Talking Heads / More Songs About Buildings and Food – deluxe edition reviewed

It’s 10 October 1978 and Talking Heads are a long way from CBGB. The Entermedia Theater is only a brisk 10-minute walk from the scuzzy, graffiti-strewn venue where they cut their teeth but, backstage, it looks more like an art opening than a punk show. Bright young things schmooze, waitresses balance fruit platters, Andy Warhol lurks; leather biker jackets are notable by their absence. The band members line the walls, looking bemused (David Byrne) and delighted (the rest of them). 

The scene, which introduces 25 minutes of footage filmed at the show, offers a fascinating snapshot of late 70s New York City. It’s also one of the countless times this new edition of Talking Heads’ second album, More Songs About Buildings And Food, captures what an exciting and transformative period it was for the band.

Keeping to the template established by last year’s super deluxe of debut album 77, the set includes the remastered original album; a disc of rarities, four of which are previously unreleased; a contemporary live set (the complete Entermedia Theatre show); and a Blu-ray featuring the original album in hi-res stereo, the 5.1 mix from the 2006 CD+DVD reissue and a previously streaming-only Dolby Atmos mix. This time around, though, the Blu-ray also includes video – that surviving footage of the Entermedia show and a 47-minute film of the band live at Sproul Plaza, Berkeley on 18 September 1978 – a fan-pleasing move which bodes well for future reissues in the series.

According to bassist Tina Weymouth, the title of More Songs About Buildings And Food started as a throwaway quip. “I took a chance and said, ‘What are we gonna call an album that’s just about buildings and food?’,” Weymouth told Creem’s Barbara Charone in 1978. “And Chris [Frantz, drummer] said, ‘You call it more songs about buildings and food.’” Talking Heads were not the first, nor the last, band to name an album after an in-joke, but the title’s absurdity, playfulness and sense of daring permeates the album.

In producer Brian Eno, the band found a willing accomplice. The two parties had met back in May 1977 when Talking Heads broke away from a Ramones support tour to play the Rock Garden, Covent Garden. Eno was there with John Cale, presumably on some kind of geniuses’ night out, and was so taken with Talking Heads that he invited them to lunch the next day, which feels very Brian Eno. Once they’d cleared their plates, they all went back to Eno’s, where he introduced them to Fela Kuti’s Afrodisiac, kickstarting the band’s Afrobeat obsession. The band were huge fans of Eno’s work on Bowie’s Low, along with his solo LPs, and insisted he produce their next album. Label bods at Sire and Warner Bros meanwhile, were huge fans of marketable radio fodder, rather than brilliant art-rock, and were less enthusiastic. Ever the charmer, Eno wooed the band from across the Atlantic with the berserk stomper King’s Lead Hat (find the anagram) on Before And After Science, released December 1977. Understandably smitten, the band dug their heels in, and Eno joined the band in March 1978 for sessions at Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas. Hopefully he expensed that lunch.

The sessions for 77 had been drawn-out and marred by clashes with producer Tony Bongiovi, things would be different this time. “It was a dream come true!” Weymouth writes in the set’s sleevenotes, “We were in a brand-new studio with a beautiful staff where we could work and play our music undistracted by city life. The March weather was warm with coconut trees and sunny salt-air breezes, a total contrast to the bitter cold in our drafty Long Island City loft.” The band’s days began with sea swimming and windsurfing and ended sampling the best of Bahamian cuisine. Given the idyllic setting, they could’ve been forgiven for dragging out the sessions, but by this point they were a confident, road-hardened live band and all but three of the album’s tracks were written years previously. The album’s basic tracks were recorded in 10 days, Byrne’s vocals took a couple more and Eno spent a week or so working on overdubs and mixing.

“Brian saw the studio as a salon of experimentation,” writes guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison in the sleeve notes. And from the thrilling opening seconds of ‘Thank You For Sending Me An Angel’ there’s a palpable sense of spontaneity and daring at play. Frantz’s drums stampede out of the traps; unable to resist joining in, Byrne starts singing early, despite sounding as if he’s several feet away from the mic; towards the end they pull off a segue into a strangely intense hoedown. It’s an explosive opener but Eno’s box of tricks – quite literally, he brought a synth in a suitcase to the sessions – help create an expansive sound, with floaty keyboard lines ebbing and flowing beneath the vocal line.

‘Warning Sign’ also benefits from Eno’s anything-goes attitude. This one dated back to Byrne and Frantz’s days as The Artistics, the band they formed while studying at Rhode Island School of Design, and over time it had developed a long instrumental intro. Eno took the opportunity to turn it into a wide-open dub soundscape, liberally smudging reverb all over Frantz’s drums. You’re never far from dub production flourishes on More Songs…, see also the crashing echo applied to Byrne’s guitar stabs on ‘Artists Only’, or the cosmic synths floating around ‘Stay Hungry’. 

While Eno catered for the headphone listeners, his interventions were minimal when it came to arrangements. According to Frantz, the producer’s major contributions were encouraging them to lose what Eno called “the woodsman” section in middle of ‘Stay Hungry’ (available here on the rarities disc), rounding up a group of female office workers to join Weymouth as the backing vocal group Tina & The Typists for ‘The Good Thing’, and urging the band to play their cover of Al Green’s ‘Take Me To The River’ as slowly as possible. Eno’s instincts proved correct on all counts and in the case of the latter, resulted in the band’s breakthrough hit. Weymouth’s hypnotic bassline leads the way, a purring groove that creates a heady atmosphere for Byrne to excel, the singer yelping, crooning and growling with relish while tightrope-walking the line between sacred and profane.

Byrne’s vocal performances are extraordinary throughout, emphasizing the strides he’d made as a frontman since the first album. He’s a detached observer attempting to make sense of the world around and constantly on the verge of hysterics. ‘The Girls Want To Be With The Girls’ finds him spitting out the findings of his research into gender politics – basically that women have more common sense than men, are more intuitive and better at making plans – before sighing “there’s just no love”. He returns to the theme in ‘I’m Not In Love’, weighing up the cold hard facts of relationships, wondering how on earth they happen and eventually declaring them to be an outdated concept.

Elsewhere, ‘Artists Only’ contemplates the creative urge (listen to the way he sings “I’m painting!”, as if he’s more surprised than anyone) and ‘The Good Thing’ was the result of a self-prescribed writing challenge, with Byrne attempting to write a song that sounded like a bad translation of a Chinese communist anthem. When David Bowie introduced an alien figure into pop music, the character didn’t have much to say for himself that sounded genuinely otherworldly; Ziggy basically liked rock ’n’ roll and doing rock ’n’ roll things. Meanwhile, Byrne sang convincingly from the perspective of an alien but didn’t have to give the character a silly name. Byrne 1, Bowie 0.

But Byrne’s finest More Songs… moment comes with the lilting beauty of ‘The Big Country’, one of only two ‘new’ songs here, along with the claustrophobic disco of ‘Stay Hungry’. To begin with, Byrne is flying above a city, surveying the ground below and – sounding rather pleased with himself – describing the functions of the shapes below (“Places to park by the factories and buildings/Restaurants and bars for later in the evening”). Things take a turn when the city is left behind and “we come to the farmlands and the undeveloped areas” – the character says he understands how these places work, and even appreciates there may be benefits to country living but bluntly states, “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me”. The abrupt shift of tone is startling – is Byrne is playing an obnoxious city slicker or a character, possibly neurodivergent, who can see how society should work but is totally overwhelmed by the reality of it?  

 The four previously unreleased alternate takes on disc two of the set offer intriguing new perspectives. This take of ‘With Our Love’ might start with Byrne chuckling “OK, here I come,” but it feels harder-hitting and more threatening than the familiar version. The alternate version of ‘Found A Job’ finds Weymouth higher in the mix and veering into slap bass territory, once they find a groove, they stay locked in for an extended, delay-soaked coda. ‘The Good Thing’ feels stripped-back, with keyboards pushed to the fore and Tina & The Typing Pool presumably on a smoking break. And finally, an alternate version of ‘The Girls Want To Be With The Girls’ mixes up the effects, with the swirling, dreamy synths of the solo juxtaposing nicely with the bite of the outro.

Elsewhere, the set tidies up previously available outtakes, with the material from the 2006 reissue alongside a first physical release for tracks taken from the 2006 digital dump Bonus Rarities & Outtakes – including ‘Electricity’, an instrumental early take on ‘Drugs’ from Fear Of Music. The single edit of ‘Take Me To The River’ is the only glaring omission, though it is included among the four bonus 7”s that accompany the 4LP deluxe version of the set.

The 19-song live set from the Entermedia Theatre is a blast, capturing the band four months after the release of More Songs… and on the verge of breaking through, recorded in front of a home crowd. It’s rough around the edges and teeming with wild energy. Byrne is on top form, sounding like an air raid siren as he enunciates the title of ‘Warning Sign’, growling the “don’t worry about me” refrain of ‘Don’t Worry About The Government’ in a manner that makes the listener worry about him very much actually, and inhabiting the preacherman-loverman of ‘Take Me To The River’ with barely contained glee. The Blu-ray footage confirms his evolution into a utterly compelling and unique frontman and is a lo-fi joy, adding an extra dimension to the set that so few labels seem to consider these days. 

More Songs About Buildings And Food is so often chalked up as a transitional album, but it captures Talking Heads in a thrilling place – a band with wit and energy to spare, absorbing music like sponges and suddenly alive with the possibilities of the studio. Let’s be glad they accepted Eno’s lunch invite.

Review by Jamie Atkins. The More Songs About Buildings And Food deluxe edition is out now.

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