CLASSIC ALBUM

CONTAINING TWO OF THE BAND’S BEST-LOVED SINGLES, THE NEW YORKERS’ ARTFUL SIXTH LP WOULD HOLD HIGH THE SPIRIT OF POP AND BECOME THEIR BEST-SELLING ALBUM AT THE TIME, SHIFTING OVER TWO MILLION COPIES

BETH SIMPSON

If you divide the history of Talking Heads into three phases then Little Creatures sits at the apex of their third and final act, when, after the early CBGBs years and their time as an Eno-assisted afro-funk art project, they settled into a role as a left of centre pop act. Until recently it was their best-selling record and went double platinum in the US. Over here in the UK it reached the Top 10 and finally supplied them with a run of hits. Well, two. David Byrne himself, in a recent interview with Uncut magazine said of the album: “Little Creatures, to some extent, was our attempt to do pop songs, which we hadn’t really done before in that way.”

It marked a departure for the band in that Byrne demoed whole songs before presenting them to his colleagues. His new material was far more traditional than the band had done of late. “They were not the wild and funky poly-rhythmic songs of Remain In Light or Speaking In Tongues,” Chris Frantz wrote in his memoir Remain In Love. “In fact, they were a return to singer-songwriter type songs with a heavy dose of Americana thrown in.”

The American ‘heartland’ was now where Byrne’s head was at. The success of Stop Making Sense had enabled him to leverage this into a feature movie of his own. True Stories was set in Texas and focused on a collection of quirky characters that populate the small town of Virgil. The plan was that Talking Heads would record the soundtrack album. Those songs that weren’t quite suited to the film were set aside for this prior project.