Saturday, October 06, 2007

Two albums by Talking Heads

Two cheap ass Talking Heads purchases bring me ever closer to completion – or at least, completion of their good stuff. 77 is the debut, have not fully got to grips with it yet, but I do like the way some of the songs prefigure the African interest of peak era Talking Heads. 'Psycho Killer' is also excellent, one of the few Talking Heads songs that is not better on its Stop Making Sense. version. And as a civil servant, I appreciated the sentiments in 'Don't worry about the government'.

Fear of Music is a somewhat redundant purpose, but I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to this on my iPod. This is the second of the band's three albums with Brian Eno, and one I think that maybe gets overlooked in comparison to Remain In Light. It is a most enjoyable record, if a rather sparse one. Last time I bought it (on vinyl), one of my then flatmates begged me to never play it when he was in the house. I still find this attitude strange – while I can imagine people not liking Fear of Music, I find it hard to comprehend that kind of visceral loathing. Such was life.

4 comments:

Kealo said...

Have you got More Songs About Buildings and Food? It's on constant rotation on my MP3 player (I'm not cool enough to own an iPod). It's one of the best albums I've ever heard.

ian said...

pretend that question mark is not there.

Kealo said...

It's arguably their best. I'll burn you a copy and give it to you the next time we meet.

I have one of their later albums, it has some good songs, but it isn't a patch on their earlier stuff. Is it just me, or do you remember them as merely a quirky pop group back in the 80s?

ian said...

Interestingly, you're not the first person to say to me recently that it's their best.

On the later records, my feeling is that they went off the boil when they stopped working with Brian Eno, though "Speaking in Tongues" has its moments. I have a tape copy of "Little Creatures", and while I loved it back then I don't think I could bear to go near it now.

On the more general thing about their being a quirky pop group... from the word go I thought of them as an Important Band, with David Byrne being the kind of guy who had deep wisdom about the world to communicate.