Jonathan Demme’s STOP MAKING SENSE is considered to be one of the best concert films of all time, if not the best ever. The Talking Heads were at the absolute peak of their musical career in 1984. The trio made up of David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Franz, once a warm up band for The Ramones on the CBGB stage in New York, was now a nine-member new wave afro funk band that transcended genre and race categories, making music for everyone, like maybe only Funkadelic/Parliament or Sly and the Family Stone before them and nobody after. Byrne’s stage production traces the band’s career. “I’ve a tape I want to play”, David Byrne says, coming on stage with a boom box under his arm. “I’ve got a tape,” that’s the beginning of a band, the first cassette that you play for friends, the first demo tape that’s sent to a record company. The first song in “Stop Making Sense” is also how the majority of the Talking Heads generation first discovered the band: “Psycho Killer.“

From this point on, the band, the show, the career grows. Jonathan Demme focuses on the band, the audience can shortly be seen at the beginning and end of the film, unlike the important docs from D.A. Pennebaker and Michael Wadley about Monterey and Woodstock where the audience is observed with ethnographic curiosity. Here it’s just about the performance, and it is timelessly sensational. STOP MAKING SENSE was so successful that it turned Talking Heads from an insider band to international stars, but the film was also the beginning of the end of the band. The fact that the next single was called “Road to Nowhere” was plausible. The Talking Heads had reached a peak from which it was impossible to develop another perspective.

Tom Dorow

Translation: Elinor Lewy