Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings And Food
★★★★
RHINO
“Cut back the weakness/reinforce what is strong,” sings David Byrne on The Good Thing, the third track on More Songs About Buildings And Food. “Watch me work!” Backed by a Chinese-style workers’ choir (actually bassist Tina Weymouth and two studio secretaries, aka The Typing Pool), there was, as the singer would say in a 1978 interview, nothing about this track from Talking Heads’ second album that the late Chairman Mao would have found “disagreeable”. In fact, deadpanned Byrne, “it would be the song that could get us a tour of Red China - but of course with the Gang Of Four.”
By the time More Songs About Buildings And Food was released in July 1978, Talking Heads had made their great leap forward, transcending the sinkhole squalor of their early CBGB stamping ground, bounding ever further away from the limitations of conventional rock’n’roll poses. “It used to be bad boys in drag and now it’s bad boys in ripped clothing,” sighed Byrne around the time of the album’s release. “It’s just another romantic notion that Europeans like to go for: the drunk on the corner has more wisdom than the guy in the ivory tower.”
For Talking Heads, though, there was a third intriguing space: not the lows of the gutter, not highs of the library, but the mundane middle ground where most people exist, clattering up against each other in dizzying forced proximity. More Songs About Buildings And Food – reissued and remastered here with eleven alternate tracks and a complete live set from their show at New York’s Entermedia Theatre in August 1978 – isn’t entirely a neck-up record (just check the erotic flutter of Stay Hungry or the sacred-profane immersion of their Take Me To The River cover for proof). Instead of indulging the rock id, though, these are songs more concerned with management theory and communication technology, with the rewards of hard work and the benefits of artistic graft, with the way everyday negotiations can spiral into a glitching, twitching world of confusion.
As Byrne’s words tick by with the urgent precision of an office teleprinter, the record plays out like a fact-finding mission. “What does it take to fall in love?” he asks on I’m Not In Love. “What does it mean?” ask “the boys” on The Girls Want To Be With The Girls. These songs are not only logging the curiosities and quirks of human nature, the chemical composition of attraction and repulsion, the mechanics of social organisation, though: they are also trying to work out exactly what Talking Heads can do, the full capabilities of their remarkable machine.
The recording of their debut, Talking Heads ’77, had been scarred by dissatisfaction with their co-producer Tony Bongiovi, who fatally wounded their relationship when he gave Byrne a carving knife during the recording of Psycho Killer as a prop. The band became so hostile to the producer – who, with both the Ramones and Gloria Gaynor on his CV, should have been an excellent fit - that they would sneak in to work when he was away from the studio.
Byrne would later be more understanding of Bongiovi – “This poor guy was just trying to help some kids make a record!” he said 20 years later – but when the time came to record their second album, there was to be no compromise, no evasion, no kitchen knives.
The band had met Brian Eno at London’s Rock Garden in May 1977 and quickly bonded over Fela Kuti, Lee Perry and Dr Alimantado’s Best Dressed Chicken In Town. In March 1978, they flew to Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios in Nassau to work with Eno on More Songs About Buildings And Food. There were new luxuries: state-of-the-art facilities, a change of scene, a co-producer whose energies and interests dovetailed with theirs while diverging enough to nudge them forwards. “He taught us that you can just go up to the console and push that fader up or twist that EQ knob until it sounds really weird,” drummer Chris Frantz told MOJO in 2020.
Both the Entermedia set and the alternate takes underscore how much the studio shaped and sculpted these songs. Like the etiolated, unstrung Polaroid band portraits on the album sleeve, there’s a lack of connective tissue in these versions, the alternate Found A Job lacking the delirious carnival sheen of the album take, the live Artists Only missing the full cinema-matinee drama of Jerry Harrison’s moustache-twirling keyboards. You can, however, hear what good bones these songs have and what a formidable live band they could be, Byrne in guttural, growling form on earlier tracks Love Goes To A Building On Fire or No Compassion.
More Songs About Buildings And Food is the sound of a band stretching out, the funk and disco seeded in their debut bursting out all over. The high-speed Road To Nowhere gallop of Thank You For Sending Me An Angel comes across as if Byrne is in a pyramid scheme for unnerving pop stars – “With a little practice you can walk/you can talk just like me” –another side of Psycho Killer’s malignant narcissism. Warning Sign’s woozy proto-R.E.M. drift sounds like an overloaded nervous system, somebody forced to defy their better judgement, feeling as if it’s played backwards even though it’s running forwards. The Girls Want To Be With The Girls, meanwhile, sees Byrne taking on the role of a lab-coated researcher trying to understand romance and failing, the pleasingly physical groove at odds with the crossed wires, missed cues, and those girls with their “abstract analysis”.
All these awkwardnesses culminate in The Big Country, its comparatively rudimentary downhome sway at odds with its thrumming ambiguities. Flying over America, Byrne dismisses the little people below: “I wouldn’t live like that if you paid me/I wouldn’t live like that, no siree,” he sings. Yet his ironically aw-shucks directness suggests he’s possibly in love with the very thing he’s dismissing - and that would dismiss in turn this tense, arty city boy.
More Songs About Buildings And Food is full of such warring impulses – girls or boys, love or isolation, individual endeavour or bold collective action, thinking or dancing. It comes from a process of intensification and concentration – in Byrne’s phrase, they wanted to do what they could to “make us sound more like what we sound like”, and with Eno at hand, they succeeded abundantly. Nearly 50 years later, it remains a thrill to watch them work.
More Songs About Buildings And Food (Super Deluxe Edition) is out July 25 on Rhino.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
More Songs About Buildings And Food (Super Deluxe Edition) Track List:
Disc One
1. THANK YOU FOR SENDING ME AN ANGEL
2. WITH OUR LOVE
3. THE GOOD THING
4. WARNING SIGN
5. THE GIRLS WANT TO BE WITH THE GIRLS
6. FOUND A JOB
7. ARTISTS ONLY
8. I’M NOT IN LOVE
9. STAY HUNGRY
10. TAKE ME TO THE RIVER
11. THE BIG COUNTRY
Disc Two
1. THANK YOU FOR SENDING ME AN ANGEL (ALTERNATE VERSION)
2. WITH OUR LOVE (ALTERNATE VERSION)
3. FOUND A JOB (ALTERNATE VERSION)
4. THE GOOD THING (ALTERNATE VERSION)
5. WARNING SIGN (ALTERNATE VERSION)
6. ELECTRICITY (INSTRUMENTAL)
7. THE GIRLS WANT TO BE WITH THE GIRLS (ALTERNATE VERSION)
8. I’M NOT IN LOVE (ALTERNATE VERSION)
9. ARTISTS ONLY (ALTERNATE VERSION)
10. THE BIG COUNTRY (ALTERNATE VERSION)
11. THANK YOU FOR SENDING ME AN ANGEL (“COUNTRY ANGEL” VERSION)
Live (3CD & 4LP Box Set Only):
1. NO COMPASSION (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
2. WARNING SIGN (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
3. THE BOOK I READ (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
4. STAY HUNGRY (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
5. ARTISTS ONLY (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
6. THE GIRLS WANT TO BE WITH THE GIRLS (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
7. UH-OH, LOVES COMES TO TOWN (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
8. WITH OUR LOVE (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
9. LOVE GOES TO A BUILDING ON FIRE (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
10. DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
11. THE GOOD THING (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
12. ELECTRICITY (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
13. THE BIG COUNTRY (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
14. NEW FEELING (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
15. PULLED UP (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
16. PSYCHO KILLER (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
17. TAKE ME TO THE RIVER (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
18. FOUND A JOB (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
19. THANK YOU FOR SENDING ME AN ANGEL (LIVE AT ENTERMEDIA THEATRE, NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 10, 1978)
Blu-Ray:
1. Original Album: Dolby Atmos Mix, 5.1 Mix, Hi-Res Stereo
2. Video: Live At Entermedia Theater, 1978 (25 Minute Promotional Film)
3. Video: Live At Sproul Plaza, Berkeley, CA, September 18th, 1978 (47 Minute Single-Camera Video)
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Photo: Marcia Resnick/Getty