I’ve Got a Little Tape I Want to Play

Probing the depths of teenage angst and existential dread with Talking Heads' iconic 1984 concert film 'Stop Making Sense.'

A cassette player goes click, a recorded drum beat fills the silence, someone is strumming a guitar, a monotone voice comes across the airwaves: ‘Can’t seem to face up to the facts, I’m tense and nervous, can’t relax.’

Lying in bed, listening through headphones to late-night radio, I’m transfixed.

‘Can’t sleep, head’s on fire, don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire.’

It’s as if this man is singing directly to me, as if he has the power to cross the space-time continuum and see into my soul. It’s as if he’s saying he knows what it’s like to be me: an angst-ridden, 17-year-old, insomniac and undiagnosed autistic teenage girl.

The music fades and Donal Dineen, the host of ‘Here Comes the Night’, a show that kept me company most nights until the wee hours, informs his listeners in a characteristic near whisper: ‘And that was Psycho Killer from Talking Heads off their 1984 album Stop Making Sense.’ It’s love at first listen. My Talking Heads obsession has begun.

The following Saturday I go straight to the local record store and find the album on the discount stand, go home and listened to it on repeat until I’m ordered to turn my music down.  

This week AutCasts is taking a little departure from the usual movie narratives to discuss one of the greatest ‘rock movies’ ever made and what Talking Heads’ music and the Man in a Big Suit, David Byrne, have meant to me. It’s one of the few musical fanaticisms that has survived my adolescence, with Stop Making Sense becoming a an album I’ve returned to again and again for joy and comfort, particularly when I need to feel connected to myself and the world.

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Shot over three nights in 1983, Stop Making Sense, is the live recording of the Talking Heads Album of the same name, directed by Jonathan Demme. The concert opens with lead singer David Byrne alone on stage. With each song he is joined by more band members until the whole ensemble is present: bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison, followed by backing singers Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, guitarist Alex Weir, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and percussionist Steve Scales. It is an epic production, filmed over three nights and showcasing the best of Talking Heads as well as songs from the band’s side-project, the Tom Tom Club.

Unlike the album, which I have listen to countless times over many years, I’ve actually only sat down to watch the full film once or twice. Through my late teens and early 20s a large portion of any spare cash I had was put aside for going to gigs or concerts. As much as I loved seeing music live I rarely, if ever, saw the point of watching live recordings of concerts. They never seemed to capture the experience of being in the crowd, that strange dichotomy of the tremendous intimacy and vulnerability created on stage but shared by hundreds or thousands of people all at once. Watching live recordings only seemed to make sense if you had been to the actual concert, and even then the recording was never going to fully capture the experience of being there. But Stop Making Sense was different.

First, I hadn’t even been conceived when Talking Heads toured Stop Making Sense in 1983. Though David Byrne has continued performing I have never been in the right place at the right time to attend a concert.

The DVD found its way to me in my early twenties and I watched it alone one Saturday night. I cracked a beer and made some popcorn, unsure whether I would stay the course. But, from the moment David Byrne walks onto the empty stage with his white plimsoles, baggy suit and sets down his boom box, I had goosebumps.

I watched from beginning to end and could not take my eyes off this strange, twitchy man, jerking and flailing and jumping and flippy flopping around the stage. It became clear this was much more than a live recording, this was a performance. This was art. A film. He and the band were telling a story:

‘There's the arc of a stage show being created and then the last half you see that that show being put into action but I think there's enough I sensed that there was another one there was kind of the psychological a narrative with me starting off as this very twitchy person alone on a stage water or alone in the world, mister psycho-killer, alone and very twitchy and alone and angsty and then gradually over the course of the with the music and with the with the help of all these other people who the band members and singers and everybody else who begin to surround me this kind of angsty guy kind of lets go and is kind of liberated it's a whole you know catharsis thing.’

I’m a real live wire

Stop Making Sense came out the year I was born but I remained largely oblivious to Talking Heads until that fortuitous evening when I heard Psycho Killer on the radio. Despite the plethora of indie and prog-rock white boys churning out existential angst in the late 1990s, few other songs had managed to touch the throbbing nerve of my own sense of disconnection from the world around me.

Talking Heads were not a cool band to like according to my teenage peers. They did not have the grunge cred of the Pixies or Nirvana, they were not as emo as Depeche Mode and whatever niche indie interest they might have had was probably ruined when Tom Jones did a cover of Burning Down the House. The cool kids in school were still mourning Kurt Cobain or had just discovered Muse. This 1980s New romantic, synth-art-pop-rock band did not seem to be on the radar of anyone else my own age, so I was mostly left alone to obsess over a skinny white guy known for his odd hair and oversized suit.

Talking Heads were a balsam for the near constant loneliness and struggles to establish meaningful connection with the world that plagued me through my teens. This is such a common adolescent experience as to be cliché, but the loneliness of neurodivergence, particularly when you don’t know or understand what is really going on with you, takes this to a whole other level. And, in many cases, even when you have left the worst horrors of adolescence behind, the loneliness, disconnection and isolation follow you into adulthood. It was more than the usual hormonal chaos to eventually grow out of. I had begin to suspect it was the way I was wired and that the world was not built to accommodate divergent forms of wiring.

Why a big suit?

The Stop Making Sense DVD extras included a short video clip of David Byrne in a, now iconic, big suit interviewing himself as a series of individuals meant to be journalists.

Byrne remains fixed to his chair, barely moving, providing answers in a soft, robotic voice. He seems almost shy, uncomfortable with the journalists, even though they are all versions of him. Byrne looks the exact opposite of the man who, with exaggerated boldness, commanded a stage for nearly two hours. And yet, here too I’m transfixed. Who is this weirdo, this genius, where did he come from and WTF with the big suit?

‘I like symmetry and geometric shapes,’ says Byrne. ‘I wanted my head to appear smaller and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger.’

I saw in him a kindred spirit, one of my own, in the uncanny way that neurodivergent people have of recognising each other even when we are masked, even when we don’t know we’re neurodivergent. There is just something there, bubbling beneath the surface, sending out signals and looking for receptors.

This man and his music, with Talking Heads and as a solo artist, have spoken so clearly to my experience, that shortly after being diagnosed I simply Googled, ‘Is David Byrne autistic?’

The result was a surprising (or maybe not too surprising) yes! Byrne identifies as having Aspergers, a term no longer favoured by the autistic community but is partly a reflection the language used at the time he discovered his identity. Already a world famous musician when he came ‘Aut’, David Byrne has come to embrace his neurodivergence over the years saying it’s his “superpower”, that hyper focus is huge part of his creative process and that “Whatever we are, we don’t know how to be another way.”

This must be the place…

Stop Making Sense is very much a journey towards community. The sparse, existential dread of Pyscho Killer is followed by the gentle, strains of Heaven. If the former tapped in to my teenage angst like no other, the latter would come to represent the stasis of grief after my mother’s death in 2008 when I was 23. It captures, like few other songs, the desire to press pause on life when time insisted on hurtling forward and it still has the power to bring me back to that emotional state. I usually cry when I listen to it, as happened multiple times this evening while finishing this piece. But post-diagnosis, I also hear a celebration of the comfort and safety of routine, repetition and predictability, aspects of Autism which are too often seen as a pathology rather than a strength.

‘It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be this much fun.’

- Heaven, Talking Heads

Then there is the sheer jubilance of Making Flippy Floppy and Take Me to the River and crowd pleasing hits like Buring Down the House and Once in a Life Time.

The sense of something unreal or surreal, the feeling of disassociation, living outside of your own body, living removed from your own life, is a current running through the whole show.

Naïve Melody plays towards the end. The stage goes dark. Byrne switches on a lampshade, a giant book case appears behind him, he and the band gather under the soft light. He sings ‘Home, it’s where I want to be….’

I have spent my most of my adulthood chasing belonging, connection and community across continents, looking for somewhere or someone with whom to feel at home. In Bolivia, Mexico and Guatemala I have had moments of ‘yes, this is it, this is where I belong’ but it has rarely lasted.  

Since being diagnosed I’ve finally learned to stop fighting myself and to stop running from myself. I’ve discovered a community of other neurodivergent people with whom I do belong. I’m no longer chasing the hope of finding my place in a neurotypical world that remains, in many ways, hostile to all kinds of divergence from socially constructed norms. Instead, I’m working to recover my authentic self beneath all the layers of masks and explore what it means for me to liberate this twitchy, angsty, weirdo from her shell.

If The Matrix showed me that self-acceptance can be a super power, then David Byrne has shown me that home is not a house or a city or a destination or a person. Home can reside within us. It can be found by making peace with and learning to accept ourselves.  

Next week I’m back with a “movie” movie, exploring hyper-empathy and social justice in my favourite ‘90s sci-fi romp, The Fifth Element!