Talking Heads Live in Rome, 1980

A followup to this 2007 post about the handful of clips from Talking Heads' Live in Rome concert footage: the whole movie is now online in one big, 1:05 YouTube clip. The 1980 concert is a kind of precursor to the spectacular Stop Making Sense tour, and is a perfect delight for a Sunday morning.

Colin Marshall at OpenCulture writes,

Talking Heads enthusiasts, note that Live in Rome features the group’s full “Afro-Funk Orchestra” lineup. Additionally, you’ll see on guitar a certain Adrian Belew, who would begin fronting King Crimson the following year. (As he might, in another reality, have fronted the Heads themselves; in our reality, he turned down an offer to take Byrne’s place.) The songs not heard in Stop Making Sense include “Stay Hungry,” “Cities,” “I Zimbra,” “Drugs,” “Houses in Motion,” “Born Under Punches,” and “The Great Curve.” No die-hard fan will feel completely satisfied with this concert, of course, until someone remasters it on Blu-Ray with a complete surround sound mix. But if you simply need a hit of a pack of art-school rockers unlike any others America has produced, this Remain in Light-era hour merits a permanent bookmark. H/T Biblioklept

Live in Rome, 1980: The Talking Heads Concert Film You Haven’t Seen (via MeFi)

• [bluest_one]

  The songs not heard in Stop Making Sense include “Stay Hungry,” “Cities,” “I Zimbra,” “Drugs,” “Houses in Motion,” “Born Under Punches,” and “The Great Curve.”

  Small addendum: I Zimbra and Cities appear in the DVD release of the movie.

  Man, I wish they’d done more with this lineup. Like a couple of full albums more.

• [capnmarrrrk]

  Thanks for the link Cory! I can’t wait to check it out. However, this is my go to for Psycho Killer, a multicut spliced together version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eeX9rdmld0

• [Jim Saul]

  Man alive that’s good. The Stop Making Sense DVD is like mirror-universe clockwork, this is like witching-hour smoky jazz. 

  The mention of Adrian Belew made me want to hear his local-band hit here in Cincinnati – “Fear is Never Boring.”

  Definitely not a video for epileptics, or for anyone who doesn’t want to see Belew and the rest of The Raisins in early-80′s short-shorts.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsFTi1DuZ8U

• [Jason Weisberger]

  Thanks, I’m now walking around LAX singing “Wild Wild Life”

• [W Thomas]

  Here’s the entire digital rebroadcast of a 1980 Germany show.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFWZRA7d_ME
  They unfortunately don’t ogle Tina like the Rome cameramen did. Yowza.

• [Orly MacGregor]

  I was lucky enough to interview Belew when he was playing lead for Bowie on the Sound+Vision tour. He told me that he hated Chris and Tina because he helped them write much of the first Tom Tom Club EP. But when he returned to Jamaica (where they were recording) after a brief trip back to the US, they had overdubbed all of his parts and rewritten everything in his absence. Don’t know if the story is true, but he basically backed up everything bad Byrne had to say about them.