13. Talking HeadsFear Of Music
Talking Heads are obviously the band that people like to talk about and they curl their lip a little bit when they do it. Generally speaking the people who go on about Talking Heads are the kind of people who will tell you that they don’t own a television, sometimes in the same sentence. The Name Of This Band is fantastic and so is Fear Of Music. It’s very difficult not to fall in love with people who, as much as they were cool in a traditional sense of the word, had a certain willingness to sound ridiculous.
We played ‘Psycho Killer’ at our wedding. We were our own wedding band because we met playing rock & roll so we did a few of our own songs and we did songs that people would know. We did ‘Tourette’s’ by Nirvana and we did ‘Where Is My Mind?’ and ‘Psycho Killer’. It’s not the time for a Sebadoh b-side.
XTC’s Drums And Wires is an album I only discovered recently. I’d heard their later stuff which is fantastic in its way but because of the production techniques it’s very much of its time, whereas Drums And Wires for the most part could’ve been recorded last year. You can definitely see it is part of the same mindset as Talking Heads but one band is based in New York and the other one’s from Swindon. There’s actually something far more liberating about being from Swindon in that sense because there’s a lot less to live up to and what you’re challenging is absolutely everything. What’s Swindon got? A really big roundabout? Paul Bodin? I’m trying to think of some classic Swindon players from the mid-90s.
Again, I’m always attracted to vocalists who are not scared to sound stupid. Drums And Wires is a really weird record because, as great as it is at the start, for me it peaks right at the end. ‘Scissor Man’ and ‘Complicated Game’ are incredible songs and some of the singing on ‘Complicated Game’ is deliberately wrong and it is amazing.
