I pride myself on being a connoisseur of classic 80s indie. From Joy Division’s Closer in 1980 to Disintegration by The Cure in 1989, and all of New Order, Jesus and Mary Chain, Blue Nile, The Smiths, and Echo and the Bunnymen in between. Despite this New York’s Talking Heads could never escape my blindspot. Sure, the better half of their career took place in the late 70s, which only means they downgraded from classic to merely magnificent. They even had noughties rip off bands that I listened too, mainly Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s, excellent debut, but just as hear Interpol’s Turn On the Bright Lights carried me bodily towards Joy Division, and Hot Fuss took me to The Cure and The Smiths, Talking Heads kept getting left out.
That is until David Byrne collaborated with St Vincent on the brass funk album Love this Giant. Now it usually takes me a while to get into St Vincent so Love this Giant really came into rotation in 2016, bring this majesty of David Byrne’s singular personality, and performance style with it. Suddenly the door was unlocked and Talking Heads were everywhere: my girlfriend of three years, who I was sure I knew all of her musical leanings randomly put on the bands Stop Making Sense performance of Life in Wartime, a song that takes on a whole new power when performed live. I finally came across Burning Down the House and Once in a Lifetime and realised “wait, that’s Talking Heads? I’ve heard those songs a million times and I didn’t know that was Talking Heads!”
Thus an obsession was born, with each album becoming an instant classic in my head: the art rock of Talking Heads 77, the assurance of their superior follow-up More Songs About Food and Buildings, Fear of Music and Remain in the Light felt like the first time I heard Kid A and Amnesiac: the sound of a band ripping up their own rule book, seeing what other sounds could be pursued and manipulated, and exceling at everything they tried. The most exciting thing is that I haven’t even scratched the surface of David Byrne’s albums with Brian Eno, or the bizarre delight of The Tom Tom Club.
So what band or artist did you finally discover in 2016? I’ll bet good money that for a lot of you it was Bowie.
