I have been playing some old Talking Heads records recently. Blame Haruki Murakami’s excellent Dance Dance Dance, which I finally got into this past week. I had it on my shelf, barely started, for a long time. Such is the way of book reading (or lack of it) during term time. Or ‘life during wartime’ as I sometimes think about it. I’m glad I finally found the space to read though, for Dance Dance Dance is a great book. It was funny reading the lines about shovelling cultural snow, for I have been reading Tim’s blog of the same name for some time now. I knew that the title was a reference to the Murakami line, but it was nevertheless odd to see the original context.
Now the cover blurb of Dance Dance Dance refers to “a thirteen year old drop-out with a passion for Talking Heads". The reality is somewhat different, for Talking Heads are really only one of many (then) contemporary groups referenced. Looking back from here, it seems odd to see them dropped in beside the likes of Culture Club and Duran Duran. Perhaps it seemed so at the time the book was written (1987/88, I think). Perhaps that was intentional. Certainly I remember being slightly hooked by Talking Heads when I was thirteen or fourteen. This would have been long before 1987, however. I do recall at that age creating my own weekly singles charts – no doubt a very male thing to be doing. Well, whatever. I recall so very well that songs like ‘Life During Wartime’ and ‘Houses In Motion’ made an impact on those charts, effortlessly usurping some of the more obvious Pop treats. My suspicion is that even in those times I was aware of making conscious decisions about choosing more challenging artefacts over the mainstream. Even if those challenges were vaguely mainstream and mediated by major label multinationals themselves. I wish I still had those charts to look back on, but they are long destroyed, like almost all the other physical evidence of those ages.
I had a conversation about this with my Mum recently actually. Not about Talking Heads, but rather this notion of the past and our recollections of it – the ways in which we find ourselves having lost touch or track of our pasts and how when we are reminded of them in some way they suddenly feel almost entirely alien. Listening to Talking Heads feels a little like that. The songs remind me of people and of places and of events that suddenly feel as though they belong to someone else. In the same breath not me, yet also inescapably me. The multiply fractured self, or something along those lines. Perhaps.
Or perhaps just changed. The same as it ever was. The same as it never was.