Talking Heads on the Return of Stop Making Sense – The New York Times

Stop Making Sense is both a definitive 1980s period piece and a prophecy. Its staging helped reshape pop concerts in its wake. The music hot-wired rock, funk and African rhythms, while the fractured, non sequitur lyrics glanced at, among many other things, disinformation ( Crosseyed and Painless ), evangelicalism ( Once in a Lifetime ), authoritarianism ( Making Flippy Floppy ) and environmental disaster ( Burning Down the House ).

Sometimes we write things and we don t know what they re about until afterwards, Byrne said. There s a sense of a premonition. I ve looked at things I ve written and I go, Oh. That s about something that happened in my life after I wrote the song.

There had been choreographed soul revues and big-stage concert spectacles long before Talking Heads mounted their 1983 tour supporting the album Speaking in Tongues. But Byrne envisioned something different: a performance influenced by the stylized gestures of Asian theater and the anti-naturalistic, avant-garde stage tableaus of Robert Wilson. (Talking Heads hired Wilson s lighting designer, Beverly Emmons.)

via www.nytimes.com

I loved Talking Heads. Stop Making Sense was a great concert film.