Stop Making Sense 1984
I was late to the party with Talking Heads. I remember first really hearing about them in 1983 when “Burning Down the House” became their biggest hit ever and whose video got a lot of play on MTV and elsewhere. But that was from their fifth album and already a little past their peak creatively. I’m not sure when I got hooked, but I remember having the soundtrack to this movie on tape and playing it all the time, but I think maybe the first Talking Heads album I bought was their next album, Little Creatures, featuring another great video for “And She Was.” After that I remember watching the concert film Stop Making Sense while working at a video rental store by myself during the very slow daytime shift in 1987. That concert had some great music from their entire career and was a great starting point for eventually collecting almost all of their albums. Their music still seems timeless today, so unique and yet rooted in so many different styles.
This concert movie, put together from four different performances plus some reshoots, is frequently listed as the best or at least one of the best concert movies of all time, directed by Jonathan Demme who would go on to win an Oscar for Silence of the Lambs in addition to some other great movies. It has amazingly high energy as lead singer, David Byrne, dances and runs around on stage, but the rest of the band and the backup singers are in almost constant motion. The movie could easily have been marketed as an exercise video. Visually the movie takes advantage of some great artistic work, maybe to be expected from a group that started at an art design college. By the time the movie was made, Talking Heads had been touring for years, and as the venues grew with their success, the touring band filled out with more musicians and a bigger sound featuring world music and funk. By the time of these performances, they had a great show going. Demme captures that, but also gets tight face shots bringing you closer than you could ever get if you saw the show in person, with short takes to cover different band members and angles. It still makes a great watch as it expands from just David Byrne on stage with his guitar and adding members for each song, then getting into different visual setups, leading up to Byrne shaking and dancing in his giant suit (which somehow wasn’t quite as giant as I remembered). Anyway, this movie still holds up well with great music and while the few audience shots definitely show 80’s styles, the stage visuals still seem fresh.
Written: 21 Jun 2020