My first encounter with the music of Talking Heads was the single 'Once in a Lifetime' which I liked but not enough to go out and buy any of their albums. That all changed with the release of their concert movie Stop Making Sense. A friend gave me copies of that album and the band's most recent studio release, Speaking in Tongues. It's fair to say that in the early to mid-1980s I was listening to a lot of hard rock and heavy metal and my friend was keen for me to widen my tastes and listen to something less ear-damaging.
Stop Making Sense was on at the Filmhouse, the main independent cinema in Edinburgh, and they had a late showing one night which I was persuaded to go and see. We'd had a few beers before arriving at the cinema and as it turned out, seeing that film was as close as I would get to seeing Talking Heads in concert. It certainly was not your usual cinema experience as the audience was applauding at the end of each song and some people were getting out of their seats and dancing to the music. Fortunately, the staff at the Filmhouse were sufficiently relaxed to let us enjoy the film as if we were an extension of the audience who had actually been there enjoying the performance live. Lucky them. Sadly, after that tour David Byrne decided he had had enough of touring and Talking Heads would continue only as a studio band.
This was one of a number of decisions that David Byrne took on his own or with Brian Eno, who the band brought in as producer, which clearly irritated Chris Frantz and no doubt the other two members of the band - his wife and bass player Tina Weymouth and guitarist\keyboard player Jerry Harrison. Another example being how Byrne took credit for writing most of the songs whereas according to Frantz, while Byrne wrote most of the lyrics, the music was very much a result of the four of them working together.
But fortunately these negative aspects only make up a small part of Chris' story of his life before, during and after Talking Heads. One thing I learned from reading this book was the amount of success he and Tina had with their other band, Tom Tom Club. I remember being aware of a couple of their early singles but didn't know that the Club, along with production work, has kept the two of them busy since Byrne walked out of Talking Heads back in 1991.
Going back to the mid-1970s, this book paints a fine picture of the New York music scene which was centred round the venue CBGB with other bands like Ramones, Television and Blondie all building up a fan base and looking for that first record deal. Talking Heads were invited to tour Europe and the UK with Ramones in '77. Looking back it may have seemed like a slightly odd combination, but it certainly worked at the time. They were quite different characters in each band with Ramones sticking with American beer and being overjoyed to find a McDonald's in Paris whereas Talking Heads, being former art school students, were much more into visiting galleries and checking out the local cuisine.
For their second album the band headed to the Bahamas and the legendary Compass Point recording studio which was very much in its infancy. In fact Talking Heads was the first band to record there. It certainly sounds like an idyllic place to make music though in later years it wasn't all fun and games when it came to the violent behaviour of John Martyn and the drug-fuelled exploits of Happy Mondays whose album Chris and Tina were supposed to be producing.
Reading this autobiography it is easy to get sucked into the idea that Chris and Tina were living this perfect life but Chris was no stranger to the rock 'n' roll excesses. One evening before going on stage he had a near-disaster when he snorted what he thought was cocaine but it turned out to be heroin. He comes clean near the end of the book relating how his cocaine use got out of control with Tina giving him an ultimatum - sort yourself out or their marriage would be over.
That aside, most of us can only dream of the sort of life Chris Frantz has led but this book gives us a window into that world where you can have lunch with Andy Warhol at the Factory in New York or bump into James Brown outside a recording studio in the Bahamas. Reading Remain in Love has made me want to not only revisit my Talking Heads albums with fresh ears but to also check out Tom Tom Club's back catalogue.
To paraphrase AC/DC, who the Heads met at Compass Point in 1980, for those about to rock, funk and dance, we salute you!
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