FILTER REISSUES
Construction time again
Hard-working second album from NYC outliers raises the roof.
By Victoria Segal.
Talking Heads
★★★★
More Songs About Buildings And Food
RHINO. CD/DL/LP
“CUT BACK the weakness/Reinforce what is strong,” sings David Byrne on The Good Thing, the third track on More Songs About Buildings And Food. “Watch me work!” Backed by a Chinese-style workers’ choir (actually bassist Tina Weymouth and two studio secretaries, AKA The Typing Pool), there was, as the singer would say in a 1978 interview, nothing about this track from Talking Heads’ second album that the late Chairman Mao would have found “disagreeable”. In fact, deadpanned Byrne, “it would be the song that could get us a tour of Red China – but of course with the Gang Of Four.”
By the time More Songs About Buildings And Food was released in July 1978, Talking Heads had made their great leap forward, transcending the sinkhole squalor of their early CBGB stamping ground, bounding ever further away from the limitations of conventional rock’n’roll poses. “It used to be bad boys in drag and now it’s bad boys in ripped clothing,” sighed Byrne around the time of the album’s release. “It’s just another romantic notion that Europeans like to go for: the drunk on the corner has more wisdom than the guy in the ivory tower.”