Question one: why is Radiohead’s OK Computer considered so seminal when the groundwork for it was already laid 28 years before? 1979 was a terrible year for the world (war, decay, Three Mile Island, Maggie), but it was a good one for music. A month after the Walkman was released, the perfect cassette appeared to go with it. So, question two: heard of a van that’s loaded with weapons?
In 1979, Talking Heads (David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz) were holed up in Frantz and Weymouth’s loft studio. Sessions leaving them unsatisfied, David Byrne sent out an emergency signal to Brian Eno, and this is what came out. Fear of Music is a concept album, and if you want to test that, add the phrase “Fear of” to basically any of the track titles: fear of cities, fear of mind, fear of air… This is “Fear of” music: itchy, medicated paranoia, shifting on unstable drumbeats, and mercurial bass. It’s clenched and nervy, but sneakily expansive.
Take the skittering riff which kickstarts “I Zimbra”, a mad dance to nonsensical Dadaist lyrics underlaid with cod-Afrobeat percussion and sliding bass grooves. This is the germination of the Heads’ glorious experimentation into rhythm, an eye-opening moment. Next is the gloriously loopy “Mind”, before “Paper” provides the record with its most straight-up rock moment.
Then comes “Cities”, the album’s third single. “Cities” is truly great, especially the alternative mix with added sirens and alarms: a hellish traffic jam, a freakout on the pavement. Weymouth’s bass is the melodic core, the handle to cling to. A similarly magical track is “Heaven”. Special and still, it’s a glimmering tearjerker and unlike anything else the band would go on to make. In contrast to that track’s tenderness, bad-coke-dream “Memories Can’t Wait” is stomping, relentless, seemingly powered by its own internal motor.
But “Life During Wartime” is Fear of Music’s monolith, and justly so: it’s hard to imagine a song quite like it, one that any band could make besides Talking Heads. Here is an entire generational moment in a song; the band’s art-punk-intellect ethos captured wryly and compellingly. Byrne’s blipped-out student revolutionary is a uniquely entrancing portrait only he could draw: “We’re tapping phone lines / I know that that ain’t allowed.” And there’s that glorious refrain: “THIS AIN’T NO PARTY / THIS AIN’T NO DISCO” — anthemic stardust.
The stratospheric, seminal music of Remain in Light came a year later, while 1984’s live film Stop Making Sense (reviewed here) was the band’s zenith. But those achievements are prefigured on Fear of Music: “The Great Curve” mutated off the side of “I Zimbra”’s encircling rhythms, and “Crosseyed and Painless” sprang from the looping, disc-skipping chug of “Animals”, which itself builds up beneath the crazed shouting Byrne would go on to employ on “Once in a Lifetime”.
You may ask yourself: how did I get here? Fear of Music is the answer, and it’s totally essential. It might just be the most cohesive, complete record that the band ever made. There’s almost too much to say about it, for which I apologise. But you see: I’ve got to get it down on paper.
“David Byrne of Talking Heads” by Jean-Luc is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.