When it first opened in theatres, in the fall of 1984, “Stop Making Sense,” directed by Jonathan Demme and starring the rock group Talking Heads, was quickly recognized as one of the finest concert films ever made. Reviewer after reviewer settled on the word “exhilarating” to describe the experience of watching an expanded nine-member iteration of the four-piece group perform sixteen of their best-known songs in an uninterrupted sequence of dynamically staged and photographed musical vignettes. In the pages of this magazine, Pauline Kael praised the film as “close to perfection,” and described the Heads front man, David Byrne, as “a stupefying performer.” “He’s so white he’s almost mock-white,” Kael wrote, “and so are his jerky, long-necked, mechanical-man movements. He seems fleshless, bloodless; he might almost be a Black man’s parody of how a clean-cut white man moves. But Byrne himself is the parodist, and he commands the stage by his hollow-eyed, frosty verve.” Similarly effusive sentiments were echoed by critics across the country. If such a thing as Rotten Tomatoes had existed at the time, “Stop Making Sense” would surely have ranked in the high nineties.
Based on the band’s insistence that the film be seen only in theatres, they initially refused permission for it to be made available on videotape or shown on cable TV. In the decades since, each release of “Stop Making Sense” on a new medium––VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming––has been greeted with fresh praise from succeeding generations of viewers and critics. Now, in anticipation of the film’s fortieth anniversary, the original negative has been reprocessed in a high-resolution 4K format, and reissued, once again, for theatrical release. In the interests of promoting the film they collectively own, the four former Talking Heads––Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz––have taken part in a series of panel discussions and media events at screenings in Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles. This marks the first time that the band has appeared together in public since 2002, when the group, which officially dissolved under contentious circumstances in 1991, was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The New York-based film director Jonathan Demme, who died in 2017, was forty years old at the time that he made “Stop Making Sense.” He had been an avid fan of Talking Heads since he first saw the band perform at Wollman Rink, in Central Park, in the summer of 1979. (“The four of them stood there like statues on this platform,” he recalled.) The following year, Demme achieved his breakthrough as a director with “Melvin and Howard,” a bittersweet comedy about a chance encounter in the Nevada desert between an unemployed factory worker and the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. He next saw Talking Heads perform in Los Angeles in the summer of 1983, and was stunned by the change in the band. The four former statues had turned into a dynamic, interracial troupe of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists performing exuberantly arranged and choreographed versions of their songs. He quickly contacted the group through a mutual friend and pitched the idea of filming their show. As fans of “Melvin and Howard,” the Heads agreed to work with Demme after hearing his thoughts about how––and how not––to present them onscreen. On the advice of their manager, Gary Kurfirst, the group financed the film themselves, with the help of an advance from their record label, in order to retain ownership and full creative control.
For his part, Demme made it clear that he wanted to focus the whole production solely on the band’s performance. Unexceptional as this might sound, it was a departure from the way that rock concerts had previously been presented on film, from Richard Lester’s mock-documentary “A Hard Day’s Night” to Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,” by dispensing with a “backstory” of the musicians coming and going; the logistics of staging the show; interviews with the band members, promoters, and fans; and the fervent response of the crowd. Instead, Demme proposed to simply film the band onstage, expertly, while avoiding the rhythmic, fast-paced, jump-cut style of editing associated with the music videos being shown on the recently established platform MTV. The apparent austerity of this approach conformed to the minimalist art-school aesthetic that Talking Heads had embraced since they first emerged as the albino in the herd of ragtag bands that got their starts in the mid-seventies at CBGB, the dive bar on the Bowery that served, for a few brief years, as the breeding ground of punk. In those days, surrounded by posturing rock romantics such as Patti Smith, Television, and the Ramones, the Heads sought to make a virtue of their musical and theatrical limitations by adopting a performance style that was initially “defined by [its] negatives,” as Byrne described it, consisting of “no rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock hair, no rock lights . . . no rehearsed stage patter,” and, perhaps most telling, “no singing like a Black man.”
By 1983, Talking Heads had come a long way, musically and otherwise, from the austere, frozen tableau they’d presented during their incubation at CBGB and their early concerts. They added a capable fourth member on keyboards and guitar, Jerry Harrison (whose Harvard degree burnished their highbrow reputation), achieved a hard-earned proficiency on their instruments, and recorded five critically acclaimed and commercially profitable studio albums, three of them made under the aesthetic spell of the polymath British producer Brian Eno. In the course of that evolution, they jettisoned many of the musical and theatrical restrictions they had originally placed on themselves, beginning with the proscription on singing like a Black man, which yielded to a brilliantly understated rendition of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” that earned them a Top Forty hit and revealed their musical affinity for the stately, churchy backbeats of Memphis soul.
The expanded version of Talking Heads that appears in the film was the culmination of a process that began in the fall of 1980, following the release of the band’s fourth album, “Remain in Light,” when Byrne and Harrison realized that the densely layered arrangements on the record, many of which reflected the polyrhythmic influence of Afro-pop artists like Fela Kuti and King Sunny Adé, could not be reproduced in concert by a four-piece group. This led to the addition, on short notice, of five additional members—Adrian Belew on guitar, Bernie Worrell on keyboards, Steve Scales on percussion, Busta Jones on bass, and Dolette McDonald on backing vocals—all but one of whom were African American. This gave the band a biracial composition that was highly unusual at the end of a decade when the audience for popular music in the United States had become substantially resegregated into the tribes of white punk and hard rock on the one hand, Black funk and disco on the other. The expanded Heads toured the U.S. and Europe that fall to an enthusiastic reception.
They then took a year-long sabbatical, during which Byrne burrowed deeper into the downtown avant-garde by collaborating with the choreographer Twyla Tharp on a dance piece called “The Catherine Wheel,” Harrison recorded a solo album, and Frantz and Weymouth formed a band of their own called Tom Tom Club, whose willfully inane single “Genius of Love” became a dance-club standard and radio hit. Talking Heads reunited with slightly different personnel in 1982 to tour in Japan, Europe, and the States, after which they recorded their first self-produced album, “Speaking in Tongues,” which spun off their first and only Top Ten single, “Burning Down the House.”
The 1983 tour documented in “Stop Making Sense” began in August and ran through the end of the year. The four original Heads were joined by two mainstays of the expanded band, the keyboardist Worrell and the percussionist Scales, along with an ebullient new guitarist, Alex Weir, and a pair of backup singers, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, who added a fresh jolt of kinetic energy to the group. But the most dramatic change was the transformation in David Byrne, who drew on the lessons that he had learned in his work with Tharp and the choreographer Toni Basil (with whom he had made a number of music videos) to turn the songs in the band’s live show into a series of individual set pieces, each with its own distinct choreography, lighting, and, in one spectacular instance, costume design. Byrne then arranged these songs into three half-hour segments, tracing a loose narrative arc that reflected the formation and artistic evolution of the band.
The film begins with Byrne alone on an empty stage with a solo version of what he considered the first “real” song he ever wrote, “Psycho Killer,” sung to the accompaniment of a boom-box rhythm track. A throwback to the calmly deranged persona with which he entered the musical world, this signature number is followed by a series of selections from the Head’s early repertoire, each one accompanied by the addition of one or two band members and the stage risers that hold their instruments, culminating in a thunderous full-band arrangement of their biggest hit, “Burning Down the House.” Byrne then unstraps his guitar, loosens the top buttons on his shirt, and launches into “Life During Wartime,” a paranoid political fantasy whose aerobics-class choreography mocks the self-importance of the song’s lyrics and ends with Byrne circling the stage at a dead run, as if in orbit around the band.