Stop Making Sense

Stop Making Sense is back in cinemas 40 years on from its initial 1984 release. Director Jonathan Demme captured New York City’s most well-known new wave art rockers Talking Heads at the absolute apex of their craft, showcasing the unique collision of soaring soulful tunes and authentic oddness. Featuring the band’s thumping rhythms and eerily prescient lyrics, the film is often singled out as ‘the best concert movie ever made.’ What is it that makes this cinematic and musical powerhouse so appealing? 

Concert films were a regular fixture on cinema marquees up until the mid 1980s with everyone from ABBA to Elvis to Gil Scott Heron committing the energy and intimacy of live performance to film. Following a lengthy hiatus broken only by a few standout titles, the last decade has seen something of a big screen renaissance in music films thanks to the rise in popularity of Event Cinema (live/recorded events streamed to cinemas). This Autumn alone has two sure-fire hit performance pictures heading to cinemas in Taylor Swift’s Eras and Beyoncé’s Renaissance. 

The draw for such features can often be to see a loved artist performing live, but also to gain a window into their world through behind the scenes footage or candid and usually exclusive interviews. D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars appears as compelling during its backstage chit chat and costume changes as it is when capturing Bowie and co.’s final performance as the titular group. Robert Mugge’s Black Wax sees Gil Scott Heron shine magnificently whether languidly crooning on stage or energetically proselytising from the banks of the Potomac.

A Simple Premise

Whilst added value is often a consideration afforded to and even demanded by cinemagoers, Stop Making Sense eschews it. From the opening moments of the film, as buttoned up, wild eyed lead singer David Byrne pads onto a near empty and undressed stage stating, “Hi. I got a tape I wanna play,” music and its performance are the film’s central and singular event. Beginning with a solo version of the band’s first hit Psycho Killer, the audience are asked to lean in,  to be captivated by simplicity. A stark antidote to the era’s often lavish and hugely popular stadium rock.

The group and the staging are organically constructed one song at a time until a handful of tracks in, the band’s biggest commercial hit Burning Down the House sees the whole gang at full tilt. In a performance that would serve well as the crescendo to most live shows, they create alchemical magic - a potion that cannot be commodified, replicated or repackaged. Byrne is electrifying, full of nervous energy and awkward bravura alongside Tina Weymouth’s constantly rolling bass, Chris Frantz’s atomic percussion and Jerry Harrison’s punk-funk guitars. 

Joined by vocalists Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, as well as regular collaborators keyboardist Bernie Worrell, guitarist Alex Weir and percussionist Steve Scales, Talking Heads are a marvel live. The inclusion of upbeat side project Tom Tom Club and Byrne’s interrim solo work may speak to a divergence in direction within the band at the time. Yet together they are electric, collected under the image most associated with the tour, the film and even the band: Byrne, dancing frenetically in his oversized Kabuki inspired , endlessly copied suit designed by costumier Gail Blacker.    

Demme the Wildcard

Despite having marked commercial and critical success, Talking Heads were still thought of as art school, avant-garde outsiders even though their unyieldingly strange music videos, often centred around Byrne’s twitchy physicality, were on heavy MTV rotation throughout the channel’s formative years in the 1980s. Alongside fellow CBGB’s alumni Blondie and The Ramones, Talking Heads were the East Coast alt-rock superstars, helping create the acceptance of bite size chunks of counter culture born of the late 70s punk scene in a New York on the verge of collapse.       

Given the strikingly similar path Jonathan Demme took to notoriety, it would seem obvious to sit the eclectic auteur (and Talking Heads fan) at the helm of such a project. Demme started out working for cult exploitation king Roger Corman in the mid 1970s but became much more well known for his feature films in the 1990s. Demme achieved back to back hits with FBI thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and courtroom drama Philadelphia (1993), both of which garnered huge critical acclaim, stellar box office performance and awards glory along with controversies over their content. .  

It is easy to see why the band and Demme collaborated together so well. Demme had a certain style, fond of intense close-ups during dramatic moments, but his broad choice of projects made him largely undefinable as a filmmaker. From films like Married to the Mob (1988) to Rachel Getting Married (2008), Demme remained unpredictable in his subject choices. As with Talking Heads’ output, predicting where either would go next was extremely difficult, you never knew which way they were headed. Together they created a concert film that goes all the way up to 11.  

Best Seat in the House

Tasked with catching the band’s mercurial, dynamite mix live, Demme chose to mostly not show the audience until the very end of the concert. His plan was to ostensibly give the cinemagoer ‘the best seat in the house’ by recreating how someone in the audience would experience a live performance. Whilst the action onstage is wildly energetic, Demme and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth (Ridley Scott’s D.O.P on Blade Runner) keep the camera relatively still, sometimes concentrating on a singular musician, always maintaining a concert goers’ eye.    

Independently financed by the band and shot over several nights at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, Stop Making Sense allows us a glimpse of what it might have been like to see the elliptical Talking Heads live in the early 1980s. Demme went on to make lauded concert films with English musician Robyn Hitchcock and Candian singer/songwriter Neil Young, both of which are above average in capturing the essence of a live performance for a cinema audience, yet neither film matches the unbridled dynamism or sheer weird joy of Stop Making Sense.     

Demme’s electrically charged picture observes one of the most important bands of the post-punk era at their absolute creative best. Talking Heads’ utterly infectious kinetic energy is somehow decanted into every frame of Stop Making Sense and like the very best of cinema, it will stay with you for weeks after watching sitting  alongside cravings for repeat viewings. It deserves to be seen big and turned up loud on the best sound system you can find. See it in the cinema if you can and I am willing to bet the urge to move along with the action on screen will be nigh on uncontrollable.  

The 4K restoration of Stop Making Sense released in UK and Irish cinemas on 29 September through A24.

© A24