Talking Heads: Remain in Light

Between 1985 and 2000, if you'd asked me to name my favourite album of all time, I'd have said Remain in Light. I hardly ever played it — and I'm staggered, now, to find that I never picked up a CD copy from Fopp and still only have this, my second vinyl copy — but nevertheless I think I was right.

Why did it take me until 1985 to realise how great this album is? I was young, and it's an acquired taste; or it was then when, unless you'd spent the seventies listening to Fela Kuti, you wouldn't have been used to this approach to songform. Still, I read the reviews in Sounds or NME and they said this was the most innovative sound around, the sound that all the other bands were going to have to struggle to match in the eighties. So sometime in '81 I bought my first copy in one of those basements under a hi-fi shop in Tottenham Court Road. I didn't like it at all. After a few weeks, I took it back — to WH Smiths in Woking, with some cock and bull story about it having been an unwanted gift, so could I swap it for another album, please? But I kept the lyric sheet, which I have to this day, having re-inserted it in my second copy. When did I get the second copy? 1984, I guess, around the time we semi-formally anointed Talking Heads the Band that Mattered Most, or something. (Because they had fewer obvious jokes than The Smiths, or what?)

Anyway, the other bands never did match Remain in Light. Maybe 23 Skidoo had a good shot at it, but I don't know their stuff as well as I probably ought (I'm undergoing a crash course in Seven Songs as I type). I'd argue that King Crimson came close with tracks like Thela Hun Ginjeet and The Sheltering Sky from Discipline. In a way they cheated by building the new incarnation of their band round Adrian Belew, whose DNA is embedded in Remain in Light through his guest contributions — but then Talking Heads had already borrowed Fripp's DNA for Fear of Music's I Zimbra, so it goes both ways. We know that both bands had African Rhythm and African Sensibility on their reading lists.

It turned out not even Talking Heads could match Remain in Light. Listening to it thirty years on, it's obvious that this is a band who've struck some cosmic motherlode of musical energy. They've fastened their seat belts and they're channelling something bigger than themselves for as long as they can hold on. Talking Heads 1977-80 is like Dylan 1962-65, watching something emerge out of a situated context and then reach that explosive concentration where it can't help but blow up — and take its context with it in the conflagration.

There's still something utterly Other about Remain in Light, especially the first side where the African-inspired rhythms are layered under slowly shifting textures. And then there are the words that run like a stream of the most inspired non-sense with beautiful polished fragments dropped in — like the fact-rap ("facts don't do what I want them to") and the "world moves on a woman's hips" verse.

I checked out the extra tracks included in the re-issue. Even the out-takes, while clearly unfinished, are breathtakingly original. Lucy loves the record, too, and the Boy dances to it. It's a hit in this house.

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