Stop Making Sense: How Talking Heads made the greatest concert film of all time

As he begins stumbling and slipping across the stage to clattering beats, all of it begins to appear to be an audition for a Kookpop 101 class on the college from Fame, or a clip from a zero-budget version of America’s Obtained Mildly Deranged Expertise. But that is the long-lasting opening of Speaking Heads’ Cease Making Sense live performance movie, shot over three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in 1983 by director Jonathan Demme and extensively accepted as one of many biggest reside music movies ever made.

Because it receives a 40^th anniversary cinema re-release this week, introduced by uber-trendy producers A24, and newly restored in 4K – with singer David Byrne’s legendary wide-shouldered enterprise swimsuit rendered the dimensions of a bus on IMAX screens – the arthouse brilliance of the self-esteem stays nearly unsurpassed in reside music.

First launched in 1984, it upended the onstage expectations of an period when main reside exhibits have been more and more about largesse. Whereas the rock behemoths of the Seventies and Eighties arrived onstage inside gigantic UFOs, constructed 40ft partitions throughout arenas or staged Arthurian legends on ice, Speaking Heads tore down and reconstructed the reside music spectacle – fairly actually – with a really new wave panache.

From that spare, solo opening Byrne is progressively joined, track by track, by his bandmates. Bassist Tina Weymouth arrives for Heaven; a drum riser is wheeled out for Chris Frantz to affix on Thank You for Sending Me An Angel; guitarist Jerry Harrison completes the line-up for Discovered a Job. And nonetheless the present grows. Keyboard and percussion podiums, backing singers and a slogan-festooned backdrop display arrive like a roadie strike being progressively resolved mid-show.

By Burning Down the Home, the complete kinetic band is in place and on funk-pop hearth. Arty lighting results and synchronised cardio routines kick in; when Byrne isn’t dancing with a standing lamp or doing microphone-to-5k laps of the stage, he turns into a rubber-limbed performer, bending, jolting, quivering and contorting his physique and eventually donning the large enterprise swimsuit impressed by some conventional Kabuki, Bunraku and Noh theatre he’d caught in Japan between excursions.

“I needed my head to seem smaller,” he stated in an interview on the 1999 DVD launch of the movie, “and the best method to do this was to make my physique greater, as a result of music could be very bodily and infrequently the physique understands it earlier than the pinnacle.”

Filmed on the tour to advertise Speaking Heads’ fifth album Talking in Tongues, Cease Making Sense captures the band on the level of mainstream breakthrough. Having emerged from New York’s unique CBGBs punk scene as art-minded pioneers of recent wave, their shift in direction of funk and worldbeat rhythms – notably on 1980’s Fela Kuti-inspired Stay in Mild album – had helped them break into charts worldwide with 1981’s As soon as in a Lifetime single and their solely US prime 10 hit Burning Down the Home in 1983.

However success and its arena-level expectations hadn’t dampened their creative tendencies. Earlier than Cease Making Sense, the usage of arthouse methods onstage had typically signified underground provocation within the rock sphere. The Velvet Underground having Andy Warhol’s movies screened on them as they performed. Early Pink Floyd dousing themselves in kaleidoscopic visuals. Even David Bowie’s Kafkaesque Isolar excursions of the late-Seventies have been aligned to his Berlin-era retreat from the populist highlight.

Cease Making Sense proved that artwork rock efficiency and mainstream success could possibly be bedfellows; {that a} massive thought could possibly be simply as putting and efficient as any variety of outlandish costumes, pyrotechnics, ostentatious units and outsized props. The sheer fashion of the movie – a important sensation and cult hit on its 1984 launch, making $5 million on the field workplace – helped Speaking Heads attain the standing of leftfield pop figureheads. Subsequent hits resembling Highway to Nowhere, And She Was and Wild Wild Life solely served to bolster their standing forward of their 1991 break up.

{That a} reside present, poised on the midpoint between Devo and James Brown, could possibly be directly so energised, joyous and creative had a significant influence on area efficiency for many years to return. Many main acts have been impressed to reinvent what the reside stage itself is able to. Peter Gabriel’s 1986 This Manner Up tour noticed him preventing his personal large, angle-poised lighting rig. Bowie was quickly to be noticed rising from the pinnacle of a 60ft glass spider in angel wings. Pet Store Boys’ debut tour in 1989 was a theatrical extravaganza stuffed with set-pieces and movies directed by Derek Jarman. Artwork rock hit the large time.

Forty years on, that Girl Gaga performs multi-act concert events set in futuristic brutalist slaughterhouses or Billie Eilish leaps out of a minimalist stage set consisting of 1 large LCD slope is, nevertheless tangentially, thanks partly to the breakthroughs of Cease Making Sense. However the buzz and hoop-la across the movie’s re-release (a Q&A with Spike Jonze to launch the movie on the Toronto Worldwide Movie competition final week was the band’s first look collectively since 2002) is testomony to the ingenious simplicity and febrile power of the movie. Which just one act has actually managed to seize in large-scale efficiency since: David Byrne.

Byrne’s celebrated American Utopia present, which toured the world earlier than settling in for a number of Broadway runs, and which produced a movie of its personal, is one thing of a non secular sequel to Cease Making Sense. Taking the idea of the unrooted band to its utmost excessive, musicians danced round a chain-draped stage carrying their devices with them, making for a complete deconstruction of the mounted conventional rock stage. In its vibrant, difficult method… Sense is restored.

Cease Making Sense is in cinemas from Friday