Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food
Warner (1978)

Obviously this isn’t a new release by any extent of the imagination. This is the first in a series of articles discussing a band or an album that I consider to be crucial to the development of the music many of us enjoy. At one point it was known as ‘Punk’, then sometimes ‘Indie’ or ‘Underground’, then eventually ‘Alternative’. Whatever label you want to give the bands that exist and have existed just off centre of the mainstream. It’s basically an attempt to paint a broader picture of the music we like. You’ll also notice that this album and others I will mention was released on a major record label. Before the 80s, these labels were often every bit as dynamic, brave and experimental as the independent labels we usually champion today. Crucially, bands like Talking Heads were seldom pressured into making an album or indeed, to change their sound or image to fit in with a popular trend. Though creative co-operation between artist and label does occasionally still happen in the present day, these success stories are few and far between. I’d ask everyone to judge these bands on the quality of the music they released rather than by their financial decisions.

Even if you’re vaguely aware of Talking Heads, the rock band formed in Manhattan during the mid-70s, chances are you won’t have heard much of the earlier records. Indeed, during the 80s, Talking Heads became a very successful band indeed, with several platinum albums and not one but two feature films to their name. They were essentially the very first band to ride on the cusp of the MTV publicity wave, sadly just as their music was becoming somewhat banal. Thus, it is difficult to imagine Talking Heads as a young band in 1978 on the brink of releasing a follow-up album to a debut record that had made only the slightest ripple in the mainstream pond. Furthermore, beyond the ambition and psychological pressures the quartet faced, there was also the desire to make amends for the relative failure of the first album. Somehow the group had found themselves recording their debut album with renowned disco hit-maker Tony Bongiovi, who had treated the band as something of an annoyance. Even worse, he had tampered with their songs by adding strings, horn charts and female backing singers. Part of songwriter David Byrne must have been at least a little bit glad that the album had tanked. Now he had an excuse to call the shots for the next record.

The first decision the band made was to bring in Brian Eno to produce their new album. Although Eno was born in Suffolk, England he was hardly the quintessential Englishman. An art-school graduate with an avowed interest in the avant garde, as well as Asian and African music, he had fallen into producing after leaving London-based band Roxy Music just before they achieved massive chart success. He had since then released a handful of extraordinary solo records ranging from the ambient to the downright maniacal. He had also worked with David Bowie on the acclaimed ‘Berlin’ trilogy, which had brought him to the attention of the American media. Fortunately for Talking Heads, he hit it off with the similarly-minded Byrne and was delighted to accept an offer to work on a new record. Immediately, Eno put his foot down and insisted the band traveled to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. His reasons for doing so were two-fold. Primarily, he coveted the studio’s state of the art MCI Mixer. It also couldn’t hurt that he was talking the band where the prying eyes of their record label and management were unlikely to follow. Both the band and Eno shared an art-school background and subsequently, commercial success was hardly a priority. All parties involved were much more interested in creating unique and timeless music.

At the height of their powers and with the right producer in tow, Talking Heads were certainly the band to achieve such a lofty goal. The roots of the band could be found in the untidy garage rock of David Byrne and drummer Chris Frantz’s previous group The Artistics. When the duo had moved from Rhode Island to New York, they started creating music using the same methods with which they had approached painting or sculpture at RISD. When unable to find a bassist in tune with their clinical style, Frantz’s girlfriend Tina Weymouth rose to the challenge. As a trio, the group created an incredibly lean and sparse variation of garage rock as perpetuated by fellow New Yorkers Television. Another crucial influence was the Modern Lovers, a Boston band lead by an incredibly straight-laced young man called Jonathan Richman. Like the Heads, Richman was enamoured by the simplicity of roots rock’n’roll and often sang about ostensibly mundane subjects such as haircuts and asking girls out to the movies. Whilst the Heads appreciated Television and the Lovers, they crafted their own sound by attaching the minimalist approach to a rhythm section which was schooled on the hard funk of Parliament and Funkadelic.

Frantz and Weymouth were a truly remarkable foil for Byrne’s songwriting. Frantz devoured Caribbean and African music which placed enormous emphasis on tight syncopation and dense polyrhythmic devices. Aside from keeping perfect metronomic time, his fills were totally unique in the spectrum of rock music. Likewise, Weymouth’s initially novice-like command of the bass wove itself into the fabric of Byrne’s songs. When arranging songs, the basslines would be necessarily simple so Weymouth could grasp the notation easily enough. After a few short months of rehearsals, she had developed a style which was completely her own – both brittle and funky. Over the top of this rock solid rhythmic foundation, David Byrne would play guitar and sing in a thin, off-kilter voice. Byrne’s songs were packed with nervous energy, characterised by his chattering guitar lines and neurotic observations. Byrne’s lyrics were also outside the box, as influenced by his literary heroes. Lou Reed had pioneered this trick in his group the Velvet Underground but whereas Reed was obsessed with the seedier end of fiction, Byrne took his influence from Dadaism, Gertrude Stein, Pop Art and non-fictional works of philosophy and psychology. The culmination of these factors produced a thoroughly modern sound but after making a few experimental trips into the studio and securing a contract with Sire Records, the group decided they needed a fourth person to flesh out the sound. Fortunately, they managed to entice former Modern Lovers keyboardist Jerry Harrison into the band. Slightly older and more wary of the potential pitfalls of the music industry, Harrison provided both a sense of experience and filled out the band’s sound with keyboard and auxiliary guitar.

If anyone was going to draw out the best performances from this group it was Brian Eno. His choice of studio and comparatively relaxed attitude to recording suited the band. Whereas Tony Bongiovi had practiced traditional studio practices such as isolating the band from each other during takes and enforcing rigorous retakes, Eno was content to let the band find a natural groove at their own pace. With this laissez-faire approach, the band recorded the basic tracks in the first five days. Crucially, Eno sensed that the band’s energy was reliant on playing together in the same room as a single unit and recorded them live to tape. He would then use his own electronic toys and the 24 track MCI mixing desk to manipulate the sound of each instrument individually. Although Eno happily described himself as a ‘non-musician’, he was an excellent sound doctor and something of a sonic innovator. With the use of the 24 track mixing desk he could change each note to his satisfaction. Not only could he play with the volume of each instrument, he could adjust the frequencies of each instrument at any given time. He could make Tina Weymouth’s bass sound as dense as a minor earthquake. He could make the guitars of David Byrne and Jerry Harrison mesh like the whirring blades of a precision mechanical saw. On most songs he crushed Byrnes vocals down in the mix to sound like the rantings of paranoid nerd. Most importantly, Eno recognised that Talking Heads were a band of rhythm players and mixed them as such.

In the 60s and 70s as popular rock music developed into a commercial behemoth, the common practices of mixing had changed completely. Pop music relies on a the power of a simple melody, sometimes two or three. In order to sell records effectively, you needed to insert this melody into your listeners consciousness as quickly as possible. Traditionally, a melody would be produced by a singer or sometimes the guitar player. In recording terms, these melodies are sometimes known as ‘Hooks’. If you look at the entire history of rock music, chances are you’ll be able to recall the hook of most commercially successful songs. Thus, almost all pop music will have the singer or guitarist at the very top of the mix. These two sounds will often dominate the range of frequencies, though you might not notice unless you are looking for it. With the melody at the top of the mix, the lower frequencies of the rhythm section were pushed down and compressed. Back in 1978, this was still a very common practice for all commercial rock music. However, funk revolutionaries such as Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament had reversed this trend to reflect their roots in African tribal music. They re-introduced a focus on the rhythmic groove above any other instruments in the mix, even the vocals. Brian Eno also subscribed to this theory of mixing. On the new Talking Heads record he placed the rhythm section at the very top of the mix.

The opening song ‘Thank You For Sending Me an Angel’ introduces us to the hypnotic treadmill effect Eno created with the band’s instruments. The rolling, repetitive groove seems to be in full gallop and yet remains perfectly stationary for several bars. An overdub of Harrison playing the steel rims of his snare provides an occasional counterpoint for the busy syncopation – something that was to become a hallmark of Eno and Talking Heads’ collaborations. The following track ‘With Our Love’ is the first real hint of the album’s classic status. Weymouth hits an unrelenting locked groove that is near impossible not to dance to. The guitars chime in absolutely perfect unison creating a tension which eventually breaks into a choppy percussive vibe. Brilliantly, Eno tucks the occasional keyboard flourishes in behind the guitars and tunes them into what is essentially the same pitch. This results in a beautiful streamlining effect that contributes a sense of overall fluidity to the song’s otherwise abrupt changes. A distant synthesizer - another Eno trademark - creeps into the mix as Byrne flusters over the inherent complications of emotional attachment. “Forget the trouble,” he barks. “That’s the trouble”.

The next song ‘The Good Thing’ confirms the running theme of the conflict between reason and emotion. Byrne had been reading a book about Chinese rhetoric when he had penned the lyrics and wanted a Communist People’s Choir effect on the backing vocals. Eno drafted in Weymouth and all of the female employees of Compass Point, credited in the liner notes as ‘Tina and the Typing Pool’, to sing with Byrne. The finished article sounds like a cross between a self-improvement pledge and an utterly rational statement of intent. “As we economize, efficiency is multiplied,” intones the choir with Byrne as a keyboard chirps just below. After a couple of minutes the song breaks pace and the band once again rides an incredible Weymouth bassline until the outro. “Cut out the weakness, reinforce what is strong,” yells Byrne in a fitting encapsulation of Talking Heads’ compositional technique. Next track ‘Warning Sign’ was a survivor from Byrne’s days in the Artistics. He tells us of an impending omen but neglects to inform us of any helpful details. Instead he talks about his hair. This song was written when Byrne was interested in Cybernetics, a mathematical theory that allows one to predict the future using probability. Eno disguised Byrne’s voice by adding ghostly synth rinses just before and after each line. The resulting song is ambiguous to the point of Dadaism.

On ‘The Girls Want to Be With the Girls’ Byrne examines the conflict of interests between the sexes as he sees it. “Girls are getting into abstract analysis,” he explains. “They want to make an intuitive leap.” The guitar sits in perfect harmony with the keyboard until the outlandish breakdown following the chorus. The guitar line weaves into the stratosphere and the keyboard gradually ascends in pursuit. It’s as if the entire psychedelic era is being compacted into 20 seconds of music and then immediately discarded as a dead end. In ‘Found a Job’ Byrne takes minimalist idealism to it’s logical extreme. Bob and Judy can’t decide to watch on the television and Byrne can’t help but wonder if they might be better of making their own shows. The crass naivety of the lyric is complemented beautifully by a single-finger keyboard solo during the extended outro. Side One ends and the record only gets more peculiar from here onwards.

Side Two of More Songs About Buildings and Food is one of the best sides of vinyl you will ever hear on headphones. If you don’t have headphones, try to get exactly between the speakers and bring the bass up to a reasonable level. The opening track ‘Artists Only’ is another surrealist oddity that sees Byrne taking the role of a dementedly self-obsessed painter. “I don’t have to prove that I am creative!” He admonishes by way of warning. After a deceptively calm introduction, the Heads beat a jogging pace before hitting the brakes and building patiently on an undulating Weymouth bassline. The guitar chatters in one channel whilst a decaying piano motif tinkles in the other. Eventually Frantz crashes down on his drums and the band lurch back into the song. Even this sturm und drang seems ill preparation for the compacted funk of ‘I’m Not in Love’, which is the most relentlessly up-tempo song of the band’s career. It’s also the most narcissistic song Byrne ever penned. “Please respect my opinions,” he spits. “They will be respected some day”. Eventually he releases a synthesized yelp and as the band race to the finish line Eno has the entire group sounding like the cacophony of a single, gigantic percussive machine. Guitar left detaches after a moment and starts to spit fractured chords back into the fray before Weymouth’s bass anchors the song back to the ground.

Perhaps the crowning achievement of the collaboration is the throbbing menace of ‘Stay Hungry’. After his prior declaration that he was beyond love, Byrne is finally ready to make to engage in physical intimacy. “I think that we can signify our love now,” he concedes in the opening line. “Ooh Girl, you can initiate an impulse of love.” Predictably, Byrne approaches the physical act of love with the same neurotic precision with which he regarded the emotion from afar. The song rides on the best Tina Weymouth bassline yet and by comparison the guitars sound like metallic pens scratching on sheets of glass. Gradually a synthesizer crescendo wails into life and Byrne solemnly intones his closing observations of the brief encounter. “Here’s that rhythm again, Here’s my shoulder-blade”. Fittingly, the title of the song was appropriated from a health and fitness magazine. It was characteristic of Byrne to colour his raciest song with something as sterile as a weight-lifting maxim.

On the oddity that is Talking Heads’ cover of ‘Take Me to the River’, Byrne is contemplating sex again. When the legendary soul-singer Al Green wrote the song he instilled the lyrics with a primitive, Southern Baptist vibe. The victim of the song is hounded by a girl who steals his money and cigarettes but won’t allow him to consummate their union. On the original, Green managed to capture the confusion of unrequited adolescent lust, which David Byrne translates into the tortured ramblings of a love-sick nerd. Eno literally takes the song to the river and throws it in at the deep end. The entire track sounds like it is immersed in fifteen feet of water, complete with sonar-like keyboard pings. Rather than increase the tempo towards the pay-off, Eno used a volume limiter to give the impression that the song was gradually getting louder. The odd song out is undoubtedly the closing track ‘The Big Country’, an acoustic affair replete with slide guitar. David Byrne takes a flight over the United States and observes them with an objective eye. One might initially be deceived that the song is a tribute to Byrne’s adopted homeland until the chorus reveals a darker purpose. “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” announces Byrne. “I wouldn’t live there, no Siree.” Byrne found a kindred spirit in the form of legendary rock critic Lester Bangs. “Finally, somebody said it: there is nothing beyond Jersey;” wrote the scribe in agreement. “Jack Kerouac made all that shit up, he was a science fiction writer.”

Although More Songs About Buildings and Food garnered the band further critical acclaim, it still didn’t push the band into the mainstream despite charting in the top thirty with the single version of ‘Take Me to the River’. It did however substantially outsell the previous record to the extent that the band would go on to make another two extraordinary albums with Brian Eno. The next record Fear of Music would push the band into an the African influenced odyssey which would culminate in the prog-funk monstrosity Remain In Light. This record would produce a single in the shape of ‘Once in a Lifetime’, which catapulted the band to stardom with the help of a video in heavy circulation on MTV. While it is true that Talking Heads certainly went on to make more commercially successful and arguably more ambitious music during the 80s, personally I consider More Songs About Buildings and Food to be the band’s crowning achievement. Simply put, there have been very few rock albums that managed to cram such unabashed innovation into two sides of vinyl and you could do a lot worse than finding out for yourself.

Tommy Dski