Fear Of Music: Talking Heads’ Third Album Is Nothing To Be Scared Of

“We were rock musicians looking for a way out”

The most radical manifestation of this new method came with Fear Of Music’s opening track, I Zimbra, a tribal funk workout teeming with energy and featuring the chanted nonsense syllables of Hugo Ball, a German poet of the Dada art movement, in lieu of conventional lyrics.

Frantz revealed more about the song’s creation in Remain In Love: “The basic track was recorded as an instrumental. There were no words yet. This particular track, with its Nigerian highlife influences and the way it came into being through jamming, was the template for composing our next album, Remain In Light. When I say the influences were African, that is for sure. But none of us were African. We were rock musicians who were looking for a way out of what had become a very predictable formula for playing and performing rock’n’roll.”

After that wild and heady start, it’s clear that anything goes – musically and lyrically. Indeed, on Fear Of Music’s second track, the laidback sci-fi funk of Mind, David Byrne sings, “Everything seems to be up in the air at this point.”

Throughout the album, the songs concern themselves with alienation, instability and the absurdity of modern living, and are – mostly – given suitably frenetic, tense treatments. There’s the jerky, wired disco of Cities, on which Byrne shouts himself hoarse while discussing the merits of various potential hometowns; The relentless Life During Wartime concerns itself with the daily routines of urban guerrillas; Air’s paranoid twitchiness gives way to a swooning chorus in which Byrne suggests – with no small amount of prescience – that even our invisible surroundings can cause us harm in this modern world: “Air can hurt you too.”

Expanding horizons

It’s all delivered with a character actor’s capacity for adopting personas and, at times, a total lack of inhibition. But Fear Of Music also features the serene Heaven, a song as simple and direct as a Neil Young ballad, on which Byrne croons, “Heaven is a place/A place where nothing/Nothing ever happens.” Whether he’s questioning the wisdom in looking for perfection or coming to terms with mortality, it’s typical of Byrne’s detached and ambiguous worldview.

Released on 3 August 1979, not only did Fear Of Music expand Talking Heads’ horizons, it saw their profile continue to rise, selling over half a million copies in the US alone and inspiring some remarkable live shows. Next up was the art-pop masterpiece Remain In Light – further proof that, really, music was the last thing Talking Heads feared.

Check out our best Talking Heads songs to find out which ‘Fear Of Music’ tracks made the cut.