Stop Making Sense review – a once in a lifetime Talking Heads show

I recently had the glorious and surreal pleasure of re-watching the greatest concert movie ever in an IMAX cinema, newly restored in eye-popping 4K for its 40th anniversary. I’ve seen Talking Heads’ 1984 classic Stop Making Sense umpteen times. But I couldn’t help but grin, thinking about the contrast between my first formative experiences with the film – in a scuzzy student flat where my friends and I would watch it religiously on DVD on a wonky TV set amid a mess of beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays – and watching it now. On a 354-square-metre ultra-high-resolution screen with surround sound and laser-aligned audio placement, nestled comfortably in a deluxe seat, sipping an XL coke. 

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Beads of sweat on frontman David Byrne’s brow glistened like chandeliers, Bernie Worrell’s synth was blown up to the size of a small spaceship, Tina Weymouth’s basslines walloped me in the chest. The effect was so immersive that I found myself involuntarily turning my head and craning my neck at times, trying to get a better view of different people and things on the stage, tantalisingly out of shot. I wanted to clap, I wanted to shout. It felt, in brief brain-tricking moments, as if I were in [italic] Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre on one of those three nights in December 1983 when director Jonathan Demme shot the legendary NYC post-punk band at the ecstatic peak of their powers. A place and time which, given loan of the Tardis, I’d travel to in a heartbeat. 

Did it make me love Stop Making Sense even more? Not really. Studded as it is with most of Talking Heads’ best songs, some in their definitive versions; a concert playfully conceptual yet powered by pure kinetic energy and featuring some of the most iconic stagecraft ever dreamed up, it’s pure perfection no matter the medium by which you enjoy it. But my IMAX experience did leave me pondering on the good wisdom of Talking Heads never reforming since their break-up in 1991, and the changing and growing role technology is playing in enshrining and burnishing musicians’ legacies for future generations to share in.  

There’s been well-documented bad blood among members of Talking Heads since their split. But as part of promo in support of Stop Making Sense’s big return to cinemas – a consequence of its rights being acquired by A24, the American producers-distributors behind blockbusters Everything Everywhere All at Once and Uncut Gems – for the first time in over 20 years all four former members have been sharing stages again, albeit just for speaking events. Tensions look to have thawed, leading to inevitable speculation that a full reunion may be on the cards. 

But Byrne remains reluctant by all accounts, busy as he is with projects including bringing his rock musical Here Lies Love to Broadway. And probably it’s for the best. He’s in good shape for a 71-year-old, but prospect of him running laps of the stage to Life During Wartime as he does during the exhilarating Stop Making Sense performance, or dancing impishly with a thrift store floor lamp to This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody), or sweating buckets in a giant oversized business suit as he sings Girlfriend Is Better, seem scant, and indeed undesirable to see. If you too could be best remembered trapped in amber in the essence of your youth, then wouldn’t you prefer to be? 

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ABBA’s decision to let tech turn back the years for them with their AI arena experience Voyage looks savvier and more pioneering all the time. Reunion tours by heritage artists are fundamentally a battle against the forces of nature and time – forces which, let’s face it, never lose. Good as some reunion tours may be, they’re all essentially reliant on an audience suspending its disbelief and buying the notion that, no, it doesn’t diminish our enjoyment if a singer’s once featherlight voice has plunged an octave with age, or a drummer’s tempo dropped to dragging pace. It’s all about climbing inside the metaphorical Tardis. 

How prescient were Talking Heads in so successfully capturing that prime moment in Hollywood in all its glory all those years ago? How many other artists may wish they’d done the same thing? Save for the likes of The Last Waltz and Buena Vista Social Club, other truly cinematic concert films are few and far between. 

But stars of today seem to be catching on to the idea. As I left the theatre after Stop Making Sense, the first thing I saw in the lobby was a poster for Taylor Swift’s The Era’s Tour movie, which arrives in IMAX cinemas this month. In December, Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour will hit the big screen, as the two biggest pop stars on Earth continue to duke it out for box office bragging rights not just in stadiums but multiplexes. 

I wonder if there isn’t more to it than just money and posterity, and whether there’s an element of banking high-quality visual data, for a future in which the pandora’s box of AI is opened further still with terrifyingly power and potential? Fast forward another 40 years, when Swift will be roughly the age Byrne is now, and she may not need to still be playing live all that often – her perma-young digital avatar could be doing it for her. 

Me I’m satisfied to keep re-watching Stop Making Sense for the rest of my days, whether it’s in an IMAX or at home on a crappy TV. I want to time travel again and again.  

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