A man in a beige suit walks across a bare, undecorated stage, the backstage junk and scaffolding exposed and strip-lit. He places a Eighties boom-box on the floor and tells the crowd: “I’ve got a tape I wanna play you”. He presses play and, head-bobbing along to a taped 808 back-beat, launches into a stark acoustic rendition of a song written from the perspective of a psychopath, sung partly in French.
As he starts stumbling and slipping around the stage to clattering beats, it all starts to look like an audition for a Kookpop 101 class at the school from Fame, or a clip from a zero-budget edition of America’s Got Mildly Deranged Talent. Yet this is the iconic opening of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense concert film, shot over three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in 1983 by director Jonathan Demme and widely accepted as one of the greatest live music films ever made.
