![]() Yet even with his unconventional approach, he achieves what many rock bands strive for anyway rock ‘n’ roll performance as pure spectacle with his own trademark stamped on it. And it certainly works, given that this performance, and this film, represents a high artistic watermark in rock filmmaking. Since the act of making music is a physical act, Byrne wanted to boost the appearance of the body, and minimize the appearance of the head, the latter of which represents the mind and rational thought. It would be in this movie that Byrne would appear in his over-sized suit, a parody of large scale rock pomp, parodied in turn on Saturday Night Live by Joe Piscopo (“You may ask yourself, why such a big suit? You may ask yourself, can the suit be taken in a little? …). Yet, Byrne’s suit, and his idiosyncratic movement on stage on this song, and on others during this series of shows that culminated in Demme’s film, was about trying to externalize what being in a band actually feels like while on stage. His onstage persona is about frenetic movement, with an exaggerated parody of traditional showmanship while on stage, rather than showmanship based on expected tight-jeaned-big-haired rock ‘n’ roll preening. Where rock band presentation of the ’70s was about unabashed sexuality, androgyny, and with a vague hint of violence, here Byrne strips it down for the ’80s. As such, with this tune you get all kinds of musical outcroppings of this artistic trajectory, my favourite being bassist Tina Weymouth’s percussive, propulsive, and tenacious bassline so tenacious that it soldiers on through out the song, even against the grain of the chords, and the verse-chorus-verse structure.Īmong the many innovations that Talking Heads employed as framed perfectly in this movie was David Byrne’s approach to the business of what it means to be a showman. If punk rock was about bringing it all back home, then post-punk was about doing the same while also undercutting audience expectations, including skipping the blues, and going even further back to Africa. Several side musicians from the funk world (members of Parliament Funkadelic and The Brothers Johnson are represented) were installed on these dates to fill out their sound, and effectively reposition their material into a more dance-oriented style, while losing nothing of its spiky, psychologically angular rock impact. It captures the band during a point in their history when they’d expanded their live sound from being a tightly-wound and appropriately claustrophobic post-punk four-piece into something of an Africanized pop-funk collective. The film was shot in at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles, December 1983. ![]() It’s their 1980 track “Once In A Lifetime”, a key element to the high-pinnacle album Remain in Light, and also a bright point in the excellent landmark 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, directed by Jonathan Demme. Here’s a clip of art-rock foursome, and post-punk pop innovators Talking Heads. ![]()
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