Talking Heads – Talking Heads: 77 (Super Deluxe Edition)

“The popular song is a very efficient and effective means of getting across ideas,” declares Talking Heads’ original typewritten ‘Statement Of Intent’, reproduced as part of this reissue package. “Without seeming pretentious, the band would like to think that music and the popular song (as a specific case) has the potential to inspire constructive feelings in the listener. The band hopes that their songs and presentation will inspire confidence in the audience. Words the band would hope can be associated with their ‘image’ are: sincerity, honesty, intensity, substance, integrity and fun.”

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These don’t sound like the ideals of a blank generation. Even amongst the supposedly iconoclastic denizens of CBGB, there was a widespread fixation with a well-established Stones/Stooges MO of leering, leather-clad hedonism and/or messianic self-destruction (which, as Tina Weymouth noted wearily, tended to come with a side-order of decidedly old-fashioned sexism). Fresh from the progressive Rhode Island School Of Design, Talking Heads surveyed this not-so-radical scene and quickly deduced that if punk really was going to provide some kind of new feeling, all those “traditional rock’n’roll stances” would have to go.

Taking their cue from Jonathan Richman (whose ex-bandmate Jerry Harrison had recently joined the band), Talking Heads’ debut rejected grandiose ideas of redemption or revolution and sought to find meaning in the everyday. Its celebration of small joys even included a shout-out to those undersung enablers of a healthy society, the “civil servants” who “work so hard and try to be strong”. Instead of leather jackets, Talking Heads wore polo shirts (provided, sweetly, by Chris Frantz’s mother). Instead of advertising their sexual deviancy, Frantz and Weymouth got married.

Except, of course, this clean-cut image – combined with David Byrne’s repertoire of tics and yelps and sudden bursts of crooning sincerity – often came across as intriguingly sinister. “Psycho Killer” was a song satirising America’s prurient interest in homicidal maniacs, or perhaps just a bit of schlock-rock fun. But most listeners were willing to believe that Byrne himself was the psychopath, an assumption not exactly contradicted by the chilling coldness of “No Compassion” (“So many people have their problems/I’m not interested in their problems”) or the way he seemed permanently bamboozled by the highly illogical workings of human relationships. By setting out to be as normal as possible, Talking Heads out-weirded the weirdos.

This new pin-sharp remaster of Talking Heads: 77 emphasises the freshness of the whole endeavour. The guitars are trebly and crisp, the rhythms brisk and utilitarian, perfectly designed to induce dancing in people who don’t usually dance. Byrne plays his role perfectly as the wide-eyed alien fascinated by daily life on earth: disconcertingly earnest, often agitated but never cynical.

Almost half a century on, it feels rather more like the start of something new than those other big New York punk touchstones of 1977: say, Rocket To Russia, Blank Generation or even Marquee Moon. Sure, the cod-calypso flourishes of “Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town” still sound a little gauche, but it’s precisely these gleeful anti-rock touches that set this album apart, prising open new horizons and laying the groundwork for more convincing fusions to come.

Disc Two rounds up all of the B-sides and outtakes of the era, including brassy ‘Pop’ versions of “New Feeling” and “Pulled Up”, plus bouncy earworm “Sugar On My Tongue”, strangely overlooked for the original album. Most significantly, there are two alternative versions of “Psycho Killer”: a harder-rocking take that plays up Byrne’s original intentions to write a song in the style of Alice Cooper; and an acoustic version, first heard as the B-side to the 1977 single release, which features Arthur Russell on cello. It’s an intriguing meeting of downtown New York minds, even if Russell’s ominous scrapes and swoops are a slightly-too-obvious nod to Bernard Herrmann.

But the real find of this Super Deluxe Edition, and the main justification for its existence, is a previously unreleased live set, forged in the white heat of CBGB on October 10, 1977. Taped a month or so before the performance featured on Side One of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, it underlines what an incredible live band Talking Heads were from the get-go. Every song is ridiculously tight and punchy, driven by Chris Frantz’s metronomic yet inventive drumbeats, while Byrne’s vocal performance is pure controlled mania, retaining the essential soulfulness of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River” while adding a whole new level of crazed intensity.

“Thank You For Sending Me An Angel”, soon destined to become the opening song of the second album, is a two-minute frenzy of roiling excitement. Without pausing for breath, the band drop straight into the taut, stop-start funk of “Who Is It?”, Byrne scatting like a madman. The tension between these often fun, danceable songs and Byrne’s high-pitched, hair-trigger delivery is as riveting as any psycho thriller. Finally, it’s a chance to hear the band as Lenny Kaye and other CBGB scenesters first saw them: “a blaze soon to engulf the world.”

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