Stop Making Sense!!!!

By Miles Silverstein

I stole a day from my schedule and caught the 9am bus to Edinburgh for one of the last showings of the classic Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense. The 1984 Jonathan Demme movie received an A24 restoration, while the accompanying album was remastered and rereleased. Whatever your thoughts on the film are, through the music one thing is clear: Some forty years later, we still feel the same ebullience and innocuity as our parents.

The song choices on Stop Making Sense are meticulous. Recorded after Speaking in Tongues but before Little Creatures, the record picks highlights from their first five releases. And that’s exactly what they are–highlights. The early work of the Talking Heads is considered to be misanthropic. Their back catalogue is filled with songs like ‘The Big Country’, a satire on city slickers too concerned with their jobs and everyday lives to appreciate the world around them, or ‘Listening Wind’, a haunting Afrobeat tour-de-force about an anti-colonialist terrorist that David Byrne wrote amid the Iranian hostage crisis. Stop Making Sense eschews these more esoteric cuts and instead opts for the more human side of their discography: the singles, the dance romps, the emotive ballads. Fresh arrangements and live-band orientations breathe new life upon the form and texture of the more lighthearted side of the group’s catalogue. The live show makes use of this practice most prominently in the first five songs: each successive song introduces another facet of the live orchestration until the sound is fully fleshed out. After Byrne’s solo performance of ‘Psycho Killer’, he is joined by bassist Tina Weymouth for a loving, drumless duet of Fear of Music’s ‘Heaven’. During the final chorus, a crew of stagehands wheel Chris Frantz’s drum kit onstage to join the duo for the third song, the country-inspired More Songs About Buildings and Food opener, ‘Thank You for Sending Me an Angel’. Immediately after the indulgent ending, Byrne ditches the acoustic guitar, and brings on legendary guitarist Jerry Harrison for the innocuously weird ‘Found a Job’, and the iconic quartet is all onstage for the first time. Throughout the song, though, there are synthesisers and auxiliary percussion onstage yet unplayed, hinting at the final additions to the band that all run onstage for ‘Slippery People’. Finally, the sound is finished and full. Three or four synths, two backing vocalists, another rhythm guitarist, even a full auxiliary percussion cage adorn the stage, decorating and enhancing the iconic DIY inclination that defined the band’s earlier work. This is the vision for the latter half of Talking Heads’s career. A fully instrumented, large band capable of paying mind to the afrobeat, punk, and country groups that inspired the band’s early days, while also serving as a larger canvas for the inexorably bigger arrangements that would go on to inhabit their later work.

This massive live orchestration stays on for the rest of the performance; the only exception is for one song towards the end of the show where Byrne steps offstage for a moment to let Weymouth and Frantz use the full band for their spin-off group the Tom Tom Club and their smash hit ‘Genius of Love’ (Note: What a weird phenomenon that song was, the guy from King Crimson coming onboard to make a song with most of the Talking Heads that went no. 1 on the Billboard disco charts, and then got sampled everywhere in the 90s and 00s, most notably a Mariah Carey song that stayed in the top spot of the Billboard top 100 for EIGHT weeks?!?! I digress). The impetus for this momentary hiatus from Talking Heads songs is for Byrne to go offstage and change into, yes indeed, The Big Suit.

The shadow of Byrne in The Big Suit is thrown up on the backdrop. His absurd, unmoving silhouette looms large, making everything else feel small. Chris Frantz dives into the moving drumbeat of ‘Girlfriend is Better’, and evoking some Platonic imagery, David Byrne’s larger-than-life shadow begins to dance on the wall. His shoulders seesaw up and down. When the camera pans back down to him himself, he is moving his head in that same pigeonish way as the avian first moments of the concert, but this time in attire designed to invoke the uncanny valley. Is his body too big or is his head too small? Either way, he stands here as a cornerstone of late 20th-century performance art. For the next five minutes, David Byrne undulates in his Big Suit, dancing playfully, metaphorically, creatively, all the while ululating over the Speaking in Tongues single. It is the quintessential moment of the concert. The Big Suit lives comfortably in the annals of music history as something that generates powerful imagery through simple fun.

So here we are. It is 2023, and Stop Making Sense is still winning over audiences. It’s still connecting with me. The band’s been broken up for three decades, so crystal-clear documentation of the group’s heyday gets rarer by the year. Stop Making Sense stands alone as the apotheosis of recorded Talking Heads performance. It is immersive and real–you are at this concert, looking at Byrne as if he was right there in front of you, Big Suit and all. His messages of love, connectivity, strength, and confidence are just as relevant today as they were on opening day in 1984. The world is doubtless a different place, but the Talking Heads persist – there is something to be said for the innocuous joy brought out by well-mannered music that’s just a little weird. Maybe we’re not so different from our parents… just trying to get by, and maybe have a few laughs and dance along the way. The most important performances are those that are able to tap into that innate human desire to find bliss. It’s universal. It’s perennial. And above all else, it’s the same as it ever was.