But all that glitters isn't gall. The best solo LPs by members of working groups reveal: (a) what the artist brings to the band in terms of influences and ideas: (b) what role, creative or otherwise, he or she plays within the group; and (c) what effect the experience of making… Read More
a solo album may have on the band as a whole. With this in mind, consider the current windfall of solo efforts by the four members of Talking Heads.
Besides the group connection, these discs have two things in common: they're neither "solo" records in the tiresome superstar sense of the word nor are they collectively concerned with the future of post-punk dance music. Essentially the highlights of his score for choreographer Twyla Tharp's The Catherine Wheel, Head-master David Byrne's Songs from the Broadway Production of "The Catherine Wheel" applies the lessons of the four Talking Heads LPs and his avant-garde Afro-rock collaboration with Brian Eno (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) to formalized ballet theater. Husband-and-wife rhythm section Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth assume the disguise of the Tom Tom Club for their busman's-holiday ramble through ethnic urban pop. And on The Red and the Black, guitarist-keyboardist Jerry Harrison takes members of last year's expanded touring Heads even deeper into the heart of funky darkness initially explored on the Heads' Remain in Light.
In a way, Songs from the Broadway Production of "The Catherine Wheel," Tom Tom Club and The Red and the Black are all Talking Heads albums. What makes them so isn't their rhythms or their generally overriding seriousness. Instead, it's a unique combination of both: a volatile schizo-fusion of academic cool and barely suppressed dance fever, epitomized by the band's 1978 cover version of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" and the holocaust-party anthem "Life during Wartime" on 1979's Fear of Music.
Unlike most soundtracks and original-east releases, David Byrne's score for The Catherine Wheel (which premièred last September) has a life of its own. The wonder of Twyla Tharp's choreography for the seventy-three-minute show is that she brings to the studied grace of modern dance the sexual intensity and liberating spontaneity of punk's electric stomp. Byrne's music and lyrics do the same thing in reverse, creating a dazzling mixture of rock & roll overdrive, R&B elasticity and ambient gimmickry but with a sense of gripping dramatic purpose. You don't have to see Tharp's dancers to know that this music moves for them.
Five songs here boast familiar Byrne-Heads trademarks – clipped melodic phrasing, a martial beat, the si
