people would be dancing in the aisles. We saw that happening and thought oh, this is something kind of extraordinary,” says Byrne. Famously, legendary film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci was one of these dancing spectators, at a European film festival: “I remember him saying, ‘They don’t react like that to my films!’”
The story of the band’s breakup is one of those classically tawdry rock’n’roll stories. Byrne abruptly cut ties with the band without telling them, leaving the other members to discover the end of Talking Heads through a newspaper interview with Byrne. A one-time reunion performance occurred when the band was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. More than two decades later, the rights to Stop Making Sense reverted back to the band.
“It kind of fell into our laps,” says Byrne. “[Prolific distribution company] A24 said, ‘We want to put it back in cinemas, in IMAX. We want to upgrade the quality and find the original negative and remix the original sound so it sounds like it should.’” From there, a reunion seemed not only necessary, but desired.
Rewatching the film after all these years, with a packed audience, was a real head-trip, both joyous and disorienting. “I was thinking, ‘Oh God. Did you shave? Do you have any pimples? Did you pick your nose? You can see everything,’” Byrne laughs. “It’s something we’re all so proud of,” explains Harrison. “It’s a delight to all get together and talk about the most visible example of what it really was to be in Talking Heads.”
And what an example. Stop Making Sense is a pure shot of adrenaline, offering new perspectives on songs that are deep in the canon of dance club classics. The Stop Making Sense version of Burning Down the House has a raw, chest-beating mania, while Once in a Lifetime trades in the swirling, dreamy “duh-dum, ba-dum-dum-dum” of the studio version for a thunderous dramatic intensity.
It’s a symphony of bodies in motion, as the band and their assembled retinue of support players (which included Bernie Worrell, founding member of Parliament Funkadelic; Brothers Johnson guitarist Alex Weir; percussionist Steve Scales and back-up singers Ednah Holt and Lynn Mabry, also of Parliament) running, jumping, high-kicking, and infectiously pumping the room full of energy. “It was intense,” says Frantz. “There was something about being on stage with that band that was really transcending, transporting as a player. And yeah, you might be getting a cramp or thinking ‘God I’m so hot, I’m sweating, look at me.’ But somehow the emotion and power of the music made it all seem like … well … a piece of cake.”
Also notable is the staging, which sees Byrne standing alone on stage to begin with, to be followed song after song by another member of the band and ever more complicated pieces of set design. “Logistically, it was a lot,” says Byrne. “A lot to ask of the crew. We’d come to a venue and have to do a sound check, bring everything out to make sure it all worked, and then take it apart again.”
“I love the term Ernest Hemingway used – it was a moveable feast,” Harrison adds, noting that the sheer size of the group of assembled players and crew members was often overwhelming. “Afterward, if the entire band went out, it didn’t matter if there was no one else in the club. We were a big enough band, especially with all the roadies. We came in, and the room got more exciting. To a degree that’s what happened on stage too – we’d have a lot of fun and invite the audience to join in.”
Demme, one of the great American independent film-makers, was essential to the film’s visual style and success. Though he had already had success before Stop Making Sense with films like Melvin and Howard and Married to the Mob, his biggest hits were before him – the Oscar-sweeping The Silence of the Lambs and Aids drama Philadelphia among them. Demme, who died in 2017, had an independent spirit and love of music that made him a natural fit for the Heads.
“His films always had great music. And it was always loud, upfront. He loved music,” recalls Weymouth. “He understood that the show was already kind of perfect, he just wanted to capture that. We wanted the camera to be a really sensitive eye, that’s not calling attention to itself necessarily, so the viewer is really drawn in as though they’re there. Jonathan said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I want to do’. And so we said yeah, you’ve got the job.”
Demme’s natural sensitivity to the many vivid personalities on stage works wonders, constantly finding surprising moments of improvisation. “He loved things that nobody had planned but that he could find and capture. They were very sensitive to capturing each person and not leaving anyone out. It wasn’t just ‘Oh look at this riveting frontman’, who is riveting and doing all these things, but you could see everyone and all the interplay.”
There’s no denying that said riveting frontman is truly at his most riveting in the film, the centre of the action even before donning the iconic “big suit”, an enormous, chromatic grey square of a costume that dwarfs Byrne inside his own clothes. Byrne cuts a different figure now to those days, a little less brooding, a little more comfortable in his skin, perhaps. The David Byrne of the Stop Making Sense era is intense, enigmatic, deeply serious, even as he shakes and shimmies in his peculiar, loose-limbed way throughout the film. At the time of the split and long after, accusations from both within the band and without painted a picture of Byrne as demanding, an egomaniac, a diva, a prime example of a tortured genius. Byrne himself admitted to being “a little tyrant” in those days. Does he maintain his perfectionist streak, this many years removed?
“Yes, but at the same time, the ‘tyrant’ part has gone away quite a bit. I’ve come to realise that if you’re going to impart your vision to the people you’re collaborating with, and they share in the work, it just makes for a much, much more pleasant vibe, and it also sometimes makes for better work.”
You certainly feel the weight of history between the four of them. There’s a concentrated effort, from all parties, to move past the antagonism of the post-breakup era toward something a little more copacetic. Repeatedly, they’ve underlined that the in-fighting and criticisms were hallmarks of a bond that was closer to family than band-mates. When I ask how their relationship has evolved over the years, Frantz replies simply, “I think we’re very mature and behaving very well.” The rest of the band laugh, and any fleeting feeling of discomfort passes. “We’re all very good boys and girls,” Weymouth adds, slyly.
Perhaps this optimism is a reflection of the resurfacing of the film in their lives, in which little of the external tensions that would plague Talking Heads is apparent. “I’m just very proud of the band and the movie itself. Especially the music. The music is great,” says Frantz. Weymouth believes that the film, which begins with a man alone and ends with a stage full of joyous people, is at its heart a film about love, symbolised by Byrne’s beautiful dance with a lamp in the performance of This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody).
“That was part of the magic of that show,” says Weymouth. “There was so much love between the band, the audience, between all the players, the crew. We all wanted to support each other in doing our very best. It’s like that when you really love what you’re doing, you kind of throw this energy out to [the audience] and then they toss it back to you with even more energy rolled up into it. It snowballs. Remember, these were Reagan years, Thatcher years, and every night we felt like we were healing people with just the release of ‘OK, here we are, we’re human beings, dancing, singing, and loving each other’. And that was a very important thing for us.”
In a promotional video for the rerelease, Byrne enters a bustling New York drycleaners. He’s picking up an item that he left there by accident some 40 years ago. It’s the big suit. We see the Byrne of 2023, back in the costume, moving much in the way he did back in 1984. It’s a time warp, much like the revelatory newness of the restored images of Stop Making Sense. “I’m not quite as fit as I was then, so one of my first thoughts was, ‘Am I gonna fit in this thing?’” Byrne laughs. “On the inside it’s not quite as big as the outside.”
Talking Heads always were a band prepared to throw a spanner in the works, their music both arrestingly funky and unafraid to prod at those aforementioned, absurd elements that signify modern life. The suit was the ultimate mission statement, but do they feel the same way about absurdity now? “I like it [still],” says Byrne. “I often don’t know what it means. We’re all drawn to it a little. We discovered once we’d [made the suit], ‘Oh yes, this actually has some sort of commentary on contemporary life, it’s not just a funny costume’.”
“It’s that thing that Ed Ruscha says – the artist’s job is to make you scratch your head,” adds Weymouth. “What does this mean, why did you do that? You can interpret it as you wish. Which is probably one of the most important things if you want something to have lasting value. That you have something that can cross generational gaps.” Frantz laughs. “It’s absurder than it ever was!”
Stop Making Sense, the 1984 Talking Heads concert film, is in NZ cinemas from November 2.
Ebony Lamb performs Successful Feelings. Made with funding from NZ On Air. Video / Locals Only