Fear in Music had seen Talking Heads successfully expand their musical repertoire, utilising disco rhythms that edged them towards the dancefloor while maintaining the tension that made their music unique. David Bryne provided his most accomplished lyrical performance, revelling in anxiety and dancing in dystopia, all wrapped up by his wry sense of humour. Fear in Music would have been a career-defining magnum opus for most bands, a peak that couldn’t be surmounted. But Talking Heads’ creative well ran deeper than most, and alongside Brian Eno, they released a record that surpassed their own Everest. Bryne’s big suit era had arrived in the form of ‘Once in a Lifetime’, while the band ascended to their status of musical gods with Remain in Light.
Following the release of Fear in Music in August ’79, the band took time out to pursue solo interests. Bryne worked with Eno on his sample-heavy experimental album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Jerry Harrison produced soul singer Nona Hendryx’s single ‘Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart’. Despite the band’s critical success, things weren’t all rosy, and Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth briefly contemplated leaving the group. Weymouth felt Bryne was too controlling, while Frantz favoured staying. The couple spent a couple of months holidaying in Barbados, contemplating their musical future as they socialised with the rhythm section of Sly and Robbie and practised with native percussion instruments.
While in Barbados, Frantz and Weymouth purchased an apartment above Compass Point Studios- where Remain in Light was partially recorded. Keen to move away from the notion of being Bryne’s backing band, the album was a more collaborative process rather than just writing music to Bryne’s lyrics. African music had long been a growing interest of the band ever since Brian Eno exposed them to the work of Fela Kuti, and the communal spirit of African music inspired sessions for the album. Tracks started as loose instrumental jams, with individual parts meshing together to create intricate polyrhythms.
Despite broadening the band’s musical horizon, Eno was initially reluctant to work again with the band but was swayed after hearing the record’s instrumental demo tapes. Eno’s electronic inputs would be crucial to the record’s sound. Remain in Light‘s stumbling block proved to be Bryne, who was experiencing writer’s block. Initially liberated by escaping the paranoia he was beginning to feel in New York, Bryne hadn’t written little while the band were in Barbados. Bryne eventually adopted a stream-of-consciousness style, abandoning conventional lyricism, partly inspired by early rapping and academic literature in Africa, especially John Miller Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensitivity.
The collaborative spirit was further enhanced by the inclusion of additional musicians, including Nona Hendryx, Robert Palmer, and experimental guitarist Adrian Belew. Jerry Harrison took on a more active role, assisting Eno in polishing the record as the band aimed for something instinctive and spontaneous, combining western rock influences with African rhythms. Remain in Light has often been cited as an early example of looping, but the record’s repetitive grooves were created by endless replaying parts after Eno had identified worthy material from their creative jams. Notably, the album features no chord changes, using polyrhythms to create ecstatic textures.
Idiosyncratic rhythm had become the band’s speciality, and Remain in Light was no different, but the multiple layers elevated it above Fear in Music. Moving from the fringes of the dancefloor to right beneath the disco ball, the band created tense, unyielding grooves, jittery and brilliantly unconventional but eminently danceable. Fear in Music’s ‘I Zimbra’ had provided a teaser of what the band could accomplish when exploring African music, but Remain in Light saw them cave fully to their influences. Combining Afrobeat, rock music, and their New Wave pop sensibilities, the band created masterful musical mayhem, a form of cohesive chaos aided by Bryne’s beguiling lyrics.
The opening gambit, ‘Born Under Punches’, perfectly encapsulates what makes Remain in Light so special. Harrison and Bryne’s jittery guitars combine with Weymouth’s popping bassline to create a repetitive groove, with everything driven by the wonderful polyrhythmic percussion. It’s menacing and unstable, with weird electronic beeps and flashes, but Eno blends its myriad textures seamlessly. Partly inspired by the Watergate scandal, Bryne reconnects with the paranoia of Fear in Music, his phrasing a form of anxious diarrhoea (“Take a look at these hands”). The track ends with a catchy tribal outro, as Bryne half preaches and raves: “And the heat goes on, and the heat goes on”.
Bryne’s paranoid state is further evident in ‘Crosseyed and Painless’, where he grapples with identity loss (“Lost my shape trying to act casual) and the notion of objectivity. The latter is done through a memorable semi-rap: “Facts are simple, and facts are straight/Facts are lazy, and facts are late”. The cowbell and conga rhythms musically propel Bryne’s nervousness, perfectly synchronising with his state of mind. ‘The Great Curve’ is more cryptic, beginning with a classic paradoxical Bryne opening statement: “Sometimes the world has a load of questions/Seems like the world knows nothing at all”. It’s noisy and hypnotic, driven by fast-paced Afrobeat percussion and its sliding guitar riffs, while multiple voices pile on top of each other at the chorus.
‘Houses in Motion’ continues Bryne’s obsession with buildings and revolves around someone endlessly digging, seemingly a metaphor for the inescapability of capitalism. Drifting into disco territory with its funky bass and sharp electric guitar riffs during the chorus, its African flavour comes from Jon Hassell’s brass work. On ‘Seen and Not Seen’, Bryne delivers a perplexing spoken word style poem about a man seeking to change his appearance, influenced by popular culture. Musically it’s a standout, with a stonking rhythm courtesy of Frantz’s drumming, the handclaps, and Wemouth’s well-judged bassline, while some warm synth lines float across the top. ‘Seen and Not Seen’ is a prime example of the album’s percussive layers creating wonderful polyrhythms that bamboozle the brain but bewitch the feet.
Remain in Light is ultimately joyous, unashamedly ecstatic in its rhythms, but typically the band still dip into eerie waters. In the Arabic-tinged ‘Listening Wind’, Bryne tells the haunting story of a foreign terrorist, Mojique, who carries out a bombing of American colonialists. The chorus is unsettling and catchy in equal measure: “The wind in my heart, the wind in my heart/The dust in my head, the dust in my head”. Bryne’s storytelling is backed by the album’s creepy electronics and ominous, insistent percussion. ‘The Overload’ is an outlier, an admittedly excellent homage to Joy Division, Frantz’s drumming performance a masterclass in post-punk aesthetics. Bryne’s voice is cavernous, emerging through a thick wall of reverb as the band sound like prophets of doom. Talking Heads may be rooted in New York, but they showed if you dropped them in Manchester, they could slot right in.
What can you say about ‘Once in a Lifetime’? It’s utterly iconic, with a video perfectly designed to usher in the MTV era. Weymouth provides a fantastic, dubby bassline which synchronises with the wordless backing vocals, an idea conceived in a jam session where Weymouth mimicked Frantz’s incoherent telling. The propelling rhythm leads into a wonderful, congregational call-and-response style chorus. It’s ridiculous and brilliantly bizarre as Bryne humorously half-speaks and half-sings about unconsciously slipping through life, all tied together by the question, “How did we get here?”. Despite being the quintessential quirky rock band, ‘Once in a Lifetime’ showed they could craft an enduring pop anthem.
Remain in Light has transcended time, each listen revealing a new layer of rhythm previously tucked away. No band are better than Talking Heads at turning the unconventional into the hypnotic, harnessing rhythms in a beguiling manner designed to make you surrender to the desires of your body, music to move your body and fox your brain. As music moved into a period of sustained creativity in the eighties, Talking Heads will always hold a unique place in history as experimental trailblazers who unintentionally created an insatiable piece of pop music.