It’s been 33 years since the Talking Heads formed and whenever I listen to them I still think their work is fresh. Rummaging through their musical corpus it was terribly difficult to pick only a single song I thought worthy of being tapped for Classics. There are so many.
I settled on “Burning Down The House” off Speaking In Tongues (1983), a single that was not only the group’s biggest chart success but broadcast them to a much wider audience via MTV and the Stop Making Sense tour documentary by Jonathan Demme (which I went to see with my father when it was making the rounds in small film houses).
There are Talking Heads songs that can compete with it, but today it is the classic. A refined product of late-70s exploration of the new and different, years in the making by the time it hit us in 1983. Proof positive David Byrne and his partners in crime were the bomb.
Talking Heads – Burning Down The House
And, as an added bonus you can thank the Bean for reminding me about Tom Jones and the Cardigans showing you just how fresh the song can be after many years. From the 1999 Reload cover extravaganza:
Tom Jones – Burning Down The House (with The Cardigans)
(I’m having one of those Mondays-managing to comment on the wrong post already-I blame lack of chocolate- delete as applicable). I should have said here:
I was one of the many that saw ‘Stop making sense’ at the cinema (actually The Dominion Theatre , London-which in those days would have been a rock venue too) and people did applaud between numbers, so immersed were we/they in the experience. First talking heads track I ever heard was ‘Warning sign’ and I guess that ‘Once in a lifetime’ is the big hit that will be played (audio and video) for a long time yet (even though Brian Eno’s vocals permeate the backing track).