Gig 048 Talking Heads / Dire Straits

Talking Heads / Dire Straits
Swindon Oasis Leisure Centre
4 February 1978

In early January 1978 I passed my driving test, at the second attempt – it seemed important to get that out of the way before I hit 18. I still had the moped and there was no question of buying a car, but my parents didn’t go out much so I sometimes borrowed theirs, a yellow Ford Escort. (I was well pleased when they bought it, replacing the previous pale blue model – why don’t cars come in yellow any longer?) My friend Richard had also passed his test, and for a while having a car seemed to open up all kinds of new possibilities, though for the most part we just drove around town, the passengers mooning and shouting ‘baldy!’ at bald blokes. Didn’t everyone do that? Some people would say this was puerile behaviour, and I would too. On one occasion I remember doing three circuits of the Abingdon one-way system, my friends mooning as we overtook a cycling nun on each lap. If you’re reading this, my apologies sister, we were young.

Talking Heads’ first album 77 had been released in the autumn, I bought it and we shared it around, as we did. It was kind of hard to know what to make of it; while it certainly wasn’t ‘rock’ in any commonly recognised sense, it had a certain jittery tension about it born out of their uptight, privileged and preppy take on funk and soul. Whatever, I found it more interesting than the Sex Pistols. It also had a strange song called Don’t Worry About The Government, written in the voice of a man who works in an office, possibly a government department. Every single artist in the rock world would use this construct to sneer at the ‘straight’ world, but not David Byrne. The man is happy living and working in his office in the USA, he likes the highways, the clouds, the laws made in Washington DC, and he’s a nice man who finds time for his friends. You wait for the catch – he’s secretly unhappy, he’s a transvestite at weekends, he’s directing death squads in Central America – and there isn’t one. Sure it’s a persona every bit as much as Psycho Killer’s Norman Bates character, only in this case it’s just a nice, ordinary man, which is pretty much unique. The song doesn’t really have a chorus, but if there is a hook it’s where he describes the location of the office thus: ‘It’s over there, it’s over there.’ My friends and I found this banal observation wildly funny, and would quote it at any opportunity, e.g. ‘Anyone seen my wallet?’ ‘It’s over there, it’s over there!’

So on the night of the gig I borrowed the car and we drove to hitherto uncharted parts of Swindon, breaking into the inevitable ‘It’s over there, it’s over there!’ on eventually spotting the Oasis Leisure Centre. Wandering round the various facilities pre-gig we found David Byrne and Jerry Harrison indulging in a wholesome game of table-tennis, which was encouraging – the notion of them hoovering up cocaine in a skanky dressing room was rather distressing. The gig itself was in what appeared to be a sports hall, a characterless barn though not quite big enough to squash any sense of intimacy. Support was a bunch of nondescript blokes who looked like they belonged in the back room of a pub – not playing music, more likely convening over a shared interest in traction engines or somesuch. They were called Dire Straits, and while their tunes weren’t terribly memorable the guitarist had an impressively distinctive style, creating showers of crystalline melodic phrases without even using a pick, and muttering rather than singing much of the time, a bit like a revved-up JJ Cale if that’s not a contradiction in terms. They were pretty good, but completely out of whack with the zeitgeist and I assumed I’d never hear from them again.

Talking Heads on the other hand were out of whack with everything, and had been adopted by the new wave audience probably due to their non-rockness, which was a rebel stance in itself. Having toured more or less non-stop they were slicker and more confident than when I’d last seen them supporting the Ramones, most of the tunes were familiar, and the new songs sounded promising, however the audience didn’t quite seem to know how to respond. You certainly couldn’t pogo or in any sense freak out to Talking Heads, and this overwhelmingly white new wave crowd wasn’t about to get down to the slightly undercooked funk grooves, plus the group looked nervous and didn’t really communicate too much, so a moderate level of appreciative twitching seemed to be an appropriate response. Nonetheless when they played Don’t Worry About The Government my friends belted out ‘it’s over there, it’s over there!’ at great volume, causing David Byrne to shoot a slightly perplexed look in our direction.