Category: Talking Heads

Videodrome :: Stop Making Sense (1984)

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Stop Making Sense is unabashedly effervescent, like a jolt of straight dopamine. For being a concert film about a famous band at the height of their success, there’s nothing about Stop Making Sense that’s trying to be cool or sexy, flashy or pedantic — it’s just trying to have a good time.

Videodrome :: True Stories (1986)

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Is True Stories a musical, a comedy, a documentary, or another Talking Heads film? In retrospect, it’s all of these things and more. True Stories is an oracular film, predicting the changing landscape of Texas while simultaneously capturing America in all its peculiarities circa the mid-eighties.

Chris Frantz :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

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With his new book Remain In Love Frantz continues his search for different approaches. It’s a look at his time in Talking Heads and his marriage and creative partnership with Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club bassist Tina Weymouth. He doesn’t entirely shy away from rock bio requirements—if you want dirt, it has enough of a dark dusting to satisfy—but it’s more a document of extraordinary shows, recordings, and the early days of punk when he, Weymouth, singer/guitarist David Byrne, and Jerry Harrison cracked open the template, building one of the most expansive discographies in all of art-rock history.

The Staple Singers: Slippery People (Soul Train, 1984)

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The “Slippery” cover, featuring David Byrne on guitar, was a minor hit for the Staples — enough so that it brought the family’s 70 year old patriarch out of retirement. Far from their first rodeo, the cover was also responsible for the Singers fifth appearance on the long-running television monolith that was Don Cornelius’ Soul Train. As covers go, this one feels like a second skin.