Late Saturday afternoon, I was sat at the computer checking football scores when I received an email from Mark Golley, as passionate and assiduous a Neil Young fan as I’ve ever come across. “Check out the front page of neilyoung.com,” it advised.
“David Byrne, all neurasthenic nettles pointing inward. He looked like someone who’d just OD’d on Dramadine – all cold sweat clammy and nerve net exoskeleton… just looked like some nut just holidayed from the ward with a fresh pocket of Thorazine, that’s all. There was something gentle, shy, reflective and giving about his hideous old psychosocial gangrene.”
That’s Lester Bangs, in full flow, recalling the first time he saw Talking Heads live, around 1976, in a rambling, sometimes flashing essay written in 1979 as a review of the Fear Of Music album, but only published for the first time now, as accompaniment to this superbly conceived DVD.
Paris, 1968. On the set of a nondescript film called Slogan, 22 year old English actress Jane Birkin finds herself playing the love interest of a washed-up advertising executive undergoing a midlife crisis. In real life, Birkin’s three year marriage to Bond-theme composer John Barry is falling apart. She embarks on an affair with her leading man, a French pop star called Serge Gainsbourg, ushering in a year he would later call “un année erotique”, during which the duo would record a hit single, “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus”, banned by the BBC for its suggestive sexuality.
