Within the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the title of David Byrne’s band was Speaking Heads — because the title of their 1982 reside album perpetually reminds us. However their total creative venture arguably had much less to do with the top than the physique, a proposition memorably underscored in Cease Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-directed live performance movie that got here out two years later. “Music could be very bodily and sometimes the physique understands it earlier than the top,” Byrne says in a weird modern self-interview beforehand featured right here on Open Tradition. To make that reality seen onstage, “I wished my head to seem smaller, and the best approach to try this was to make my physique larger.”
Therefore costume designer Gail Blacker’s creation of what Speaking Heads followers have lengthy known as the “huge swimsuit.” Byrne has at all times been keen talk about its origins, which he traces again to a visit to Japan. There, as he put it to Leisure Weekly in 2012, he’d “seen plenty of conventional Japanese theater, and I spotted that sure, that sort of front-facing define, a swimsuit, a businessman’s swimsuit, appeared like a type of issues, a rectangle with only a head on high.”
A good friend of his, the style designer Jurgen Lehl, stated that “the whole lot is larger on stage.” “He was referring to, I feel, gestures and the way in which you stroll and what not,” Byrne advised David Letterman in 1984. However he took it actually, considering, “Nicely, that solves my costume drawback proper there.”
Although Byrne solely wore the large swimsuit for one quantity, “Girlfriend Is Higher” (from whose lyrics Cease Making Sense takes its title), it grew to become the acclaimed movie’s single most iconic aspect, referenced even in youngsters’s cartoons. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael known as it “an ideal psychological match,” remarking that “when he dances, it isn’t as if he have been transferring the swimsuit — the swimsuit appears to maneuver him.” The affiliation hasn’t been with out its frustrations; he as soon as speculated that his tombstone can be inscribed with the phrase “Right here lies David Byrne. Why the large swimsuit?” However now that Cease Making Sense is returning to theaters in a brand new 4K restoration, almost 40 years after its first launch, he’s accepted that the time has lastly come to choose it up from the cleaner’s. Unsurprisingly, it nonetheless suits.
Associated content material:
How Jonathan Demme Put Humanity Into His Movies: From The Silence of the Lambs to Cease Making Sense
Speaking Heads Reside in Rome, 1980: The Live performance Movie You Haven’t Seen
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embody the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the e-book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
