FEATURE:
Up the Hill Backwards
Talking Heads' Remain in Light at Forty-Five
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THE fourth studio album…
IN THIS PHOTO: Talking Heads in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
from Talking Heads, Remain in Light turns forty-five on 8th October. Following the release of 1979’s Fear of Music, Talking Heads and Brian Eno (who produced the album) were keen to put to bed any notion that this was David Byrne solo album or his project. Remain in Light was a different music direction that brought in influences from Afrobeat with African polyrhythms and Funk blended with electronics. Often viewed as the best Talking Heads album, I wanted to go a little deeper with it. I will come to a couple of reviews for this album. Before that, there are some features that I think are important to source. In 2021, Classic Pop took us inside the making of Remain in Light. The recording and legacy of the album is particularly interesting:
“It was into this antagonistic atmosphere, albeit in the pleasantly sunny surrounds of Nassau’s Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, that the initial sessions for the band’s fourth album, Remain In Light, were cast.
The sonic template for what would turn out to be their most enduring masterpiece was actually laid down on the opener of their previous album, Fear Of Music’s polyrhythmic I Zimbra.
The track was a compellingly propulsive combination of Africa-influenced drum sounds melded with a funky disco bassline and Byrne chanting nonsensical Dadaist poetry over the top.
In many ways I Zimbra was an unlikely touchstone, as on the surface of things the band weren’t exactly the closest of cousins to Fela Kuti, the afrobeat pioneer, whose 1973 Afrodisiac album was a major influence on the track. But the band and producer, Eno again, were committed to exploring its possibilities into a whole album’s worth of material.
With AC/DC entrenched in Compass Point’s Studio A recording comeback album Back In Black, Talking Heads established camp in Studio B.
With no songs formally written, it was agreed that the studio be utilised as a tool for composition with the music created by the band members out of improvisation – with producer/collaborator Eno to be regarded as the group’s fifth member.
As Frantz recounts in his autobiography Remain In Love, “We were interested in creating sounds that would take us deeper and far beyond what people had come to expect from us.”
To achieve this ambition rather than start with a traditional song structure or lyric, the band would create multiple fragments of songs through improvised jam sessions.
Frantz recalls: “My personal challenge and Tina’s was to conceive and perform rhythm parts that not only grooved like crazy and propelled the song forward, but that also sounded shockingly new… Tina and I created parts that were loops performed live. Then David and Jerry [Harrison] could superimpose their parts over ours.”
Byrne explained his take on the process as best he could to the Library Of Congress in 2017: “We were listening to African pop music, like Fela Kuti and King Sunny Adé, but we didn’t set out to imitate those. We deconstructed everything and then as the music evolved, we began to realise we were in effect reinventing the wheel.
“Our process led us to something with some affinity to afro-funk, but we got there the long way round, and, of course, our version sounded slightly off. We didn’t get it quite right, but in missing, we ended up with something new.”
With the Compass Point sessions over and the basic tracks laid down, the band returned to New York for more recording in the Sigma Sound studios. It was here that simmering tensions started to boil over with Frantz and Weymouth feeling unwelcome.
This is how Frantz recalls the experience in Remain In Love: “It seemed as if [Byrne and Eno] thought of us as sidemen who were no longer useful to them. At one point Brian actually said to us in his most bothered tone of voice, ‘There are too many people in the control room.’” It was a comment that the rhythm section clearly didn’t take too kindly to.
Niceties aside, the work that Byrne, Eno and Harrison were putting in was getting results. Former King Crimson guitarist and Bowie acolyte Adrian Belew was shipped in to add wild, crazy solos to several tracks, while avant-garde trumpet player Jon Hassell contributed freaky brass. Nona Hendryx, formerly one third of girl group Labelle, was also invited to add backing vocals.
It was around this time that art school alumni Frantz and Weymouth began to work on concepts for the album cover. The couple had met at the Rhode Island School Of Design in 1973, and it was there that Frantz first formed a band, The Artistics, with fellow student David Byrne; who was often referred to back then as ‘Mad Dave’ among the drummer’s circle of friends (if ever there was a warning sign…).
Remain In Light’s artwork was created digitally, which was then a new-fangled, cutting-edge process, with the aid of the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology’s powerful mainframe computer.
Initially, the iconic photograph of the US fighter planes was planned for the front cover (Tina’s father had flown Grumman Avengers during his Navy service) with the band portraits destined for the back.
However, the roughly painted bright red masks crudely splodged over the headshots made for an impactful image and the roles were reversed.
With the album finally completed, the perennially thorny issue of songwriting splits and credits was broached. Eno had wanted the album to be called Remain In Light by Talking Heads and Brian Eno, but he was eventually talked down.
After some discussion it was agreed that writers’ credits should read ‘All Songs By David Byrne, Brian Eno, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison and Tina Weymouth.’ The names were in alphabetical order, and the final LP artwork was signed off as such.
However, when advance copies of the LP were circulated, the writing credits had been altered to ‘All Songs By David Byrne, Brian Eno, Talking Heads.’
What’s more, the lyric sheet on the inner sleeve had been changed to ‘All Songs by David Byrne and Brian Eno, except The Overload and Houses In Motion written by David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Jerry Harrison’. It was a sleight that must have felt like a huge, hurtful smack in the mouth to Frantz and Weymouth.
Nonetheless, the album was released on 8 October 1980 to widespread critical acclaim, featuring high across-the-board ratings in the music press best of year polls – coming first in both Sounds and Melody Maker, while placing sixth in NME.
While not remotely interested in touring himself, Eno believed Remain In Light to be too dense for a quartet to take on the road, and so the lineup was extended to nine members for live performances.
To beef up the band, Adrian Belew was joined by Funkadelic’s living legend Bernie Worrell, alongside bassist Busta Jones, percussionist Steven Scales and backing vocalist Dolette McDonald. The nucleus of which would remain intact for 1984’s concert film Stop Making Sense and the soundtrack album of the same name.
Following a hugely successful world tour with the big band and after releasing four albums in just as many years, Talking Heads, sensibly for all concerned, went into a three-year hiatus.
Byrne worked on a musical score for US choreographer and dancer Twyla Tharp titled The Catherine Wheel, while Harrison’s first solo outing was called The Red And The Black. Frantz and Weymouth returned to Nassau, where they now owned a property.
Venturing into the same studio where Remain In Light was initially recorded, they formed side project Tom Tom Club and scored a couple of substantial worldwide hits in Wordy Rappinghood and the much-sampled Genius Of Love.
Talking Heads continued to work together for four more studio albums, but the psychic toll in daring to reach the creative heights of Remain In Light meant the damage was beyond repair, and what was once the most searingly sharp of cutting edges was now blunted”.
The Quietus published a feature about Remain in Light for its forty-fifth anniversary in 2020. They highlight how, even though it was created at a stressful and strange time for the band and there “may still raise questions over its authorship for the band’s exceptional rhythm section”, Remain in Light has not aged and is one of the band’s very best:
“If Talking Heads have a signature song, then even more than ‘Psycho Killer’, even more than ‘Burning Down The House’, ‘Once In A Lifetime’, which opens side two, is surely the one. It’s so familiar, so beloved, so immediately and everlastingly catchy, that it’s easy to no longer notice just how weird it is. As is often the way, while seeking to do their most self-consciously experimental work, the band fashioned their finest moment of pure pop. Has any magnificent pop song been quite so eccentric; has anything quite so eccentric become so magnificent a pop song? A gorgeous liquid ripple; one of those aforementioned loops, ascending, descending, punctuated by Byrne doing the TV preacher shtick that, like all inspired ideas, seems altogether obvious once lightning has struck its originator; then the dissolve into the chorus, the currents of time running simultaneously backwards and forwards, flow and undertow, wave and wash, river and sea. It is extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily profound, more meaningful and moving than, we may guess, anybody involved, even Byrne, had any notion it would be – and it is thus an extraordinary vindication of the way he and Eno chose to work. It wasn’t fair, no. The greatest art seldom is.
That ‘Once In A Lifetime’ does not render what follows – or what precedes it – redundant is a further illustration of just what a marvellous album this is. ‘Houses In Motion’ is perhaps the strangest dreamscape on here; no sooner does the tempo slow down enough for us to get our bearings, than the landmarks themselves start dancing around us, a heavy, swaying undulation, and we’re lost again. (The longer live version on the under-regarded live double LP The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, by the dazzling nine-piece touring outfit that took Remain In Light on the road, is even more deliciously and deliriously unsettling. Every time one sees or hears live archive of the band, one sympathises more and more with Frantz’s frustration, then fury, that they never toured after 1984. It was Byrne’s prerogative, yes; but at what grievous cost to both band and public.)
‘Seen And Not Seen’, and ‘Listening Wind’, are spooky as all get-out, in very different ways. The first, setting Byrne’s deadpan spoken vocal against a gently pulsating backdrop, feels in hindsight like a near-blueprint, certainly in mood and in theme (an existential meditation on appearance and identity), for what Laurie Anderson would soon commit to record. The second features one of Byrne’s most remarkable feats of lyric writing, putting himself inside not only the mind but the soul of a terrorist/ insurgent/ partisan – choose according to your inclination – planning and executing a bomb attack on an American target in his country. The languid, eerie, pattering loveliness of the music – and Remain In Light, it should be noted, sounds amazing throughout, something for which engineer and mixer Dave Jerden, later to produce the best work of Jane’s Addiction and Alice In Chains, should take substantial credit – imparts far more tension to the story than any overtly dramatic setting could have done. A year after America’s invasion of Iraq, Byrne would ruefully acknowledge the song’s prescience: “I don’t know if I could get away with performing that live anymore.”
If anybody has ever made an album that is more complex than Remain In Light yet runs more seamlessly, or feels closer to perfection, then I cannot think who or what. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth have plenty of good reasons to resent David Byrne and Brian Eno, but it’s a shame if this record is one of them. It is Talking Heads’ primary shot at immortality, and every single person involved did exactly what they needed to do, better than any other person could conceivably have done it. In the end it is the band’s name on the cover, the band’s music in its grooves, the band who collectively – and by a necessarily convoluted route – made not only their own masterpiece, but one of the supreme masterpieces of the age, and for the ages”.
I am going to wrap up with a detailed review from Pitchfork. In 2018, they heralded an Art-Rock masterpiece that is “a thrilling synthesis of artifice and Afrobeat”. There are other features I would advise people to check out, such as this and this. It is without doubt one of the best albums of the 1980s. Even though there has been a reunion of the band, David Byrne has said a full-blown reunion of Talking Heads would be unwise. They are on better terms than they were when they broke up, though I don’t think we will see them back together recording more music:
“This mass created the impression that Talking Heads was a collective—one that might embark on a familiar song only to arrive somewhere wild and strange. “There is something essential about losing control over what you do,” Weymouth told the Canadian zine Pig Paper in 1977. This would also turn out to be a central insight, as the band increasingly coupled its conceptual experiments with rhythm arrangements designed to make its core members—and its audience—lose control.
Talking Heads’ belief that artifice could feel more real than fake sincerity paved the way for future art rock acts, but Remain in Light differs from successors like Laurie Anderson or Life Without Buildings in that you can dance to it. The rhythm arrangements on this album are irresistible. They are the visceral complement to Byrne’s conceptual lyrics about air conditioning and his face. This combination of gutsy rhythms and heady words elevates songs like “Crosseyed and Painless” from nonsense to dream logic. What begins as an idea becomes, in its fullest expression, a feeling.
Although Remain in Light has become an acknowledged classic, it retains a feeling of unfamiliarity. It is tempting to attribute this quality to Byrne’s obtuse lyrics, but the album’s instrumental arrangements also constitute a break with rock’s conventional forms. Weymouth’s bassline on “Crosseyed and Painless” crowds staccato bursts of notes into the first half of each measure, leaving the second half empty in a way that defines the percussion pattern. This technique, essential to funk, diverges from rock’s standard practice of using the bass to keep time. Perhaps the album’s greatest heresy, though, is its total absence of guitar riffs. Like Weymouth, Harrison prefers to use his instrument as a noisemaker. His howling fills on “Listening Wind” lend a foreboding, unpredictable atmosphere to lyrics that are as close as Byrne gets to conventional narrative. These tracks do not hew as strictly to Afrobeat forms as “Once in a Lifetime” or “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” but they still manage to introduce a coherent sound that is alien to mainstream rock.
Without Afrobeat, though, there is no Remain in Light. The central role of West-African polyrhythms in the album’s sound draws attention to a curious aspect of its longevity. Could a group of white musicians playing Afrobeat be taken sincerely in 2018? Virtually every genre of American music, including punk and especially rock, is taken from black forms. Afrobeat is not African-American, though; it’s straight-up African. The 21st-century sensibility finds something problematic in a band of white art-school types playing West African music. Earlier this year, the Beninese musician Angelique Kidjo released her own version of Remain in Light, which NPR described as “an authentic Afrobeat record” compared to the original. Given how closely Kidjo followed the Talking Heads’ arrangements, this description raises questions about what we mean when we say “authentic.”
The success of Remain in Light—undeniable regardless of our ideas about the degree to which artists should respect historically ethnic divisions between musical forms—forces us to reckon with the album’s contradictions. Rock is a more welcoming genre today than it was in 1980, and punk has never seemed closer to the perennial danger that it will become a parody of itself. Still, it is hard to imagine a current underground rock band like Joyce Manor taking a turn toward the music of the Nigerian Afropop star Davido without getting laughed into oblivion. The fact that Talking Heads pulled it off so spectacularly, even 38 years ago, is a tribute to their aptitude as students of music.
There is something motivational about Remain in Light, not just as dance music but as expression. On “Seen and Not Seen,” Byrne speculates that a man might change his appearance “by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in the back of his mind.” It’s an absurd commentary on the nature of vanity, but it also declares a touching faith in artistic willpower—a faith Remain in Light rewards. The album presents such a strange artistic vision, foreign to what came before but operating as though it were the culmination of a long tradition, that it seems to declare the power of weirdness itself. To be not just strange but singular, to reinvent a form in a way that you can dance to, to smuggle beer into the museum: This is the visceral thrill of art. We want to deny it on theoretical grounds, but we can’t. So we must revise our theories”.
On 8th October, the exceptional Remain in Light turns forty-five. I am sure it will get new inspection and affection closer to its anniversary. Forty-five years later and the album remains ageless and as astonishing as ever. Remain in Light is a moment in music history that…
FEW can match.