Music Arcades: Talking Heads: Fear of Music

When I first borrowed someone's cassette copy of this album, at school in about 1981, I was still in the middle of my prog… what's the suitable noun here? it has to be 'odyssey' doesn't it? So I was in the middle of my prog odyssey — yep, in 1981 — and Fear of Music played a part in leading me out of the woods and into the light. This and Japan's Tin Drum.

Neither album is a million miles from prog. Think of the wonderful Discipline by King Crimson as another 'boundary object' that marks the transition away from pompous delusions of grandeur towards a reclamation of experimentation and innovation within songs.

Talking Heads showed me that you could be profound without singing about the cosmos and the nature of existence. That writing ideas might be more exciting than writing about ideas. And that it could be OK to wiggle your hips a bit, after all. But a very cerebral wiggle, as you can tell.

And Fear of Music has never gone bad ever since. I can't remember exactly when I bought the record; sometime in the early '80s. But, as with Rust Never Sleeps and a few others, there's never been a time when I didn't really like this album.