Talking Heads – Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live Review

Talking Heads’ early years are revolutionary for the post-punk scene, but heading back to them is a tough task. Not because the songs featured on Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live is a poor assembly of the David Byrne-fronted group’s early efforts, but because they’ve been revolutionised and revived over the decades into whole new beasts. Hearing the origins is always of interest to those who want to take hold of the intention of this song or that style, but it’s in the future we feel the most recent and reflective versions of these songs. A tinny-sounding Psycho Killer with some alternative, worse lyrics, is not going to win over a new fan. But Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live is for the dedicated listener. Those who wore thin their copies of Remain in Light or were interested in seeing how long a fiftieth anniversary celebration could be stretched. For years, as it turns out. Talking Heads’ collection shows a side to the band which was still clear on their debut, ‘77.  

A brief echo towards the end of the opening track Psycho Killer is of interest, for sure. It hints at a different direction to a song which peaked with the Stop Making Sense version and has since been broken down, built up, and often spoilt by the many covers to follow. It’s not all a loss, though. There’s a treasure trove of items in Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live worth sifting through for those who want to hear the band at their earliest. Not their most interesting period, that would arguably be post-Stop Making Sense, but certainly in a spot of tense, of-the-times creativity. CBGB influences reign supreme. Those September 1975 demos are a sign the band were not quite ready to release their work, something Byrne and drummer Chris Frantz would talk of on occasion. They were right to wait until ‘77 had gestated that little bit longer.  

That’s not to say Tentative Decisions doesn’t have some excellent moments to it. There’s a spot of brilliance towards the end of No Compassion which finds itself in the shadow of broader, Americanised punk, but all the same it sounds inherently Talking Heads. Instrumentally, the band is where they always were during the pre-1980 boom of new wave interest. It’s Byrne who struggles to find his footing with songs like The Book I Read sounding a little scratchy and unconvincing. Those howls halfway through the song are nice indicators of how he would develop his voice, but the higher pitch and howling balance is not yet found. He managed it brilliantly all the same, and it comes through on a volatile Artists Only live performance. Pair that with The Artistics tracks at the end, and you have a capable collection of songs from the early years of Talking Heads.  

Not all that much is revealed about the band by these demo versions other than what they themselves would admit – that they weren’t quite ready to record, that a few creases needed ironing out. You can hear as much in the Psycho Killer version released by The Artistics. A little too fast on the “run” repetition and lacking the higher-pitched howl which ties together both the album version and Stop Making Sense peak. Warning Sign also feels a little off the mark but, crucially, the songs which make up Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live are good fun. Scrappy pieces of a band about to explode because they reserved their energies until they were certain of what they had at hand. They brought about monumental change, and you can hear that in motion, just a little, here.