I Will Find a City
Jonathan Gould’s new Talking Heads biography recalls a once-thriving and now disintegrating independent media network that could elevate eccentrics with potential.
A review of Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock by Jonathan Gould; 512 pages; Mariner Books (July 2025)
CBGB, the legendarily seedy club in the Bowery neighbourhood of New York City that became the home of US punk rock and new wave in the mid-1970s, fascinated me from an early age. At high school, I would skip gym class to hide in the library devouring Lester Bangs’s music criticism and Please Kill Me, the oral history of US punk edited by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil. Most of the dramatis personae in McCain and McNeil’s account have long since been rewarded with cultural canonisation, membership in the Rock Hall of Fame, and spots at the top of critics’ lists of the most important albums/singles/bands, but Talking Heads were, to my mind, the best of the bunch. They were never as propulsive as the Ramones, as feral as the Dead Boys, or as decadent as the Heartbreakers. They were not shamanistic like Patti Smith or glamorous like Blondie. And they lacked Television’s doomy romanticism or the Voidoids’ scuzzy nihilism. What Talking Heads brought to the CBGB’s eclectic scene was an idiosyncratic and uniquely angular intellect.
Burning Down the House, the new biography from veteran music writer Jonathan Gould, is more rewarding when it simply tells the band’s story than when it tries to explain how Talking Heads “transformed” anything outside of their own corner of popular music. No one in the band agreed to be interviewed for the book, which is a pity. There’s enough lingering acrimony to preclude a lucrative reunion tour, so it may be that no one concerned wanted to reopen old wounds in print now. Nonetheless, Gould has done some admirable spadework unearthing valuable material from the band’s various interviews, profiles, and comments over the years.
As the band’s oddball lyricist and strangely charismatic frontman, David Byrne had the courage to stand apart from the grungy mayhem of the New York punk scene by embracing his own twitchy and cerebral version of normality. Byrne was a suburban art-school dropout, clad in a polo shirt and slacks with short hair, who sang (in a voice that Richard Goldstein in the Village Voice compared to “a seagull talking to his shrink”) about psycho killers, buildings and food, and heaven as a place where nothing ever happens. Byrne formed Talking Heads in 1975 with his art-school friend Chris Frantz on drums and Frantz’s girlfriend (and wife-to-be) Tina Weymouth on bass.
