I remember feeling a little disturbed the first time I saw the cover of Talking Heads 1980 release Remain in Light. With the red pixellated face paint covering David, Jerry, Chris and Tina’s faces, and the upside down A’s in the band’s name, the album seemed to be commenting on so many things: technological breakdown, randomness and chaos in the world, the primitive/modern dichotomy of contemporary life…

I didn’t have the legit album, but a bootleg cassette version from a small shop in Jakarta’s Blok M area. One of the many things these bootleggers did that annoyed me was to change the track order of the album on the cassette — I never figured out why this was done, maybe it was to squeeze in as many songs as possible on each 45 minute side of the cassette. As a result, the first song on my cassette version was “Crosseyed and Painless”, but the actual first song on the album was “Born Under Punches.”

This album was a revelation — it was the first Heads album I had heard and it hit me right in the gut. I heard this before 77, More Songs About Buildings and Food, and Fear of Music. I’d have to say Remain in Light opened up all kinds of worlds for me — I immediately bought all their previous albums, including the live album recorded in someone’s living room (!).

It was the first time I’d heard about Brian Eno, which led me to explore his solo albums and collabos with Robert Fripp. (And from Fripp I moved on to King Crimson.) On this album I heard the guitar genius of Adrian Belew with his bizarre electronic-sounding blips and bloops. And then there was the bubbling keyboard funk of Bernie Worrell which opened up the whole Parliament/Funkadelic experience. The fact that this album brought in so many crazily varied strands of music still amazes me today.

Overall the experience of listening to Remain in Light was like waking up on a different planet where the ancient and futuristic collide, and organized sonic mayhem ensues. With a heavy African vibe — talking drums, call/response chanting — layered in thick funk, the album sounds like four somewhat geeky white band members (with Eno as the mastermind) channeled Mother Africa into the mixing board to coax out the most otherworldly rhythms and melodies heard to date.

The other big thing about this album was the teaming of David Byrne and Brian Eno — some people might claim they unfairly dominated the making of the album and alienated the rest of the Heads. Notwithstanding all that, Byrne/Eno went on to make the brilliant My Life in the Bush of Ghosts which was like Remain in Light meets Coldcut — but more on this later.

In the meantime, hear for yourself what I’ve been babbling about, courtesy of Amazon.