Talking Heads

Talking Heads are the best band that ever fucking lived and This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) is the best song that was ever written. Both of those things are true. Neither is up for debate. If you disagree, we can sit politely in the same room, but we can't, under any circumstances, be close.

I am not going to be reasonable about this. Wanted to flag that up front. You can feel free to offer me others, and god knows my ears get spun daily - but I always come back to this.

I always come back to face a view.

This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) is the best song ever written, Talking Heads are the best band that ever fucking existed, and if you disagree with either of those statements we can sit politely in the same room but we cannot, under any circumstances, be close.

I am not going to be reasonable about this. I want to make that clear up top.

Speaking in Tongues, 1983. David Byrne, possibly the most uncomfortable man ever put behind a microphone, had been getting shit for years from interviewers and label suits about how he never wrote love songs. He wrote songs about buildings, about cities on fire, about the dread of suburbia and the terror of standing still in a small room. He wrote Psycho Killer. He did not write I love you and you love me. So at some point he decided fine, alright, here's one. Here's a fucking love song. Are you happy now.

Yes, I am thank you David.

But because he's David Byrne, he couldn't just sit down and write a normal one. So the band did this instead: they swapped instruments. Tina Weymouth, who plays bass for a living, picked up the guitar. Jerry Harrison, who plays guitar and keys, sat down at a Prophet-5 synth and played the bassline on a keyboard. Byrne took another synth and picked out the simple little lead melody, the "naive" one the whole thing is named after, the kind of line a trained musician would be almost embarrassed to play straight. Chris Frantz stayed on drums because someone had to be the adult.

That is the song. That is the thing you are hearing. The riff that loops underneath the entire track, the one that goes round and round and round and never gets boring, is a guitarist playing bass on a keyboard. The actual bass player is up top, playing guitar. Everyone is a step out of position, slightly out of their depth, and the whole fucking thing locks together like it was assembled by a machine.

And then Byrne sings: Home, is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there. And then: I'm just an animal looking for a home, share the same space for a minute or two.

Which is a love song. It is technically a love song. But it's a love song written by a man who genuinely seems to find the concept of "home" and "another person" baffling and a bit dangerous and worth poking at carefully with a stick. Love me till my heart stops, love me till I'm dead. That is what you write when you're not sure how this works but you fucking mean it anyway.

The studio version is on Speaking in Tongues. The live version, where Byrne dances with a floor lamp like it's a person, is on Stop Making Sense and is one of the most emotionally exposed performances ever filmed. He's awkward, he's tender, he's slow-dancing with a lampshade because he doesn't know what else to do with all of it. Enough to peel my wig back.

The song has been licensed to everything. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Lars and the Real Girl. The Paolo Sorrentino film literally named after it, where Sean Penn plays a retired goth rock star wandering around Europe in eyeliner. Every emotional-but-not-corny scene in a film made after 1983 either uses this song or wishes it could afford to.

That is the song. That is the best song. I will entertain disagreement but I will not respect it. I barely respect myself, so you have no hope.

Burning Down the House was their only US Top 10 hit. ONE. The single hit they ever had in the States, in their entire career, is from the same album as This Must Be the Place and Slippery People and Girlfriend is Better. Speaking in Tongues is a goddamn anthology that the band just happened to record in one go. It started with Chris Frantz, who'd been to see Parliament-Funkadelic in full glory at Madison Square Garden and came back hyped to hell. During a jam he kept yelling burn down the house, which was a P-Funk crowd chant, and Byrne grabbed the line before he had the faintest idea what it meant and built a song around the feeling of it. Which: of course he did. That's the whole Byrne move. He hears something, doesn't understand it, builds a song shaped like the not-understanding.

Slippery People. Funk-gospel. The Staples Singers later covered it and Mavis Staples sounded like she'd been waiting her whole life for someone to write that song so she could sing it. The Stop Making Sense version, where Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt come in on backing vocals and the whole band kicks into a different register, is the moment the concert film stops being a rock show and becomes a fucking church service. Take a fat gummie. Wait the allocated 30-45 minutes, panic because it hasn’t worked, take another and realise the first one is now working (a very important step). Listen to it once. Then listen to it on headphones. Then sit very still.

Cause he’s alright, alright is going to force you to ask am I? And also what is a slippery people. Am i a slippery people. And from there you will be very concerned, and then… I Get Wild won’t help, Swamp won’t help… you’re just Speaking In Tongues now. Manual breathing, and maybe even seeing into the 5th dimension if you’ve got the good stuff.

Once in a Lifetime. Remain in Light, 1980. Produced by Brian Eno when Eno still gave a shit about being in a room with other humans. He has a point, though.

This is the song where Byrne dressed up like a malfunctioning televangelist in the video, jerked his arms around like he'd been shocked by an electrical fence, and asked the entire audience: And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. And you may find yourself in another part of the world. And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

That question is the entire fuuuuuucking song.

And here's the thing about it: there's no answer, Byrne knows there's no answer, and that is exactly why it's still standing forty-five years later. You can be in your own kitchen holding a coffee you don't remember making and the song is already there, waiting, going well? how did you? how did you end up here there? I’ll be fucked if I know.

That's the whole band, start to finish. They take the stuff that's too big or too strange or too <whatever> to say out loud (how did I get here, what is home, do I have the first idea how to love another person) and they build something you can dance to out of the not-knowing. Byrne never solves any of it. He just slow-dances with the lamp. So like, we might as well all love a lamp or something…

Which is why I always come back. Not because Talking Heads have the answers. Because something about them saying same as it ever was, or how did I get here, or whatever else it is, just make sense in life.

This Must Be the Place is the best song ever written. Talking Heads are the best band that ever fucking existed. And if you disagree with either of those, we can sit politely in the same room. We just can't be close.

Until next week, when it is a different band…
Zara

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