Alternative Weekend: Focus on ‘Talking Heads’

I have been posting most weekends using @detlev’s #metalweekend tag, but my main love of music is progressive and alternative music. Some of my posts have included these songs, but I feel they are not keeping with the spirit of metal.

I will continue to post article’s using #metalweekend occasionally but feel I have more to offer regarding these other genre’s that I am more familiar with.

Introducing #alternativeweekend. Post an article that highlights THREE great songs that are either progressive or alternative and use the tag #alternativeweekend or use the ‘Focus on’ series if you like. There are no rules, just make your own!

If you have a short story or something to offer regarding an opinion on your songs, then share it with us!

My introduction to this band was during my software piracy days around 1984. I was a poor lad working at Kwiksave and couldn't afford to buy games for my Atari 800 Home computer. I had found a small community in the city of Manchester, not exactly close to my home.

The local cracker was a misguided unsociable freak by the name of RobC. He was so famous on that platform that his legacy still remains on the internet over 30 years later.

To me, he was the goto guy for new games. He lived with his parents in a huge detached property in Chorlton-cum-Hardy where I would visit him every 2 weeks to get the 'new stuff'.

This tale is not about my terrible acts of piracy though, it's about Talking Heads. You see, RobC seemed to play the Remain in Light album near constantly at least for a few months during my visits.

This album is extremely industrial and not like most of their others. It suited RobC well I guess as he used to code in HexaDecimal, I kid you not. Having droning songs like these in the background helped him eradicate that nasty software protection so we could rip off the disks and play for free.

Talking Heads – The Great Curve (Remain in Light – 1980)

Here's a six-minute song with no chorus, quite typical of material from this most excellent album. Listen to that screeching guitar going wild at multiple points.

We didn't really hear these kinds of sounds until much later in the 1980s, such pioneers they were.

Talking Heads – Listening Wind (Remain in Light – 1980)

I had to include another song from my favourite 'Industrial' album, though this breaks the mold and does have a chorus as well as verses.

This is a more mellow song and has a lot going on in there in terms of sound effects.

Talking Heads – Slippery People (Stop Making Sense – 1984)

When I hear Slippery People I think of 80's nightclubs. When this came on the floor got filled with dancing people, guaranteed. Outside of clubs you never heard it, it failed to chart but as a club song, it was right up there.

I was trying to find the version with David Byrne in the fat suit, but it seems you have to pay to watch that version.

Talking Heads – Psycho Killer (77 – 1977)

This song just has it all, David Byrne will his crazy vocals, 'Ayayayayay', which defined him as unique.

This one is my preferred flavour of the song from The Old Grey Whistle Test. Yes, you have to be really old to remember that.

Here's a short interview with David Byrne wearing that crazy suit. To enter a club in 1985, you had to dress very stylishly, with a tie and a jacket.

Stupid sized shoulders were the thing to have, but he took it a little further. I wonder what he thinks of it today.