Music Film Of The Year
“It’s Like A Conversation”
Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense reasserted its greatness, and brought the factions of Talking Heads together, unexpectedly. “It’s never looked better,” Jerry Harrison tells Martin Aston.
Same as it ever was: Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense lineup (clockwise from left) Steve Scales, Jerry Harrison, Ednah Holt, Lynn Mabry, Chris Frantz, Alex Weir, Tina Weymouth, David Byrne, Bernie Worrell.
Courtesy of Sire & Warner Music Group
IT WAS ALREADY, possibly, the greatest concert movie of all time, but in 2023 a 4K digital upgrade added bold new dimensions to director Jonathan Demme’s simultaneously dense and spacious portrait (“Like an austere orgy,” New Yorker critic Pauline Kael suggested) of a tight, taut Talking Heads at their 1983 peak, feeding their love of African pop into a King Sunny Adé-style big-band jamboree. At core, Stop Making Sense remains as much surrealist theatre and architectural design as musical performance, from the drip-fed introduction of band members to the bare-bulb lighting and shadow-play that expanded Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre stage. Reflecting on this masterpiece of relentless energy, joy and funky union, Talking Heads multi-instrumentalist Jerry Harrison spoke to MOJO…