Music Arcades: Talking Heads: Naked

I don't know about you, but I built up massive expectations for this album, yet ended up thinking of it as an anti-climax.

It all started so promisingly. There were the reports of the band revisiting the African musical influences that made Remain in Light so exciting. The Guardian-intelligentsia end of the media were falling over themselves to talk about it. The BBC even broadcast a TV essay by Eric Griffiths about it, and I was so taken in by how important it all seemed, that I recorded that essay the old fashioned way (I had no access to a VCR), with the microphone of a tape recorder held up to my landlady's television set. I had a quick look just now to see if I could find the cassette, but no luck.

Then the first two songs are, if you'll pardon the pun, absolute blinders. Massively infectious dance numbers, with smart tales to tell. Blind sounds like it could be a Graham Greene story (I'm thinking The Quiet American) or a Touch of Evil-style film noir. Mr Jones takes the deftly postmodern step of taking the protagonist from Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man and asking, "Could he not know what is happening here, and be perfectly happy about not knowing?"

But then, as far as I'm concerned, it's all downhill from there — not enough wiggle in its stride — until the final track, Cool Water. I felt at the time that this song could have been inspired by James, who were signed to the same label, Sire, as Talking Heads were at the time.